Why the Ukraine is a Parody of a Country that Shouldn’t Be Defended By Democracy Lovers

If you like democracy, you should be disgusted by the sight of the Ukraine; even if you don't, it's still a fucked up parody of a country

Long weeks of war cries and dire warnings from NATO and the usual neocon suspects make it clear that we all must promise to forever give up on comparisons with Munich 1938. It’s been decades, people: we can do better than to reuse the same old Chamberlain metaphors when country X messes with country Y and NATO is not willing to unleash a nuclear war in defense of democracy or whatever. Please: find another comparison.

There are many things, however, that are not clear in the minds of many. For example, the extent to which the Ukraine is a laughingstock, a parody of a country that does not deserve to be defended even by the Ukrainians. I have already written a lot on this subject (for example, here and here) but it is worth recalling some of the great successes of the country that was once the most prosperous republic of the Soviet Union and is now the second poorest country in Europe, just ahead of shithole Moldova (sorry, Moldovans, but you know I’m right) and the largest exporter of wanted prostitutes and oligarchs.

Let’s start with details that none of the ardent pro-Ukrainian warriors cares to remember: since the 2014-2015 conflict, which I covered for the Wall Street Journal and is described in my Spanish-language novel The Dancers, pro-Russian troops on the Donbass front have been identified with the St George Ribbon in brown and black that was worn by Soviet troops in World War II. Ukrainian troops identify themselves with Nazi insignia. Not only that; the Ribbon itself has been banned since 2017 in Ukraine, as a symbol of hate.

I repeat it, so there is no confusion: the symbol of the troops that liberated Ukraine from Nazism and the planned extermination of the entire Ukrainian population by the Nazi regime (since that was its objective) is PROHIBITED AS A SYMBOL OF HATE; these are the little ribbons that 90-year-old war veterans wear on their Soviet medals. This detail alone would make Ukraine a country that deserves to end up in the dustbin of history. But we have only just begun.

The recent history of Ukraine is a long, hysterical anti-Russian provocation. The Russian language (dominant in most of the country for literally centuries) has been banned from schools, and Russian-language media have been shut down; any pro-Russian is attacked, exiled or killed. The murder of dozens of pro-Russians in a union building in Odessa in 2014 is celebrated as a great civic festival, with Nazi-style torchlight marches. Even Femen, the feminist group famous for its bare-breasted displays, was created primarily as one of many anti-Russian NGOs that sprang up before the Maidan coup in 2013-2014, and much of its task has been to harass and attack Russians. Russian interests in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Attacks on pro-Russian separatist positions in Donbass, including attacks on civilians in the region, are ongoing and well documented. The Ukrainian constitution includes, but only since 2019, the country’s aspiration to join the European Union and NATO, in contradiction to a trillion US and NATO promises and commitments to Russia since 1989. Communism, my friends, it is officially banned in the Ukraine since 2015.

The Ukraine, being a laughingstock, is the only one in the world where Nazism is glorified; there are many countries, including all of the Baltics and Croatia, with a complex relationship with their Nazi past, given the connection between Nazi puppet regimes and the struggle against oppressive Soviet communism. Only Ukraine glorifies Nazism. Listen, I could understand this in Germany, since Nazism was an ideology that defended that the Germans are excellent and the Slavs are the biggest garbage in Europe. But in a Slavic country? This shows that we are talking about a pathological ideology.

The official, standard salute of Ukrainian patriots is “Glory to Heroes”, the official salute under the Nazi occupation. The main combat unit of the Ukrainian army, the Azov battalion, is an openly Nazi unit, with insignia borrowed from the Waffen SS, filled with neo-Nazi volunteers from all corners of the world, including the US. Streets and squares are full of famous Nazi names.

The main ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism, Stepan Bandera, was a useful fool of the Nazi occupation, who sent him to Ukraine to set up anti-communist guerrillas: but only when the Germans had almost completely lost control of the region, because they did not want a lousy Slav in command of their beloved colony. In 2018, parliament declared him a Hero of the Ukraine.

Here is a summary of the string of recent international protests and reports of nazification being promoted by a certain government. The UN General Assembly at the end of last year adopted a resolution against the continued glorification of Nazism in that particular country in the world. Guess who were the only two countries that voted against: exactly, Chile and Tonga. No! I’m kidding: it was Ukraine and its patron, the US, always willing to do whatever it takes to stick a finger in Russia’s eye.

Even with this baggage, I could still tolerate Ukrainian nationalism if it were at least efficient. If Ukraine were the Swastika Iceland of the Black Sea. But no! Ukraine is not only a festival of historical stupidity, it is the most corrupt country in Europe according to multiple indicators. A country that works so badly that almost half of its population has had to emigrate. You will have seen estimates that they have about 40 million inhabitants (the 2001 census gave 48 million), but the reality is that the most reliable ones give around 31 million, if you discount all those who have had to leave and those who seceded in Crimea and Donbass. That is less than the 35 million inhabitants that Ukraine had (ex Crimea, only incorporated into Ukraine 60 years ago) in the imperial census of 1914: it’s a country that is dying of stupidity.

The current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former television comedian, was put there by an ultra-corrupt oligarch who had to temporarily leave the country after stealing billions of euros. Zelensky himself is corrupt to the core, which also makes him a puppet dependent on his Western supporters, since he very well knows that they already have replacements ready if he does not fulfill the role assigned to him.

The 2019 elections that the clown won (after a campaign promising improved relations with Russia) were marked by manipulation and vote-rigging unparalleled in recent European history, but common in a country where parliamentarians are caught cheating on a regular basis. This Harper’s story is a fascinating look at the cesspool that is the world of the Ukrainian oligarchs, their robberies in broad daylight and their influence on local politics (this one, from the same outlet, examines the influence of Nazi militias.)

We’re not done, since I can’t believe you forgot about Trump’s impeachment. Don’t you remember who he was supposed to be talking to about things he shouldn’t be talking about? Zelensky, of course. In a phone conversation, Trump told the Ukrainian president to investigate the extraordinary corruption of a certain Joe Biden, who collected commissions from the oligarchs via his drunken, perverted, drug-addled son, Hunter. All of this filtered through Hunter’s position on the board of directors of a gas company, Burisma, dedicated to selling Russian gas for commissions, because Ukraine does not produce gas, and Hunter speaks neither Russian nor Ukrainian nor does he have or damn idea how the gas industry works. Guess the name of the current American president, I already gave you all the clues you need.

In 1962, the US threatened the Soviet Union with a nuclear holocaust if it did not withdraw its missiles from Cuba. In 2022, the US is building a military base in the Ukraine and preparing to bring into its alliance a crucial piece of Russian historical territory that was recovered in 1943-44 at the cost of millions of lives; a territory that was the founding nucleus of the first Russian state, Kievan Rus. And NATO tells us to go to war against Russia to defend this gang of Nazis, thieves and pimps. To defend democracy.

Democracy is icing on a cake: an ornament for efficient and organized societies, allowing their elites to rotate in power without the need for assassinations, purges and revolutions. Democracy does not create efficiencies, nor has it ever done so: all the ancient Greek poleis that democratized either were already rich and powerful and lost power, influence (and population) with democracy (just look at the Athens of Pericles, but there are countless other cases, notably Syracuse) or, when they were poor, discovered that democracy only brought (as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and many other places) chaos and destruction.

We could call this the “Ukrainian problem”: when you have civilized elites, who compete in efficiency and provision of services to the citizen, that competition helps to improved conditions in the country; when the elites are kleptocrats, psychopaths and retards, the rotation between the Progressive Shit Team and the Rightist Shit Team is a spiral of self-destruction and robbery. The Ukraine, since its independence in 1991, has been the greatest existing example of democratic failure; we all know that you cannot tell Westerners that democracy is not working and point to Nigeria or Myanmar. No: they need a good example with people like them, a country with high levels of education and where people take out mortgages and go on vacation without a machine gun in the trunk.

If you’re pro-democracy, you should be looking forward to Putin invading that poor wretched country now and removing it from the list of Western democracies. In this way, you will get rid of a shocking, bloody, obvious example of the failure of your convictions. I don’t understand why the pro-democracy crowd isn’t rooting for Putin. It would be sad to see the Ukrainian sepoy army hand over their expensive weapons to whoever first walks into their bases; but we have already seen it in Afghanistan, and survived the trauma. It would be sadder to keep seeing the utopian democratic dream be raped day in and day out by this rabble.