The wall mural taking shape reminds me of Lane 8 Survive, ft Channy from Poliça.
I left off yesterday adding to my post that Z had blurted out his fondness for Andriy Yermak, head of the President’s Office, during a pow wow with a clueless Bloomberg flak. The president said criticism of Yermak is an attempt to weaken him.
"Yermak is one of the most powerful managers in my team. He does what I tell him to do. All the bad things that are said about the head of the OP [President’s Office] are done in order to weaken first Zelensky's team, and then him."
“Him” is Z. That Z has started referring to himself in the third person is not a promising sign.
In other words, Yermak is to Z as le Grand Colbert was to the Sun King, Louis IV. This is a clownish, populist position.
Don’t criticize me (or my contrôleur général) because that’s tantamount to criticizing Ukraine, which is fighting courageously for democratic values, its survival, et cetera.
Z thinks, mistakenly, the self-serving batshit premise will be taken seriously outside of Ukraine. It won’t.
In the 11th year of war, Ukraine remains a sham democracy, a primitive quasi-Byzantine post-soviet feudal autocracy. Democracy here is not underpinned by elections or coordinated work of democratic institutions, but by popular uprisings. Absent them, even the illusion of democracy would not exist1.
Ukraine’s leaders should emphasize and demonstrate that Ukraine, as Evhen Magda has said, is not Russia’s Siamese twin2.
Guest post by practicing philosopher Volodymyr Pastukhov.
Comparing what Biden is already doing with leaks about what Trump intends to do leads to the disappointing conclusion that, although they are so different, they are together. Essentially, we are talking about two versions of the "collapse" of America as a global empire. In one case (Biden) we are talking about a slow, bureaucratic, relatively controlled "slide" into the other world, while in the second (Trump) we are talking about an explosive, adventurous "jump" into it from the well-traveled imperial track. Maybe not the best analogy, but Biden and Trump are to me like Gorbachev and Yeltsin are to America.
In both cases, we are dealing with a reduction in the volume of America’s presence in the world economy and, as a consequence, in politics, as a global regulator, which has assumed a significant share of responsibility for maintaining the existing order of things, which, by inertia, is called the “Potsdam Peace.” The difference is that under Biden this is happening “in spite of,” that is, as if unintentionally, with dancing and tambourines, endless unfulfilled promises that turn into painful betrayals. But under Trump, if you believe the “ideas” of his “advisers” leaked to the press, everything will happen “thanks to,” that is, they will “cut to the quick” and with poorly hidden pleasure, selling betrayal as patriotism. It is difficult to say in this case whether old horseradish is sweeter than young radish.
The more details of what is happening emerge, the more obvious its non-randomness becomes. One by one, illusions about the limited size of the fiasco are crumbling. No, this is not a struggle between greed and stupidity, where a good theater is “just a little unlucky” with its actors. And no, this is not a private institutional crisis, which there is hope to correct with targeted constitutional measures. It is like a crack in the foundation of the American social and political order, which has led to the deformation of all supporting structures. America's retreat into itself under these conditions seems inevitable under any ruler.
I'm not sure it's "curable" with cosmetic repairs. On the horizon looms the image of a gigantic sinkhole that may emerge in the familiar and established system of "planetary equilibrium" after the American Atlantis sinks. No, of course, we are still talking only about a tendency that manifests itself as a trend for one, or even several decades, and not about a one-step act. However, all sorts of things can happen. The USSR also tilted for a long time and then sank in a matter of weeks. It is the associations with the USSR of the late 70s and Britain of the late 40s that come to mind first today. America is overloaded with its own mission, and this is the root cause of the crisis, including the crisis of American institutions. The role of a sole leader is no longer possible for the United States, and this, apparently, must be accepted as a given. That is why all the calls to stand up, to work hard, to show something to everyone will run into the Chinese wall of incomprehension, both under Biden and under Trump. The world needs to learn to live without America in the doses to which we have become accustomed over the past forty years.