Is Ukraine's Zelensky Playing Us For Fools?
Who is the real "Nazi" anyway? What Kholomoisky and Osama bin Laden Have In Common...
Like most good thinking people, I, too, want the war with Russia in Ukraine to come to a swift end. The first casualty of any war, however, is the truth, and there’s been a deliberate warping of the truth as concerns what the casus belli really is. To attempt to answer this question is not to endorse either side. Perspective taking is a key to empathy and empathy is the only way forward if a lasting peace might be achieved. We might ask, though, given recent events, whether or not some groups even want peace at all.
As a son of the American Revolution on both sides of my family I may be among the few who can honestly broker what’s really going on here. I have no family from Russia or Ukraine (though family of mine has served in both countries). I’ve got no axe to grind other than keeping Americans safe. I’ve long buried any hatchets too. I’m not quite a pacifist but I do consider myself something of a dove. I hate war and I have seen its effects in my travels to far away lands.
That is not the case of many of the neoconservative voices who pretend to act as if the czar has come to do another pogrom. There are long memories in this part of the world and memory is a notoriously unreliable source. It’s mighty rich to be lectured to by immigrants or their children about what America has to do for Ukraine.
One of the frequent neoconservative talking points is that “Ukraine has agency.” You’re not allowed to ask the obvious question: Does it really?
That “agency line” is one of the lines used by Eli Lake, a serial fraudster now at Commentary Magazine. Eli may not like it remembered that he lied America into the war in Iraq but that is, in fact, exactly what he did. Eli’s history has been well chronicled by journalist Ken Silverstein. Curious isn’t it, that he’s once again calling for war having gotten wrong the Iraq War and faced no career repercussions.
A normal society would list Eli Lake up there with Sabrina Rubin Erdely of Rolling Stone fame or Stephen Glass of the New Republic but here we are with Bob Wright pretending that he’s a credible expert on matters Russian. Goodness gracious.
We don’t believe that narco states are well governed if their leaders are constructed by cartel bosses. America has rightly been arresting and trying corrupt Latin American leaders in absentia and even in America itself. There is no quarter for corruption or mafia control, except apparently when it comes to Ukraine.
One of the other points often remarked is that Putin is wrong to call for “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. To be sure it’s crafty by Putin to manipulate history like this too. No less a moral authority than Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger made an impassioned speech arguing that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s status as the son of Holocaust survivors ipso facto means that he has no ties to the Nazis. Schwarzenegger even invoked his father’s well-documented Nazi history.
Putting aside the historical questions of World War II for a moment — the relationship between Hitler and the Jews is extremely complex pre-war, to put it mildly, and you should read about the Haavara Agreement or the estimated 250,000 German Jews who served in the Wehrmacht — it’s rather obvious that the Russians have a different reading of World War II — “The Great Patriotic War” — than does America. To them the 20 million Soviet citizens who died in a Nazi war of aggression deserve more attention than say, the plight, however noble, of world Jewry.
But in point of fact Zelensky very much does have ties to one of the most dangerous warlords — Igor Kholomoisky.
Here’s how that notorious right wing rag — The New York Times — discussed how he planned to play the politics. “If I put on glasses and look at myself like the whole rest of the world, I see myself as a monster, as a puppet master, as the master of Zelensky, someone making apocalyptic plans. I can start making this real,” Kholomoisky told the Times. Kholomoisky, his Jewishness notwithstanding, continues to fund the Azov Battalion which is a proudly Nazi-aligned outfit and which has been terrorizing ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine.
We might wonder how one builds a militia and I suspect that a consideration of the Dark Triad traits of would be applicants is needed. You may well want the sorts of people who would be willing to commit war crimes. The Dark Triad traits are highly heritable after all. We will explore those genetic selection questions in a review I write of Matt Cole’s new book, Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six.
We’ve already explored how Facebook allows for weaponizing desperation and mental illness. True to form, The Intercept reports that Facebook is now allowing praise of Azov Battalion after having barred them. This development is consistent with our analysis of Facebook as tied into both China and Likud.
Kholomoisky is definitely hiring sociopaths and people so desperate they’ll link up with “Nazis” for a paycheck. The so-called Nazis are apparently very great fighters. “These are our best warriors,” then-President Petro Poroshenk said at an awards ceremony in 2014. “Our best volunteers.” The Azov Battalion has been well integrated into the armed services.
We neglect the selection and harnessing of sociopaths in the service of the national interest. There’s even a 2013 book by Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success.
I suspect that there are a lot of psychopaths and sociopaths operating around us.
Is it too soon to ask the questions about the psychological predisposition of the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers? Might they, too, have been genetically selected by larger forces? And if they have, aren’t they also victimized?
Casey Michel, writing in the Spectator, addresses the attack that Kholomoisky did on the American manufacturing.
As investigators and authorities now know, one of the most notorious oligarchs out of the former Soviet space oversaw a trans-national money laundering scheme of historic proportions – and used places like Cleveland, in addition to a number of other small towns across the American Midwest, to hide and launder hundreds of millions of dollars.
With no one paying attention, this oligarch, a Ukrainian national named Ihor Kolomoisky, steered one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in world history, and ended up becoming one of the biggest real estate landlords in mid-west America.
Kolomoisky may not be a household name, even with the recent uptick in interest in oligarchs and kleptocracy. But just because he’s perhaps less known than oligarchs like Roman Abramovich doesn’t make Kolomoisky any less important – or, for those in Ukraine, any less dangerous.
Born in Soviet Ukraine in 1963, Kolomoisky scrambled to make a living during the Soviet collapse of the early 1990s. Emerging in newly independent Ukraine, Kolomoisky followed a range of other oligarchs around the region, pocketing formerly state-owned enterprises like steel plants to gas wells at fire-sale prices.
Kolomoisky had two advantages over other nascent oligarchs, though. First, he had a background in metallurgy – in the science of making and moulding metals and alloys in demand. Secondly, Kolomoisky displayed a ruthlessness that made even other oligarchs, no strangers to violent crime, blanch.
Engaging in reiderstvo, or outright raiding, Kolomoisky seized asset after asset across Ukraine, reportedly paying off local judges and magistrates in the process.
One instance, as Forbes reported, saw 'hundreds of hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws forcibly [take] over' a steel plant that Kolomoisky eyed.
Elsewhere, Kolomoisky once lined the lobby of a Russian oil company he wanted to push out with a series of coffins. For the full
Bond villain effect, he even maintained a shark tank in his office, which he would fill with bloody chumwhenever he wanted to intimidate a visitor.
Kholomoisky has been sanctioned by the US Department of Justice but curiously we are told to believe that the two men are no longer in touch. New billionaire sugar daddy who dis, apparently. Who needs Kholomoisky when you got the U.S. Treasury, amirite? What could go wrong in one of Europe’s most corrupt countries?
Then again, why not both the mobster backing and that of the international community?
Netflix has announced that it’ll begin showing Kholomoisky-financed television show that brought Zelensky to prominence. Does this mean Netflix will be putting money in the pocket of a sanctioned Ukrainian oligarch? Or is something else going on?
Rather than take these ties seriously and explore them, our (largely Jewish) media has refused to go there. This is a great form of covering up. Ignoring the Kholomoisky ties is tantamount to never mentioning the role the Koch or Soros family play in American politics. It just isn’t credible. Is it possible to report on President Donald Trump’s rise to power without discussing Peter Thiel or Sheldon Adelson? Money in politics matters to our media — just apparently not when it comes to Ukraine.
The macro development is this: Just as nation’s have been made responsible for the terrorists within their borders, so, too, are they being made responsible for the conduct of oligarchs who carry their passports.
An oligarch who doesn’t serve a king is the equivalent of a loose nuke who can willy nilly change the fate of nations. If Kholomoisky would fund
What would the Ukrainian government he backed be willing to do? Might it be willing to turn well meaning Americans volunteering to go to war in Ukraine into sacrificial lambs?
Ukraine certainly has agency, I suppose.
The extent to which oligarchs run their own foreign policy and that foreign policy has or does not have the blessing of the state is quite the question. But it cannot be allowed until recently.
You have to believe that Obama bin Laden had no connections to Saudi or Emirati intelligence even though his earlier ties to American intelligence were well fretted over.
Instead we had to believe that we were at war with terrorism — terrorism which has always been ultimately financed by a state.
Taken through the oligarchy frame to its logical conclusion maybe we ought to have asked which king bin Laden served and whether he served multiple kings over time in much the same way that Jeffrey Epstein did. (Intriguingly, given Epstein’s ties to Saudi and Emirati and Israeli intelligence, Epstein may have had foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks.)
To use this oligarch frame means taking bin Laden seriously as an instrument of state power and raises the possibility that we get a lot wrong a lot of the time.
Might bin Laden have been a pet of the Pakistanis all along? His death in Abbottabad — right down the street from the Pakistan Military Academy — suggests he was at the very least a guest.
And might Pakistan’s chief ally, China, have preferred us to squander our treasure and troops in the Middle East rather than say, addressing them head on in Asia?
And might China have backed countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Netanyahu’s Israel to focus our attention elsewhere?
This is one of your best.
Greetings, Charles Johnson. Not only is there "the Azov Battalion which is a proudly Nazi-aligned outfit and which has been terrorizing ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine" but also Svoboda and other similar organizations in Ukraine. I do not believe Zelensky is even Jewish.
It doesn't matter because I do not want America wasting its vitality and weapons defending Ukraine's borders while leaving ours wide open in the South AND to the East. I am much more concerned (as an American) about China than Russia v Ukraine. You too?