A writer in the magnificent American Conservative does a mild version of the old “not-all-40-million-people-in-the-Ukraine-are-nice-people-therefore-the-country-is-illegitimate-and-has-no-right-to-resist-Russian-imperialism-or-exist” trick. While I admire him for trying it—it’s a gambit that I’ve put to work more than once over the years—I’m not sure it’s effective anymore.
Not that the Ukrainians aren’t Nazi monsters. The question is whether, at this late date, we can make the charge stick.
Ukrainian propaganda and info-ops have become sophisticated. It’s bad enough that the Ukrainians have recruited their millions-strong community of smiling, good-looking young porno actresses to jump around cheerfully in front of Western news cameras waving French and Latvian and Polish and UK and EU and peace-symbol flags. It’s even worse that, with the low peasant cunning for which they were infamous in successive versions of the Russian empire, and which no less perspicacious an observer of the Russian nationalities question as Lenin identified as the most salient of their degenerate characteristics, the Ukrainian “motherfuckers,” as my priest calls them in his earthy Tomsk accent, have gone so far as to take the cleverly self-inoculating step of having an authentic real-life dyed-in-the-wool 100% straight-up Jew be the president of their country.
This, after they installed another Jew as their prime minister in 2016.
And, while we’re at it, just this week the Ukrainian parliament illegalized antisemitism.
I think even the most committed of us far-right geniuses will have to accord the Little Russians a measure of grudging respect for their craft here. It’s precisely as if Hitler had disarmed the anxious Europe of the mid-1930s by instituting a formal “co-Fuhrer-ship” with the Frankfurt dry-goods merchant Epshteyn, while contriving to get the Chief Rebbe of Danzig elected chair of the Reichstag. One can imagine the goodwill that would’ve accrued to the Third Reich in a naïve and relieved Europe—giving Germany’s stormtroopers cover to surreptitiously do their work, just as the Ukrainian stormtroopers do their genocidal anti-Russian work all over the Ukraine today.
We need new strategies. I propose admitting and even highlighting the new Ukrainian affinity for Judaism, but for Judaism in a particular guise: its crypto-Nazi Zionist guise. We’ll play up the Ukrainian president’s Jewishness, but then associate it and him with the outrages of the Israeli apartheid regime. It will help if we can find out that he carries an Israeli passport, but even if we can’t, we can claim that he does.
On a higher level of sophistication, we’ll stress the Ukrainian origins of the original generation of Zio-fascist butchers, such as those who blew up the King David Hotel, pointing out that many of those militants learned their unclean partisan/terrorist warfare tactics from the Ukrainian thugs among they were raised in Galicia. Needless to say, we’ll compare the ethnic Russians in the Donbass to the brutalized Palestinians, and we’ll compare both those ethnic Russians and those Palestinians to the Jews of Auschwitz.
At the same time, we’ll scream that the Kiev Junta’s antisemitism law represents a vicious heresy against the sacrosanct liberal ideal of free speech.
We’ll do whatever it takes.
•••
Meanwhile, the Blessed Erasure—the term that my fellow parishioners and I are using as shorthand for the invasion and destruction of Ukraine for which we have longed, and which has been so long promised—continues, most conspicuously and annoyingly, not to happen. FASTER, PLEASE.
The political scientist Edward Luttwak, who has irked me by claiming on Twitter that a full Russian blitzkrieg would be both against Russian military doctrine and practically impossible, claims that the idea of an invasion has been drummed up out of whole cloth by an ignorant U.S. intelligent community whose members can’t even read Slavic languages and have no idea what they’re talking about. This is what I’ve been starting to think, too, and while it reassures the objectively pro-Nazi Luttwak, it fills me with great despair.
But not all is bleak. A thaw set in here in Indiana this week, softening the ground near our outhouse and raising the good smell of the fecund earth. The Church festival of Maslenitsa approaches at the end of the month. It’s a harbinger of the resurrections of spring, which in turn brings with it our Pascha Most Blessed, the Feast of the Resurrection of Christ, Prince of Peace.