Ukrainians Are the Victims of a Two-Front War, Besieged by Brutal Russians and the Depraved Deep State
It’s enough to break your heart.
I remember when Westerners hoisting Ukraine flags, and speaking up for Ukrainians, meant something decent and wholesome: It meant you were one of the people willing to talk about the terror famine the Soviets imposed on helpless millions — which Soviet sympathizers and The New York Times denied ever took place. (The old Gray Lady still clings today to the Pulitzer Walter Duranty won for lying about that.) It meant you cared about religious freedom for millions of Orthodox and Catholics, repressed and subverted by a ruthless atheist government.
I’ve prayed in Ukrainian churches, and hung out in Ukrainian restaurants to hear the stories of those who’d survived Soviet genocide, Nazi invasion, and Stalin’s brutal “liberation,” following by mutual ethnic cleansing by Polish and Soviet Communists. (For a deep dive into that, visit The Museum of the Victims of Communism, or watch Famine 33, the first film made in Ukraine under perestroika, which I showed when I taught college.)
Now what does a Ukraine flag waved by an American or a European signify?
The same thing a “Black Lives Matter” banner did in 2020, when a posh suburbanite in a safely gated neighborhood hoisted it over his topiary. It’s now a fashionable accessary, a virtue signal and status symbol, and in fact a post-Christian religious fetish.
Painful History
Ukraine’s history is one of missed opportunities and tragic consequences — a rich land trapped between hungry neighbors, with no natural defenses: just wide-open lands that foreign armies could roll over and conquer. Is Ukraine a venerable nation that never got a fair chance at independence?
Vladimir Putin doesn’t think so. He claims it as Russia’s heartland, pointing back to Kievan Rus and centuries of successful tsarist rule. As The Stream pointed out recently:
That argument might be convincing if the Russian-run Soviet government hadn’t imposed a genocidal famine on Ukraine in the 1930s, starving between four and eight million people while exporting their food; Stalin sold that to pay for building industries elsewhere in Russia. That historic crime was enough to convince most Ukrainians that they needed their own country — just as the Holocaust won many Jews over to Zionism. When the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent parts in 1991, Ukraine seized its opportunity.
But the early 1990s were a bad time to be a fledgling free government in Eastern Europe. American advisors and investors were busy pillaging Boris Yelstin’s Russia, with the help of ex-Communist oligarchs who were likewise looting Ukraine. As Mike Benz has explained, our Deep State and bipartisan Uniparty were busy turning the tools they’d used in the Cold War for a new and exciting purpose: suppressing patriotic and Christian movements all through Europe, and exporting the degenerate values of our post-Western elites. Our postwar institutions such as NATO and then the EU became the weapons in a class war, waged from the top against the historic peoples of virtually every Western country. “Invade the world, invite the world, and abort the West” was the maxim.
It’s jarring to see the same Western elites claim to speak up for national sovereignty and the sanctity of borders while they honeycomb Ireland with refugee camps to welcome in more Africans, try to outlaw Germany’s only patriotic party, and imprison Britons for complaining of migrant rape gangs assaulting their daughters. The elites who chose Ash Wednesday to blather about Ramadan are now crafting patriotic montages to recruit fresh troops to serve in a pan-European army in Ukraine. (The last pan-European army to serve there was the Waffen-SS, by the way.)
Zelenskyy Is Ukraine’s Martin Sheen
Volodmyr Zelenskyy is a talented actor, and he trots the globe reading the lines his foreign masters write for him. That was his profession: He was Ukraine’s Howard Stern when a TV company hired him to star in Ukraine’s answer to The West Wing, in which he (hilariously) saved the country. The show’s success gave some Deep State Ivy Leaguer a brilliant idea: Why not start a “West Wing Party” and run Zelenskyy in real time?
The actor-turned-president duly read off the scripts that came from the Biden White House, even playing a role in Donald Trump’s fraudulent impeachment. So it’s just as foolish to get angry at Zelenskyy as it would be to hate Martin Sheen for taking orders from Aaron Sorkin.
And it’s borderline criminal for Americans to get angry at Ukraine’s people — who are the victims of our own Deep State just as surely as any January 6 defendant who was locked in the D.C. gulag. Instead, we ought to be asking them, as Jason Jones did in a Kyiv speech in 2023:
Will Ukraine trade Russian colonizers and occupiers for post-Christian, post-Western ones? Will it turn its children over to the counselors and therapists who now in America quietly recruit kids for sex-change procedures, puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical castration of boys — often without the consent or even the knowledge of their parents? Will Ukraine let Planned Parenthood — which designed the murderous One Child Policy on behalf of the Red Chinese government — open clinics in Kyiv that would rob you of a generation of children, a new Holodomor in service of a new godless ideology of evil to finish the job Josef Stalin started?
Right now, the people of Ukraine are trapped in a two-front war between the conquering armies of Vladimir Putin’s chauvinist oligarchy and the West’s parasitical overclass that’s rapidly liquidating Christendom. It’s as if Ukrainians were back in 1943 again, enduring the conflict of Hitler’s armies and Stalin’s. If they serve either side, they’re collaborating with almost primordial evil.
I thank God that Donald Trump is tearing up the teleplay, forcing Europe to man up by providing its own defense, and disrupting the corruption of the post-war consensus which boils down to “civilizational suicide.” I pray for a peaceful solution, a quick end to the futile slaughter our venal spooks unleashed, and the utter collapse of the pyramid scheme that is “the Western alliance.”
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.