The slanders of the Ukrainian president are nothing new. But there are commentators and commentators: in the case of Domenico Quirico in La Stampa, it is true that “the survival of Ukraine” depends on the United States. The problem is the conclusions drawn from it
Odessa, from our envoy. Yesterday the use of slanders, written or drawn, opposite Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Certainly nothing new. Since the beginning of widespread interest in Ukraine, i.e. since the invasion of Ukraine, there has been a touch of irony, if not sarcasm, towards the actor, the little actor who has really become and is carrying on with a boring party as the president of such a big country same name as the TV series: Sluha Narodu, Servant of the People. The irony was felt most strongly in Italy, the great country where, after a series of already spectacular predecessors, a movement inspired by the slogan “Go fuck yourself” came to power. Led by a comedian whose exponents and multitude of followers were named by his own comedian founder, Grillina. The adventure of a poor Christian, one might say if he were not a Jew, that happened to Zelenskyy inevitably aroused amateurish psychological interpretations: it was like certain tales of homeless people finding the lottery ticket and then fate doing what it wants, on likes to be ruined and she longs for her mattress on the sidewalk. We didn’t actually know anything about Zelensky, or almost, before this unique lottery ticket fell on him. Then the race for the psychological interpretation began. So, for example, I overestimated the Russian services and on February 24 I thought that perhaps he would not arrive alive on February 25, and I found in it – only in that, of course – an affinity with the fate of Salvador Allende in La Moneda. “The Americans” – who all call themselves that, and in any case mean par excellence “the CIA” – thought almost the same thing, but more effectively: that he and his family should therefore be offered safe refuge outside his occupied country. Instead he put on this green shirt (for the impatient greenish ones), which made him imagine everything and warned that he would not move, neither he nor his family. It wasn’t little. For example, it was the reverse of what had just happened in Kabul, quite ignominious for “the Americans” and for all of us in general. It was a big surprise, and yet it was only half minus one of it: the other half plus one was that the vast majority of Ukrainians with their wives and old people and children and dogs terrified and queuing for shelter showed that she was at least as determined in resisting the invasion. To make it decidedly inappropriate and a little unworthy to describe a Ukrainian people taken hostage by the patriotic act of their actor-president.
Well, let’s return to the impatience and indeed the mockery with which part of our opinion of Zelenskyi is greeted. Not that I know much more than I did on day one: I’m in Ukraine, but I hang out with people on the street and don’t have the opportunity to interact with the ruling class, their rivalries, their purges. I also read the newspapers, shall we say. And I completely ignore the newspapers, where impatience with Zelenskyi makes him responsible for the war on an equal footing with Putin, although he is not much more responsible than Putin (Il Fatto newspaper worked overtime yesterday). Instead, I carefully read an article by the excellent Domenico Quirico in La Stampa. Quirico, on the other hand, is convinced that Zelensky is a bad actor, that he faithfully adhered to a script that others, most notably “Putin’s Pathetic Aggression,” wrote for him, and that he pushed himself from an increasingly inadequate one “act two” to which the war has come and which demands not to give in to the tyrant – “which, given the events of the last few months, is a hypothesis outdated by the facts” – “but to exploit Russia’s obvious weaknesses, knowingly how to deal with the edges of victory.
Quirico writes: “It is Putin who has written the perfect role for him: the leader leading the heroic resistance of an entire people against an arrogance, led with the Stalinist and brutal method, ruthless, combative, a force of nature in its small vitality Animal. Enough to make the enemy, the Tsar, seem like a mediocre official of evil by comparison. The stringing together of adjectives harbors the danger of confusing the reader: “Stalinist, brutal” is Putin’s method, “ruthless, combative, … in his vitality a small beast” is Zelenskyy, who thus describes the tsar as a mediocre employee of evil in casts a shadow. Quirico’s entire flamboyant argument is marked by such rigor: ‘His / Zelensky’s / terrible and memorable year is not a composite of deeds, of decisions: in fact he did nothing politically or militarily memorable. The Russian aggressors and the Americans decided everything for him.” This is where Quirico seems to me to slip in the famous equation: between Russians and Americans – and Zelenskyy in the middle (for a handful of dollars, by the way). Quirico seems to come to this conclusion: “Actually /Zelensky/ knows that the only ringside spectator that matters is Biden. Because the survival of your country and your character depend on the United States; by the American will to preserve the centrality of American omnipotence in the international arena against any anti-hegemonic temptation. All without the direct use of force involving even minimal American casualties.” If I’m not mistaken, several things are said here. That “the survival of your country,” Ukraine, depends on the United States: that’s true, even if one wants to add “above all” so as not to make the allies’ contribution totally irrelevant. That “the American will” is to maintain the “centrality of its own omnipotence” (let’s call it an exaggeration) and reject any intent to negotiate as “anti-hegemonic temptation”: thus making Zelenskyy nothing more or less than compliant Actor in the permanent Proxy War. (And that since the war by proxy, Americans’ holy selfishness has guaranteed not even to risk a life of its own).
“The Americans,” God forbid, that we protect ourselves from enemies. But in light of this, is it really possible to ask the actor Zelenskyy or whoever is “exploiting Russia’s obvious weaknesses to know how to deal with the fringes of victory”?