Ukrainians just demonstrated their commitment to democracy. So we’ve seen the news reports in the last days: Zelenskyy’s government removed some rights of being independent from the corruption agencies. There were massive protests, and then he again revised his decision.
This is something that happens all the time in democratic countries. The government decides something or plans to decide something. There are protests or citizen feedback or other ways of engaging like elections, and politics change depending on what the people said they want or don’t want.
Now you can think of Zelenskyy’s motivations whatever they are. I do take him at his word that he wants to fight corruption because that is his political mission. That’s why he went into politics. That’s why he prepared his path from being a comedian to being a politician.
If you’ve watched his television show, “Servant of the People,” that’s the topic: corruption. Politicians who just enriched themselves. Russian influence. How corruption also poisons the people, including his family, and how politics is really hard, and how one man—played by himself, but with a different name—complains about all of this as a teacher, and then suddenly becomes president, ironically through some shenanigans, but he then fights corruption. And again, it’s not easy. That’s what Zelenskyy set out to do.
As I understand it, he is not necessarily—or wasn’t before the war—necessarily popular because, of course, things are complicated and he didn’t achieve everything he had set out to achieve. However, in his defense, when you look at how other reformers like Yushchenko and Tymoshenko didn’t get along and how difficult the transformation of a Soviet society to a democratic society has been, from the outside, it seems that Zelenskyy is doing as good a job as he can.
But you have a thriving civil society during wartime. You have a country making reforms to become compatible with the European Union. You have the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, openly criticizing President Zelenskyy, and he can do so.
So I read that apparently Russian media were very confused. How can it be that there can be protests in Ukraine of such a massive size and the police or military don’t break those up? How can this be? And here we come to the core of what Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine is really about.
Ukrainians—most Ukrainians—want democracy. They are sick and tired of the Soviet culture of corruption, of the Russian criminal influence starting from the top, from the Kremlin, of a culture in which nobody is accountable, everybody enriches themselves, and the people, if they’re not playing the same game, are the lesser for it.
This corruption is named corruption because it corrupts everybody and everything.
And so what you just witnessed was almost a very clever demonstration that democracy in Ukraine works. That democracy in Ukraine is—well, nothing is irreversible—as irreversible as it possibly can be. If the people keep having their say and keep the energy up, there’s nothing here to stop democracy in Ukraine. And again, this is a country at war. This is a country at a war it did not want. This is a country that is in this war because Russia cannot comprehend how another Slavic people closely related to Russians can think completely differently.
Because here’s the truth: they may not think completely differently. Russians may want democracy too, but they have been pushed down so many times by their authorities that they don’t dare to utter the thought.
I can tell you I’ve met many Ukrainians in my life and they were all dedicated to democracy. I’ve also met many Russians, young Russians dedicated to democracy and incredibly frustrated with their country.
But here you see Vladimir Putin’s nightmare. If Russians and Ukrainians are so similar, then whatever rebellious impulses within Ukrainians, whatever these impulses may be, they may lie within Russians too.
And there is a culture of sedition within Russian culture. There is a culture of anarchism within Russian culture. It’s just that it’s being suppressed.
Now, I’m not a friend of socialism, communism, Soviet system, and whatever. But the one irony here is Vladimir Putin served in the KGB, in an organization serving the Communist Party which came to power during a revolution against the establishment—or rather during a revolution against the revolution because there was already a democratic revolution going on.
So the system that brought Putin into power, into employment that raised him, is itself a system that has celebrated revolution and rebellion. The cognitive dissonance—the—I don’t know, I don’t have words. The irony, it’s not funny because of what Putin and his government are doing to Ukraine and have been doing to others and are threatening to do apparently again also to Georgia, and they’re still occupying Georgia, parts of Moldova, and disrupting all our lives.
So, if you had a moment of being disheartened by Zelenskyy’s decision about corruption, I hope that is over because he proved he listened to his people. And I do believe there may have been Russian influences too. That certainly is the case in Ukraine that you have to always count on that. But the people of Ukraine just made a huge step towards affirming their European culture, their democratic culture, their commitment to justice, and that is good news and that is why we need to support Ukraine. That is why Russia needs to be defeated.
Thank you to the people of Ukraine for keeping up the fight because they’re fighting for all of us.
Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 