The Rude Pundit: Zelensky Challenges Us to Live Up to Our American Hype

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2022/12/zelensky-challenges-us-to-live-up-to.html

The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
12/22/2022
Zelensky Challenges Us to Live Up to Our American Hype


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Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. God, the madness this nation has helped unleash on other nations. I've watched Democratic and Republican presidents justify all of this under some vague and incoherent notion of "national security" or whatever other serious-sounding nonsense they want to use to coerce us into buying into savagery. And I heard nary a peep from conservatives about virtually any of it. But now with Ukraine they decided to take a stand? Go fuck yourselves bloody.

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. "American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom, the freedom of people who stand for their values," he said, linking Ukrainian hopes to freedom to our own American belief in that nebulous idea of "freedom." And he invoked the military history of the United States, with his references to the Battle of the Bulge and FDR and the Battle of Saratoga, fer chrissake, demonstrating that he knows American history better than most Americans and that he wants us to believe in the myths we tell ourselves. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are.



That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up.