I am almost tempted to draw a comparison between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I will not do so because it would be heavily in Zelenskyy’s favor. Furthermore, I do not have to agree with their politics, their way of thinking or their actions. Take Churchill’s elitist white colonial conservatism. Not to mention the numerous mistakes the man has made in his long political career. Yet both have the right profile for a wartime leader. Men brave enough not to fear for their own lives. Men willing to put it on the line. True leaders with more than enough courage to not bow their heads to anyone who wants to subjugate them. Even when the odds are against them. Leaders with love for their people, people who want to rally around them. From whom the soldiers at the front derive their motivation to keep fighting and the people the will to suffer for the good cause.
Yesterday’s display was shameful and unprecedented. That a president, like a toddler tormented by megalomania, which in some people is accompanied by the failings of old age, thinks he can lecture an independent head of government. As if he were sitting in Las Vegas at the poker table. With, my cards are better! If this is what the leader of the free world is like, I call for the bankruptcy of an adult attitude.
That kind of leader is extremely rare. And then Donald Trump, who radiates less and less the allure of a president and begins to look more and more like a senile godfather, the head of a mafia family, thinks he is the right person to force Zelensky into making an offer he can’t refuse. Where have I heard that before? Indeed, from the lips of Marlon Brando in the movie just before his death. It mainly exposes the wheeler-dealer Trump as someone who knows absolutely nothing about international law. For those who understand the concept of popular sovereignty in Chinese, it sounds familiar. That no law or rule is above the right of the people to decide their own future. This is difficult for all autocrats to swallow, because they cannot deal with this absolute right. To mold to their will. To make money from it. They can suppress it, but it is precisely this oppression that hastens their downfall.
And of course, President V. Zelenskyy, as a symbol of his own people, is a considerable obstacle to the will to resist. But what is even worse is that the demand that Zelenskyy step down is deliberately creating chaos in a country that must above all maintain unity. Ukraine is turning into a kind of Wild West if it is up to draft dodger Trump, where American steel barons can make a mockery of the freedom of an entire people to choose for themselves.
The rigid discipline in the ranks of the Republicans is becoming increasingly sad to see. How adult men can allow fear for their own necks to transform them into frightened rabbits. Into a herd of bleating sheep that, due to the lack of a good shepherd, have completely lost their way to heaven.
Ludo
