Most Vapid Article Yet on Ukraine War
What the oligarchs want you to believe
I let lapse my Wired magazine subscription some time ago. It started out as a funky, McLuhanesque, tech lark back in 1994 when it was founded by Louis Rosetto. In 2012 it was bought by Conde Nast and turned into a typical left-nonsense publication. Naturally it features Virginia Heffernan, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, although apparently not lately. She want to Harvard. Which explains a lot.
For some reason the mag still sent me it’s June issue, which just plopped into my mailbox. It features an article on the Ukraine War by Heffernan which, I just checked, appeared in the online edition on May 22. So it is a snapshot of what she and the liberal backers of this war were thinking back then, which we can compare to today’s reality.
Her take is one of fashion. Which is appropriate, because the only war the Ukraine regime is winning is that of the “narrative,” as they like to say. Even the Biden regime and others on the left now are admitting the war has not gone too well. Something I have been pointing out on this space from the beginning.
Heffernan huffs in her headline: “Volodymyr Zelensky and the Art of the War Story.”
Subhead: “Video dispatches from the Ukrainian president skillfully dissolve Putin’s delusions. We would all do well to listen.”
She enthuses about him being an actor who played the Ukrainian president on TV. Then writes:
Zelensky's first video of the war appeared on February 23, the eve of the invasion. In Russian, he addresses “grazhdanam Rossi”—the citizens of Russia—as a “grazhdanin Ukraini”—citizen of Ukraine. The word citizens and not people reminds listeners that they're members of a modern nation and not infantry in a holy war for an ethno-state.
I remember some of the Russian I knew in my U.S. Army days, and that’s not right. Grazhdanin means “citizen,” and is how people commonly are addressed nowadays. The real contrast is to tovarisch — comrade — which was almost mandatory during communist days. People — lyudi — is not used that way.
She praises Zelensky for switching from a business suit to his trademark olive-drab tshirt. But that was dumb of him. Serious leaders wear business suits. It’s a uniform. True, Churchill and Stalin sometimes wore uniforms. But they were actual military veterans. Castro wore his khaki uniform. But he also had fought a revolution.
My sense of style is close to zero, but even I know that.
Heffernan:
Finally, on April 15, Zelensky seizes on a concept he has developed throughout the war: “reality.” Reality is where Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians live; Putin, by contrast, is lost to it. “We have withstood 50 days already,” says Zelensky, “although the occupiers gave us a maximum of five. That's how they ‘know us’”—here he mocks Russia's grievous underestimation of his country—“that's how they ‘make friends with reality.’” The scare quotes indicate a terrible closeness that's far from a friendship. The Kremlin didn't find the abject deference it forecast from Ukraine. Instead, in Zelensky's telling, Russia got forced into intimacy with the reality of its own weakness and failure.
No, reality is Russia has 6,000 nuclear weapons and a major conventional military and Ukraine is not a NATO member, so it’s on its own ultimately. Reality means Ukraine had to accommodate Russia by pledging never to join NATO, stop killing Russian speakers in the Donbas — 14,000 before the war — becoming a neutral country and disarming the Azov Battallion and other neo-Nazis. It did not do that, so it got invaded.
Heffernan:
And Zelensky's telling is now the only telling of the war there is. Lionizing any world leader is dicey business, but this is surely Zelensky's moment. To have monopolized the media main stage for months in his own videos is an extraordinary feat. To have built, brick by brick, a grand narrative that attracted aid from around the world is another. But to have reminded the world of the cultural interplay, home planet, and grounding in reality that make us humans is to pull off a rhetorical rout comparable to any heroism on the battlefield.
There’s that “narrative” word again. Leftists love it. Indeed, this now is a “grand narrative.” The the reality is tens of thousands of brave Ukrainians — and they have fought bravely, and died — along with tens of thousands of Russians, have been killed for nothing but her sense of fashion.
Heffernan nowhere mentions the key fact: Russia’s 6,000 nuclear weapons. Although she does mention the brief dustup over the Chernobyl nuclear plant. As I’ve said many times, if you don’t talk about the 6,000 Russian nuclear weapons — and the nearly 6,000 wielded by the United States — you’re not serious.
She should stick to fashion. Not that she will. The oligarchs that own Wired/Conde Nast/Advance Publication, the Newhouse family, want it that way. Instead of critical discussions of policies that might get us all nuked, we get fashion assessments of Zelensky’s tshirt.