Dressed to kill
DENNIS BROE examines how dress sense on the catwalk of the US media betrays the corruption of manipulative comedians
POWER DRESSING: Volodymyr Zelensky with Joe Biden in the White House on December 21 2022 Photo: Office of the President of the United States/public domain
THE GREAT German radical Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned and then put to death for her opposition to WWI and her promotion of the people’s cause, famously said, predicting the Nazi onslaught to come, that the choice had come down to socialism or barbarism. There is no alternative. But maybe there is a preliminary stage (or perhaps it’s the same stage) where the choice is socialism or couture.
Couture can be high end or low end as we saw recently when the Flying Zelenskies were in Paris and Washington. The former comedian Volodymyr appeared before the congress in what looked like battle fatigues, a green long-sleeved sweatshirt and dark corduroy pants, giving the impression that he had just come off the battlefield.
His ask was simple. He merely wanted £41.5 billion and more advanced weapons to escalate the war in Ukraine, all of which he said was “not charity, but an investment in democracy.”
The week before, Volodymyr’s wife, the former screenwriter and TV producer Olena Zelenska, appeared on a whirlwind tour of Paris in an elegant navy-blue two-piece outfit where she met with French President Macron’s wife Bridgette.
One could say that both simply dressed for the occasion, but the US press were taken in by the comedian Zelensky playing the part of battle-hardened commander and began comparing him to World War II heroes under fire such as Winston Churchill.
As both the Russian and Ukrainian sides were bogged down in the war, the US media then began comparing today’s Ukraine to the moment to the Americans were briefly stuck in the mud in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge before prevailing and marching onto victory in Berlin.
But does this reflect the true state of the war? Just prior to coming to the US, Zelensky ordered 60-year-old men to be drafted alongside the largely untrained 18-year-olds of his previous order, and sent to the front to be quickly mowed down by the other side, the 300,000 men called up by Putin and given three months of training before being sent into battle.
There are now multiple reports of Ukrainian infantry, faced with this slaughter, refusing to fight and then being shot by Ukrainian nationalists with the fascists embedded with them. This is akin to the refusal of the suicidal trench warfare in WWI depicted so poignantly in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. The more appropriate WWII analogy might be not to 1944 but to 1945 as Zelensky lives his last days in his virtual bunker.
Zelensky was given more or less what he wanted: £36 billion from Biden, while American workers in the US are in the middle of a housing crisis, while nurses are so badly understaffed in the healthcare system they need to go on strike for a decent workplace and as inflation is still rampant increasing the cost of heating and food.
Of course, much of that money will simply be dumped in the laps of the US arms and weapons manufacturers who have benefited greatly from the Ukrainian money pit, as the means to increase corporate welfare spending and reapportion funds upward to an already wealthy class feasting on this carnage.
Prior to his meeting with Biden, Zelensky met with Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, nominally to plan the rebuilding of Ukraine, but in fact to surrender the country to foreign capital, much like the attempted makeover in Iraq, which will result in Ukrainian workers living under an ever more strident regime with hours and pay dictated by an investor’s bonanza of low-waged exploitation of the country.
While Zelensky’s parade of army fatigues went down a bomb, the dishevelled hair and grey T-shirt of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who had milked his investors for billions, was lampooned as a Silicon-Valley billionaire concealing his wealth, in this case a Bahamas penthouse on a 600-acre estate with golf course, yacht marina and private restaurants.
The tycoon quickly changed gears and now appears in blue suit with matching blue and pink tie.
While Bankman-Fried is rightly lambasted as a crypto Bernie Madoff for posing as an everyday geek, isn’t Zelensky simply picking the pockets of the US working class in his pose as a wartime, battle-hardened commander?
Both are scam artists deceiving a gullible public. Just as they accepted that Bankman-Fried was a successful entrepreneur rather than the builder of a gigantic Ponzi scheme, they are only too willing to accept that Zelensky, the suppressor of opposition parties and media outlets whose country wouldn’t meet the liberal standards of the EU were it to apply for membership, is a defender of democracy.
Instead of Churchill, the more apt comparator for a president and his fashion-plate wife would be Vietnam’s Diem and his de facto first lady Madame Nhu, his photogenic paramour, whose elegant ankle-length dresses, a combination of east and west, got her onto the front cover of Time magazine in the early ‘60s in the early years of the Vietnam war.
This was before the US and the CIA pulled the plug on the couple, whose outright corruption and bilking of the country’s wealth had made them a liability. When her partner was assassinated in a US intelligence-sanctioned coup, Madame Nhu fled to Paris. If this war turns, it is possible that the Flying Zelenskies could go the way of the damned-to-hell Diems.
This piece is part of a new podcast titled I Fought The Law, the law being corporate media and their cheering on of the weapons and fossil fuel industries as they lead us ever closer to global war and planetary destruction. You can listen to the podcast here https://www.buzzsprout.com/2114654/episodes/12129690.