Russia Calling, Russia Calling

If you don’t get the reference, Google “Lord Haw-Haw“.

Stefan Mychajliw’s Ignorant Symbolism

Literally for weeks, the popular “Tucker Carlson” program on Fox News has gone out of its way to denigrate American democracy, the West, Ukraine and its leadership, and the alliances and treaties that help to make up what we commonly refer to as the free world. That program had instead offered full-throated defense – if not outright support – for the neofascist expansionist terror of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Right-wing populists, for whom Carlson is an avatar, admire Putin because he represents an America they prefer. Ignorant, bellicose, xenophobic, obnoxious, insular, and unfettered by people whose ideology and/or existence does not comport with (nominally) Christian whitehood. Propaganda here matters: “opposition to critical race theory” is substituted for “being racist.” “The election was rigged/stolen” is substituted for “accepting the results of a democratic election.” A Putinist America would be exponentially more intolerant – imprisonment, segregation, abolition, harassment, and annihilation would await anyone who identifies as homosexual, transgender, or in any other way not in compliance with what a kleptomaniacal televangelist would deem to be proper. It is not an accident that the right’s populism has selected the word “woke” – a term born from racial struggle – as its bogeyman. As a contemporary Putinist conservative, being anti-“woke” can be, and is, shorthand for all the things mentioned above, and many more that are not.

Stefan Mychajliw is not much. He’s a failed TV reporter, failed commentator, failed PR guy, failed Comptroller, and failed candidate for everything from Congress to a town supervisorship. Obviously, his myriad failures make him qualified to do little else except join a right-wing propaganda firm. After all, who can forget how successful he was in his effort to equate Hamburg’s lovable Randy Hoak with Antifa’s black bloc? What a resume.

He is also one of western New York’s better-known citizens of Ukrainian extraction. He is not ignorant when it comes to symbolism in propaganda. Just go back and look at some of the downright evil and malignant campaign literature he sent around in 2021. Yet, when he appeared on Carlson’s nightly Wonderama of white nationalism, Mychajliw wore a tie with alternating stripes of white, blue, and red.

He was appearing on Carlson’s show to talk about Ukraine, of all things. As someone remarked to me on social media, “Joining us tonight to discuss matters of world security, we welcome Stefan Mychajliw, former no-show Comptroller of Erie County and guy who couldn’t win a seat on a town board despite all his name recognition. Stefan, with your extensive experience in such things, tell us what we ought to know about geopolitics.”

Does he even speak the language?

But I am also someone well-steeped in the minute symbolism rampant in eastern European ethnicity, politics, and culture. I am old enough to remember how, under communism, Croats often preferred Pepsi because its logo was red-white-blue, the colors of the Croatian flag, but without a red star. The flag of the Netherlands and Paraguay were similarly appreciated – a flag with red-white-blue horizontal stripes without a communist symbol would be banned in SFR Yugoslavia as reactionary and anti-revolutionary.

I bring up Yugoslavia not just out of personal experience, but because it was the last place a fascist maniac’s genocidal and expansionist war of choice was fought on European soil.

So, when you’re invited on national cable television to talk about the Russian war against Ukraine on a program that just a few nights before had defended Putin, one would think you would be careful about what you wore and the symbolism it brings. Just last night, Congress was festooned in yellow and blue.

But Mychajliw wore a tie that prominently featured stripes in the order of white-blue-red. This is the order of colors of the flag of the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin. He did so while parroting the Putinist line that all of this is Biden’s fault and Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on Trump’s watch. That’s right, he later mocked “liberal, woke “logic, to which he added the parenthetical “an oxymoron” while himself utilizing a logical fallacy; i.e., post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Mychajliw’s faulty “logic” is, of course, utter nonsense. Trump has been in thrall of Putin since at least Miss Universe 2013. He has never to this day uttered a critical word of Putin, calling his move to invade Ukraine the work of a “savvy” “genius”. Trump spent his entire Presidency denigrating and weakening our alliances with our traditional western democratic allies – NATO and the European Union. It was Ukrainian President Zelenskyy from whom Trump tried to extort a quid-pro-quo to manufacture a false scandal to aid in the 2020 election against Joe Biden.

It is safe to conclude that Trump and his “America First” dogma are no friends of the western political, economic, or military order, and no friend to Ukraine. This ideology instead praises “strongmen” and depots. Tyrants and dictators.

This puts Trumpists and Bannonites like Mychajliw in a sticky situation. Putin’s Russia is their dream – complete political dominance, violent quashing of dissent, power and cash concentrated in a small, pliant elite, and average citizens being so utterly exhausted and demoralized by the futility of trying to demand competent, responsive representative government that it all happens without much fuss. But the illegal, immoral invasion of Ukraine is based on lies not seen since the 1990s in Yugoslavia and 1930s farther west. So how does one reconcile one’s allegiance an ideology that would have America emulate Putin’s Russia while simultaneously condemning that regime’s fascist, eliminationist expansionism?

That’s got to be a tough one. Usually, when these Putinist Americans encounter a problem, they simply pick from their roster of scapegoats. Liberals. Gays. Women. Academics. Teachers. Unions. Immigrants. Black people. Brown people. Asians. Scientists. The educated. Foreigners. “Elites”. George Soros. Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama. Made-up spies, provocateurs, saboteurs. Journalists, etc. ad infinitum. Putin has more of his own – NATO, America, the West, Nazis. It’s all so easy, and the foundation for this continues to be built day by day by the craven and the power-hungry. “Putin ain’t woke!” scream mercenary Erik Prince and propagandist Steve Bannon.

Political symbolism is silent but can scream loudly. I am not suggesting that Mychajliw deliberately chose that tie as a signal of his true allegiance; but what I am saying is that it was, at best, clumsy and more likely sheer, blind ignorance. In his first outing as a professional basement propagandist, he beclowned himself – a Ukrainian-American wearing the Russian flag on his chest and he didn’t know any better. Assholes like he scream bloody murder if your American flag lapel pin isn’t large enough, demanding your obedience to the trappings of jingoism. I am certain that any Ukrainian patriot who saw those colors in that order on Mychajliw’s tie was screaming at the TV.

From personal experience – if a Croatian patriot wore something on TV bearing the colors of the red-blue-white Serbian tricolor between 1991 – 1995, it would be an epic scandal. It can’t be that hard for a Ukrainian to own a tie with blue and yellow in it. Hell, go look at Michael Caputo’s Twitter profile. Try that, next time, or go neutral. Otherwise you look like an ignorant prat who doesn’t know shit about shit.

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

NY-24 Follies

There’s a lot to unpack as Chris Jacobs, who on January 6, 2021 voted to put an end to the American democratic process, continues to tack hard right, but there is a small number of ambitious people who think Jacobs’ Trumpism is too leftist for their taste.

One of them is a big – sound familiar? – Twitter lawyer loudmouth (and happens to be a big fan of a so-called “neoreactionary” Substack blogger who thinks that American democracy is obsolete and we need a kind of absolute monarchy. It is evil stuff devised to subjugate you.)

Anyway, naturally he’s a big Putin fan, too.

This paragraph really deserves some sort of prize for how it twists and turns. It is astonishing to consider whether America might have a “geopolitical interest” in the largest European country – a nascent democracy – being invaded and subjugated without justification, resulting in over a half-million refugees streaming across the borders of our NATO and EU allies. The allusion to “global finance” is an old trick missing only the word “protocols” or “Rothschild” but suffice it to say that a whole lot of money laundering was done by Russian oligarchs through the purchase of Trump properties. I would like to say that the paragraph shown above makes no sense, but that would be insulting to things that make no sense. This is puerile gibberish, written to appear deep.

See? It’s the Ukrainian people’s fault that they enjoyed a free European life, which was obviously triggering to Russia’s Putin. You’re too stupid to have this galaxy-brained take because you likely don’t have a “cursory understanding” of the world.

And, of course – nonsense.

Bad Takes: Left Edition

In a sea of bad and dumb takes, this one from some left-wing asshole whose family never had to run to the basement during an air raid really takes the cake. This sort of whataboutism is facile, juvenile, and jejune – it is also fundamentally ignorant.

Again, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an unjustified aggression against a neighboring democracy. Ukraine’s only crime is that it hasn’t allowed itself to become a Russian vassal state like Belarus, so Putin will impose that by force.

That Time cover about “bringing Serbs to heel” is not analogous. It is not even from the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to halt a genocide of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which somehow remains a topic of much consternation among some of an ignorant ilk.

It is instead from September 11, 1995. Here’s a link to the issue. It has to do with NATO bombings of Serb irregulars in Bosnia who had undertaken a years-long brutal campaign of genocide against Bosniak Muslims and to a lesser degree Croats. Sarajevo remained under siege with indiscriminate shelling and sniping of innocent civilians by Serb troops hiding out in the surrounding mountains. This article in 1995 specifically detailed the process by which the decision had been made, the evidence underlying that decision, and what was being done – that is to say, NATO was targeting military positions held by Bosnian Serbs to terrorize innocent civilians in Sarajevo. All this was two months after the genocidal massacres in Srebrenica. (Those short of memory can go watch “Quo Vadis, Aida?“).

Lazy efforts to equate Russian aggression against Ukraine with NATO’s response to Serbian genocide from 1991 – 1995 only serve to underscore that the deep problem of education in America doesn’t have to do with wokeism or CRT. It has to do with a generation of privilege learning nothing valuable about the world around them and taking their cues instead from extreme propagandists on social media.

To me, it is equally insidious for right-wing populists to turn their backs on western pluralist democracy in favor of white Christian nationalist authoritarianism as it is for left-wing populists to do the same in the name of class war and proletarian dictatorship.

I don’t know about anyone else with a, say Ukrainian or German surname, but my parents came to this country to leave authoritarian, totalitarian dictatorship behind and to join the western world. To have an opportunity to thrive and to be free. To speak their mind, to fly whatever flag they want, speak whatever language they want, and to sing forbidden songs and to freely criticize bad people. I don’t know what other people consider “freedom” to mean, but to me and my parents, it would have looked a lot like what the Ukrainian people are fighting for.

My country and my heritage and what I believe in align with Ukraine’s struggle to stay free a lot more than, say, convoys of underemployed truckers during a supply chain crisis who refuse to wear a mask or get a shot.

So what I am saying is that right now is a time for choosing – are you on the side of the people of Ukraine and their European democratic hopes and dreams, fighting to repel a fascistic onslaught? Or are you on the side of the aggressor and its spy madman dictator? It really is exactly as binary a choice as that.