https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/25/the-two-zelenskys/
Choose your Zelensky. He can be either saint or sinner. Either valiant repairer of the liberal international order or compliant puppet of the WEF. Either a one-man defender of liberal democracy or a stooge of nefarious globalists. These are the only two Zelenskys. There’s no in-between. He’s either a Guardian editorial made dashing flesh or the willing jester of Davos Man. Take your pick.
What has happened to Volodymyr Zelensky over the past year has been extraordinary. First, of course, his nation has been subjected to the barbaric imperial aggression of its Russian neighbour, transforming Zelensky from improbable president into even more improbable commander of a war of national liberation. Then there’s been his memeification. Zelensky as virtual emblem, whether of good or ill. This global deification / demonisation of a man at war has provided a grimly fascinating insight into the tech age.
At first, the Zelensky memes were favourable, and funny. Most of them were about his testicles. ‘Things you can see from space: Amazon river, Grand Canyon, balls of Volodymyr Zelensky.’ Even Babylon Bee, which is now pretty firmly in the Zelensky-sceptical camp, was having genital-based fun at the expense of the Russians. ‘Mysterious Large Circles On Russian Radar Turn Out To Be President Zelensky’s Massive Testicles’, said a headline in February last year.
Soon, though, a divergence emerged. The virtual world came to be split between eyelash-fluttering Zelensky fanboys and girls and people who all but come out in a rash at the mere mention of the Ukrainian’s name. Between the witless gushing of media luvvies like Caitlin Moran, for whom Zelensky was a new ‘Hot Priest’ (see Fleabag; better still, don’t), and the inexplicable venom of Very Online right-wingers who started to damn Zelensky as a global welfare queen taking money from the West’s coffers to fund his probably phoney war. The shallow polarisation of what passes for public discussion in the 21st-century West had rarely been so starkly illustrated.
Both sides are projecting. Take the pro-Zelensky set. These liberal fawners over a handsome president are not really expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian struggle for national freedom. How could they, given most of them are allergic to the ideal of national sovereignty, as evidenced by their seven-year hissy fit over Brexit? No, for them Zelensky’s fight to restore Ukraine’s national integrity takes a distant second place to what they imagine he’s doing – giving voice to their views, embodying their beliefs.
They’re so vain they think this war is about them. Zelensky has become ‘the standard bearer for liberal democracy’, said the Financial Times. He isn’t only battling Russian aggression, but the broader ‘authoritarianism’ of the 21st century. Tell that to the brave young Ukrainians on the frontlines, I dare you – that they’re laying down their lives for the pompous ‘liberal’ pretensions of FT types as much as for their own right to self-determination. Zelensky’s Ukraine has given many of us a ‘renewed sense of unity and purpose’, said one observer. This sad war has an upside, hinted the NYT: it proves that ‘liberalism has some life left’. A writer for the i was more shameless still, marshalling Ukrainians into battle with, you guessed it, Brexit. Where Brexit implied the EU was a spent force, and that the future would be populist, Zelensky’s fight reminds us of the ‘absolute moral imperative’ of modern Europe, he said. European unity is ‘the dream which now moves [Ukrainians] as they throw their bodies in front of Russian tanks’.
