Perusing the Zelensky-bashing of the Very Online right, I found myself thinking: ‘This reminds me of something.’ The branding of Ukraine’s president as a ‘welfare queen’ who is draining America’s coffers. The libelling of Ukraine as a uniquely corrupt nation whose thirst for war threatens to damn all of mankind to disaster. The shameful blaming of Ukraine for its own invasion, as if Russia had no choice but to violently rebuke its uppity, vexing neighbour.
Ukraineophobia and Israelophobia are both blights on the body politic
Then it struck me: Ukraine is to the cranky right what Israel is to the mad left. Their Zelensky Derangement Syndrome creepily mirrors the frenzied loathing for Israel that has been infecting leftists for years. In both cases, a frothing moralism masquerades as anti-war critique. In both cases, one nation is made the scapegoat of world affairs, held culpable for virtually every ill facing humanity. Ukraineophobia and Israelophobia are both blights on the body politic.
The online right’s curious animus for Volodymyr Zelensky has exploded back into public view following that blow-up in the Oval Office. But it’s been brewing for some time. David French wrote about ‘the oddly intense anger against Zelensky’ back in 2022. Spend just five minutes with the online right and you’ll see it. Zelensky is a glorified actor, a WEF puppet, a money-grubbing ‘piece of sh*t’, ‘totally corrupt’. It’s all there. They hate him. You’d have to shout ‘Benjamin Netanyahu’ in a hip eaterie in Homerton to witness similar fits of pique.
The similarities between rightist Ukraine-bashing and leftist Israelophobia are startling. All weekend, ‘ZelenskyWarCriminal’ trended on X, echoing the left’s shrill accusations of criminality against the rulers of Israel. You feel like grabbing both sides by the scruff of the neck and reminding them that it was Israel and Ukraine that were subjected to criminal invasion, the former by the neo-fascist militia of Hamas, the latter by Vladimir Putin’s marauding military. Calling the victims of crime ‘criminals’ is some nuclear-grade victim-blaming.
Like Israel, Ukraine is accused of living off American cash. Donald Trump Jnr called Zelensky an ‘ungrateful international welfare queen’. Some on the right see Ukraine as an amoral pox on Europe, similar to how the left views Israel’s supposedly sickly imprint in the Middle East.
Zelensky is a ‘dictator’, said President Trump (though he seems to have forgotten saying that). Ukraine is the most corrupt nation on Earth, some say. Zelensky is ‘the perfect person for DC’, says Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA: ‘Barely can speak English, an actor, and totally corrupt.’
Worst of all, Ukraine is blamed for the calamity that befell it when Russia invaded in February 2022. ‘You should never have started [this war], you should have made a deal’, said Trump to Ukraine last month. Some on the right claim Ukraine and its flirtations with Nato ‘provoked’ Russia’s invasion. Trump’s berating of Zelensky for ‘gambling with the lives of millions of people’ made me feel like I was going insane: Mr President, Ukraine did not ask for Putin’s criminal onslaught against its territory and its people.
This geopolitical victim-blaming is indistinguishable from what the left said after 7 October: that it was all Israel’s fault. Israel ‘is the only one to blame’ for today’s events, said 33 student societies at Harvard University on 7 October itself. The activist class has spent the past year-and-a-half saying wicked Israel provoked Hamas to act – the political equivalent of saying ‘She was asking for it’. Now, some on the right who criticised the left’s deplorable censure of Israel for its own suffering are doing likewise with Ukraine. If only you’d been meeker, more decorous, maybe poor little Russia wouldn’t have felt the need to invade.
Not everyone who makes critical noises about Zelensky is suffering from Zelensky Derangement Syndrome. There should be plenty of space for reasoned discussion about the future of the war in Ukraine, about America’s role, about the dangers of escalation. Zelensky, in my view, has been a brave and good wartime leader, but he’s made mistakes, like all men at war do.
But what we have seen from the White House these past few days, and percolating furiously online, is not just ‘criticism of Ukraine’: it’s a strange, seething contempt for Ukraine. Just as the radical left’s enmity for Israel long ago crossed the line from political critique into blind and even bigoted hatred, so the radical right’s hostility towards Ukraine now belongs less to the realm of judicious analysis than to the realm of unstable emotion. As an unforgivable consequence, Russia, like Hamas before it, is absolved of responsibility for the horrors of this awful war.
The left views Israel as the source of the world’s problems, and now some on the right seem to have a similar take on Ukraine. Such scapegoating is morally infantile and politically blinkered. It is unbecoming, wherever it comes from. Is it too much to ask for some moral consistency? Ukraine and Israel were both criminally violated by foreign armies and they have every right to fight back against their persecutors. That’s my hot take.
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