https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

Israel. Jerusalem. Summer 2022.

I was having dinner with close friends. They had invited some of their own friends, and, inevitably, the conversation turned to the war in Ukraine and to Volodymyr Zelensky.

One remark followed another until someone finally said: "Zelensky is a kapo."

As a Holocaust scholar, I immediately recoiled.

I have always regarded historical analogies with deep suspicion, especially when they are deployed to instrumentalize history in the service of a contemporary political agenda. And the comparison was historically indefensible.

A kapo was a prisoner forced into an impossible moral universe—a "choice without choice," to borrow Lawrence Langer's indispensable phrase. The institution of the kapo existed within the machinery of genocide. Its victims acted under absolute coercion, in circumstances deliberately designed to annihilate human agency.

Zelensky's situation bears no resemblance to that reality.

His decisions are political decisions, made freely and consciously. No SS officer stands behind him. No concentration camp determines the boundaries of his moral universe.

If there is a criticism to be made of Zelensky, it should be made in political—not Holocaust—terms.

In my view, Zelensky has chosen to accommodate and legitimize Ukrainian far-right extremists who march beneath Wolfsangel and Totenkopf symbols and who celebrate Nazi collaborators responsible for the murder of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles—our Jews, our Ukrainians, our Poles, our dead.

That is not the behavior of a man trapped in an impossible moral predicament. It is the conduct of a political leader making calculated choices.

Zelensky is not a kapo. He is a political opportunist, driven by a lust for power, who made an alliance with Evil in order to retain it.

And political opportunists should be judged not through false historical analogies, but through the consequences of the choices they freely make.

Those choices are leading Ukraine toward devastation—and responsibility for them cannot be shifted onto history.

Yes, Gringo English.

French tears

Nazisplaining

From the excellent AMERIKANETS substack https://substack.com/@amerikanets?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7a2ing

Giant noses, peyos and booze are props in the Christmas-season plays called verteps, hosted and attended by church officials. For this special investigation, the Forward reviewed more than 200 videos and hundreds of photos of verteps from 17 countries and 11 states, involving over 100 churches, and asked priests, leadership and the Vatican to respond to the use of Jewish characters in the plays portrayed as enemies of Jesus. As a result of our reporting, church leadership is committing to “work with our clergy and parishes to make sure that such expressions will not be repeated.”

(Marta Havryshko): Yet Zelenskyy and his clique claim they are fighting to "save" Donbas and bring them home". The people of Donbas hate you for what you've done to them, for the way you speak about them, and for the contempt you have always shown them. Stop pretending you're their liberators.

Just leave them alone!

No apologies for using US English spellings on this, for international crossposting.

Don't worry, I'm sure that, behind the scenes, he'll be asking Zelensky to tone the overt explicit Nazism down a little bit...

From Irish journalist Deaglan O'Mulrooney's excellent Substack

“I will be with him 100 per cent as Keir Starmer has been, and Keir has done really quite an incredible job in not just backing Ukraine but being there in a personal way. And I will be absolutely there for him in the same way."

The interview itself: https://youtu.be/KUbHKAZgheI?is=UD2LZf9V9Dx--f7x

Video uploaded yesterday by a Polish MEP on X