Ukraine & Revolution

For rulers, the most dangerous of all things is a still-armed soldier who starts to reflect, says John Wight.

By John Wight
Medium  

The real enemy of any government or regime, in the last analysis, is its own people. They are who rulers fear most.

That is accordingly why so much effort is devoted by rulers to propaganda, primarily designed to sustain the myth there exists a national interest to which all are bound, regardless of socioeconomic status or one’s actual life experience. 

In truth there is no such thing as a  “national interest.” Only the interests of the dominant class of rulers matters.  Thus heavy lies the crown, and lightly is tread the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy.

This dynamic is most pronounced in time of war. Men with guns sent to fight other men with guns are never more dangerous than when the initial, warm glow of patriotism, responsible for them readily marching towards their own demise, is replaced by the grim reality of suffering and slaughter. 

It is then when that most dangerous of all things for rulers emerges:  a still-armed soldier who starts to reflect.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the historical example, tout court, of how poor soldiers, thrown into the maw of combat, develop a revolutionary consciousness which supersedes the national one they’d set out to defend. 

Civil unrest also erupted in France and Germany after this war to end all wars, though in both cases capital’s forces proved strong enough to overcome the threat from below.  

A Turning in Ukraine

Ukraine has lost the First World War of our time. Kiev’s Kursk offensive and occupation of Russian territory has at this writing turned into a disastrous rout.  Further still, Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached critical mass. No amount of European Union and U.K. financial and material support will be able to salvage or alter the reality on the ground without the deployment of European troops. 

The governing regime of any country reduced to literally kidnapping young men off the street, as the Ukrainians have been, to send into combat  can be said to have relinquished any claim of legitimacy.

Ukraine, after three years of unremitting conflict, is no longer a sovereign state.  It is a proxy of NATO and Brussels.  It is a failed experiment in ethno-nationalism and ethno-fascism. It is the Israel of eastern Europe and equally reactionary. The country’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, when viewed in this light, has been nothing more than a convenient agent of Western imperialism.

To witness him being dressed down by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office was to see how power operates.

The khaki-clad, diminutive leader of this corrupt state was, by that point, used to being feted like some touring rock star in Western capitals across the world. Now, suddenly, there he was being reduced to his “actual” status as Washington’s footstool, useful only until his usefulness has expired.

To Trump’s credit at least, he comes to the table shorn of illusions as to the machinations of the warmongering, Western security establishment that would apparently prefer WWIII to peace in our time. 

From the very same establishment flows the sordid and squalid values of the mortuary. The deaths or maiming of a million young men is for them a sacrifice worth paying in the name of hegemony and legacy.

It is why EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron et al. are the worst possible leaders in place at the most critical time.

In every bombastic speech that von der Leyen delivers — during which she relentlessly attempts to paint Russia as the repository of a Mongol Horde intent on global domination — you are left with the indelible impression of a woman who has never forgiven the Red Army for storming the gates of Berlin in 1945. 

Starmer has made a virtue of lacking any. This pumped-up, local bank manager is Tony Blair — without the laughs. He is a tragedy middle England produced, a man so wooden he doesn’t put his suit on in the morning. His suit puts him on.

As for Macron, this centrist popinjay is a king without a throne. To watch him bestride Europe like an aspiring Colossus is to be reminded of Napoleon’s observation that “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”

Russia under President Vladimir Putin has never been forgiven, and will never be forgiven, for the “crime” of recovering from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. 

A weak and pliant Moscow has long been the default position of those in the West who view geopolitics as a struggle for domination, no matter the consequences, instead of the need for co-operation with the desire to forestall such consequences.

Ukrainian men and women have been sacrificed on the chopping block of NATO expansionism. They have been fed into the meat grinder fashioned in the name of the zero sum game of power politics, with the bastards responsible for so much death and destruction in need of being held to account, and soon.

The Bolsheviks understood this need and acted upon in it in the context of the killing fields of WWI. 

Indeed, Ukraine has its Alexander Kerensky in the shape of Zelensky. In other words, a failed leader doing his utmost to continue a losing war in the name of power for power’s sake.

Ukraine, as things stand — and with the former historical comparison in mind — is in desperate need of its Vladimir Lenin.  But there is none in sight. Nor any organized revolutionary party. There are some Ukrainian soldiers furious with Kiev, however.  

Take a gander at this Ukrainian soldier, bawling his eyes out, stuck in the muck and misery of a battlefield, watching his buddies perish—while Zelensky sits there, arms crossed, stiff-necked, and stubborn as a mule, refusing to even entertain a ceasefire! pic.twitter.com/cDJLm9W7Ft

— Rush Limbaugh (@LimbaughLegacy) March 9, 2025

In 2025, the guns of the Ukrainian soldiers, shivering and freezing in the trenches, are pointed in the wrong direction. As the man (apparently Napoleon) said: “War happens when the government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution happens when you figure it out for yourself.”

The sooner the long suffering troops of the Ukrainian armed forces figure it out for themselves, the better it would be for all of us.

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else.  Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.