What Constitutes Dignity for the President of a Country?

Is it dignity — to see old men, who take care of their decrepit mothers — to be dragged into military precincts where they are “processed” and sent to the war?

Is it dignity to see the buses which drag these men, attacked by their wives and daughters?

Is it dignity to hear that one of the draft officers tells the new drafty to ship his invalid mother into assistance living and go to war without worries?

Ukrainians claim that only 8-10% of men are drafted through these violent and abusive means. So are we talking about 90% dignity for the president of the country, are we not?

Yet, the cynical Zelensky has the nerve to deliver to his nation the speech that his handlers from British PR firm had clearly lifted from their own history books. Churchill speech about war and dishonor: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”

So yes, Ukrainians have chosen a dishonor of butchering their own citizens in the east of the country, the dishonor of the civil war, even though they refuse to call it such for obvious propaganda reasons. And now they have a long, destructive, and unwinnable war on their hands. Unwinnable because Russia is by far more powerful than the country mired in corruption and xenophobia.

Is this dignity to listen to Boris Johnson and NATO commanders, and sent more and more citizens into a meat-grinder? Is this dignity to see the money coming from the naive tax payers in the west to be channeled into foreign bank accounts belonging to the top officials of Ukraine? Is this dignity to see the ministers of your own country to be deeply mired in million dollar corruption schemes, and then running to Israel for cover?

Or should I call it a plain old dishonor, the concept that none of the recent Western politicians (Brits in particular) had shown any familiarity with. What dishonor, — says Boris Johnson. All we learn in our Etons is the ability to shamelessly pursue our goals and keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of criticism.

So yes, it looks like not just Ukrainians, but now Europeans are rapidly embracing the proposition that they can’t resist. They are recklessly choosing both dishonor and war, while abusing the tired cliches about freedom and democracy.

And what about Russia, the BBC listeners can ask. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s withdrawal from Germany and East European countries, Russians were saying one and the same thing: we have our security concerns, so stop pushing NATO into our noses. Don’t abuse our fascination with the west, our legacy of Stalinist and Soviet abuse and mismanagement, our misery and thirst for good life — for weakness.

There is only that much “dishonor” that we can take. We put up with your promises not to expand NATO. We put up with your destruction of Libya and Syria. We put up with your dismantling of Yugoslavia, and redrawing the map of Serbia. But sooner or later we’ll strike back. We’ve been doing it for centuries, and we’ll continue doing it, if you don’t get it.

So don’t dismiss us, we’ll choose the war, if we have to. Putin warned the west in 2007, once again he warned it in 2014, then in 2022. Only a shameless fools like Johnson or Zelensky can think that Russia would stop now. Yet, that’s exactly what they think, choosing war and dishonor again and again, while speechifying away the grief of their own population, sacrificed on the altar of western arrogance.