Zelensky als Criminele Dienaar van het Volk

Op 31 december 2018 maakte Zelensky bekend dat hij zich namens een nieuwe partij met de naam Dienaar van het Volk ('Sloeha Narodoe') ook daadwerkelijk kandidaat stelde voor de presidentsverkiezingen in 2019,

aldus de internet encyclopedie Wikipedia, die eraan toevoegt:

Zelensky had bij zijn verkiezingen geen duidelijk omlijnd programma. Hij nam een gematigde positie in en presenteerde zichzelf tijdens de verkiezingen als iemand die corruptie wilde bestrijden en partijen bij elkaar wilde brengen. Hij was vooral populair bij kiezers uit de lagere middenklasse, die traditioneel niet erg geïnteresseerd zijn in politiek. Wel werd er in Oekraïne gespeculeerd over mogelijke banden van Zelensky met de controversiële oligarch Ihor Kolomojsky. 

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelensky 

Typerend voor Oekraïne is dat Zelensky gekozen werd zonder een ‘duidelijk omlijnd’ politiek ‘programma,’ maar dat de belofte de wijd verspreide corruptie in het land te zullen bestrijden in feite voldoende was om tot president te worden gekozen. Dat is opvallend, want op 3 oktober 2021 maakte het gerenommeerde Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), een 'niet-gouvernementele organisatie van onderzoekscentra, media en journalisten die actief zijn in Europa, Afrika, Azië, het Midden-Oosten en Latijns-Amerika,’ het volgende bekend:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.

Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.

Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.

Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.

Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.

Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.

The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.

Met andere woorden: de ‘dienaar van het volk’ Zelensky en zijn kornuiten sluisden hun vermogen, inclusief Zelensky’s rijkdom, naar belastingparadijzen, speciaal in het leven geroepen voor de georganiseerde misdaad, om zo de belastingen in Europa’s armste land te kunnen ontduiken of te ontwijken, zo u wilt. Met enige verbazing schreef de OCCRP dan ook over deze joods-Oekraïense oligarch, voor wie bijna de voltallige Tweede Kamer op 31 maart 2022 uitbundig applaudisseerde:  

A comedian and actor who had been famous since the 2000s, Zelensky began his political rise a few years after taking on a starring role in the political satire ‘Servant of the People,’ which began airing on the oligarch’s network in 2015. The show starred Zelensky as a humble history teacher whose anti-corruption rant in class is filmed by a student, goes viral online, and wins him national office.

In a case of life imitating art, Zelensky ended up winning the real-world Ukrainian presidency just three-and-a-half years after the show’s launch, with more than 73 percent of the vote.

Op zich is het niet uniek dat een tweederangs acteur c.q. komediant tot president wordt gekozen, Ronald Reagan was hem al in 1980 voor gegaan, dankzij het geld van Amerikaanse neoliberale oligarchen. Ik citeer opnieuw de OCCPR:

Zelensky capitalized on widespread public anger at corruption, but his 2019 campaign was dogged by doubts over his anti-graft bona fides, given that his campaign was boosted by media belonging to Kolomoisky — who is accused of stealing US$5.5 billion from his own bank and funneling it offshore in concert with his partner, Hennadiy Boholiubov.

In the heat of the campaign, a political ally of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko published a chart on Facebook purporting to show that Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank.

That ally, Volodymyr Ariev, didn’t provide evidence, and his accusations have never been proven. But the Pandora Papers show that at least some of the details in this alleged scheme correspond to reality. The leaked documents show information on 10 companies in the network that match structures detailed in Ariev’s chart.

The new documents show that part of the network was managed with help from Fidelity Corporate Services, an offshore consultancy that was one of 14 firms whose documents make up part of the Pandora Papers leak. The documents show that Zelensky and his partners used companies based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Belize, and Cyprus.

Two of Zelensky’s associates in the offshore network, who were also part of his TV production company, now hold powerful positions. Serhiy Shefir is Zelensky’s top presidential aide, while Ivan Bakanov heads the Security Service of Ukraine.

These powerful positions also come with risks. Shefir narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt when his car was fired on outside Kyiv on September 22. He was unharmed, but his driver was wounded.

Zelensky has repeatedly pledged to rein in oligarchs. The day after the attack on Shefir, the country’s parliament passed a bill that would create a register of oligarchs and bar them from financing political parties or taking part in privatizations. Zelensky said that the attempt on Shefir’s life will receive a strong response and will not influence his fight against vested interests.

A spokesman for Zelensky declined to comment. Shefir and Bakanov did not respond to questions.

https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-reveal-offshore-holdings-of-ukrainian-president-and-his-inner-circle 

Zelensky wordt als gevolg van de perscensuur in Nederland door de meerderheid van de politici en het volk bewonderd voor zijn 'democratische’ opvattingen en zijn strijd tegen Het Kwaad in de wereld dat Rusland heet. De mainstream-propaganda draait op volle toeren, en elk dissident geluid wordt, net als in elk ander totalitair systeem, onmiddellijk gecriminaliseerd, het maakt daarbij niet uit of de informatie klopt of niet klopt. Zoals ik gisteren schreef: 

Onder de kop ‘De terugkeer van censuur’ stelde op 29 maart 2022 de NRC-filmredacteur Peter de Bruijn dat er in zowel Rusland als in het Westen een ideologisch correcte opvatting bestaat met betrekking tot ondermeer de verslaggeving van de oorlog in Oekraïne.

Omdat De Bruijn geen praktische voorbeelden gaf van de westerse censuur aangaande het uitlokken van de Oekraïense oorlog door de NAVO, en de context van het huidige conflict, citeer ik een alom gerespecteerde oud New York Times correspondent, de Amerikaanse schrijver en journalist Chris Hedges, die op 28 maart 2022 het volgende bekend maakte:

The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’ Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. 

I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of ‘Ulysses’ or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia. I was on RT because, as a vocal critic of US imperialism and militarism and, of the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow. 

Are we a more informed and better society because of this wholesale censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us? If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative. And that is where we are headed as the ruling elites refuse to respond to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the working class, opting not for social and political change or the curbing of the rapacious power and obscene wealth of our oligarchic rulers, but instead imposing iron control over information, as if that will solve the mounting social unrest and vast political and social divides.

 

The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction. 

What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a 10-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was ‘disinformation.’ I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. 

This censorship is about supporting what, as I.F Stone reminded us, governments always do — lie. Challenge the official lie, as I often did, and you will soon become a nonperson on digital media. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power. Look where they are now. This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin’s whitewashing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes those moments in the media and the press when we attempted to examine our reality in ways the ruling class did not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we don’t know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present. 

‘The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen,’ Hannah Arendt warned. ‘What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.’

I am not alone. YouTube regularly removes or demonetizes channels, which happened to Progressive Soapbox, without warning, usually by arguing that the content contained videos that violated YouTube’s community guidelines… My video content, by the way, primarily consisted of book covers, quotes from passages of books and author photos, but it got disappeared anyway. 

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/28/hedges-on-being-disappeared/ 

Zelfs de schijn van persvrijheid wordt niet meer hoog gehouden, nu blijkt dat censuur uitstekend werkt, zoals onze politici weten dankzij de ervaringen in totalitaire systemen. En daarom weet men nagenoeg niets van Oekraïne en zal de kater straks des te ellendiger zijn. Vanzelfsprekend verzweeg NRC’s redacteur Peter de Bruijn over deze westerse politieke censuur. En ook geen woord van hem over de westerse collectieve zelfcensuur met betrekking tot Oekraïne en zijn criminele 'dienaar van het volk' Zelensky. Volgende keer meer.