The Language of Losers

Political losers can easily be recognised by their propensity to level against their opponents the most far-fetched accusations.

 Up until now, one could rarely see in international politics leaders who debase themselves by calling their opponents names. But this is exactly what is happening lately, starting with Joe Biden's almost daily slur offensive against Vladimir Putin, and on to Zelensky in Kiev who calls the Russian soldiers "animals" in order to rob them of their humanity.

The most outlandish accusation Biden has levelled against Putin so far was to brand him a "war criminal", for the excesses attributed to the Russian army in the field, as if the Russian president personally instructed the soldiers to attack and kill civilians in Ukraine. 

To be sure, I have never heard anyone call George W. Bush a war criminal for the excesses made by the US army in Fallujah or Abu Ghraib, for example. Moreover, the United States refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court and its military has quite a reputation of engaging in summary executions in all the wars it initiated or participated in, or in rapes even in peacetime.

The real butcher in Ukraine is actually Zelensky. From the outset he called on Ukrainian civilians to carry arms, produce Molotov cocktails and attack Russian troops and tanks. He encouraged women to bake and serve poisoned cakes to Russian soldiers. In so doing, Zelensky has transformed Ukrainian civilians into combatants. As such, he made them legitimate targets of the Russian army. How can any leader sacrifice his country's population this way ? In fact, Zelensky has armed the whole population because from day one he had the intention to provoke a high number of civilian casualties, in order to turn around and accuse the Russian army of war crimes. For Zelensky, the events unfolding in his country are everybody else's fault but his own or his team's. 

What we are dealing with here are two losers who cannot accept that their plans to bring Russia to its knees have backfired. One can recognise losers in domestic or international politics fairly easily. They usually launch outlandish accusations against their opponents and try to make public opinion believe that their targets are psychopaths, or war criminals and the like. Actually, all politicians resorting to such personal attacks have lost or are about to lose the allegiance or respect of their own electorates. Their handling of disputes, both in domestic and in international politics, is usually disastrous and leads to serious trouble for their own country or their allies.

The test of true leadership, however, also means having the guts to assume one's own shortcomings and errors and not blame these on one's opponents.