While the mainstream media and Washington foreign policy establishment continue to hail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a champion of freedom and “democracy,” Ukraine has further limited free speech within its borders, placing a total prohibition on the nation’s primary opposition party and seizing all its assets for the state.
As Paul Joseph Watson noted in a report at Summit News, a Facebook post by Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice declared the government’s action against the party Opposition Platform — For Life (OPPL), which has been accused of being pro-Russian.
This comes after the party had its operations suspended in March. Because OPPL was Ukraine’s second-largest political party (its popularity was even greater than that of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party last year), its dissolution essentially removes any significant political opposition from the president’s path.
Last month, OPPL leader Viktor Medvedchuk was placed under house arrest. He has argued that the party merely seeks better relations with Russia for the good of Ukraine.
In its announcement, the Ministry of Justice claimed OPPL sought to “undermine the sovereignty” of Ukraine, a rationale by which the government has already banned 10 other opposition parties.
Zelensky last month signed legislation allowing for the banning of parties that oppose the current government’s handling of the Russian conflict. This law allows the courts to seize such parties’ assets without an appeal.
OPPL had already been dissolved in the Ukrainian parliament back in April, though the party reorganized there under the name “Platform for Life and Peace.”
In a related move to crack down on opposition, the Zelensky government has sought to imprison and extradite Ukrainian critics living abroad.
Watson described the arrest of YouTuber and Zelensky critic Anatoly Shariy in Spain last month:
Anatoly Shariy, who has almost 3 million YouTube subscribers, was detained on an international arrest warrant in a joint operation by Spanish and Ukrainian police, as well as international “partners,” according to the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).
They claim that Shariy has been acting on behalf of “foreign” forces by infringing Ukraine’s national security via his media commentary on the war and engaging in “incitement of hatred.”
Shariy’s arrest “is more proof that every traitor of Ukraine will sooner or later receive his well-deserved punishment. It is inevitable,” the SBU asserted.
The steps by which the Zelensky government is shutting down political opposition runs according to the same playbook by which regimes throughout history have used fear and scapegoating to eliminate threats to their power.
The pattern is always the same: Stir the fear of danger from an external enemy and claim that the political opposition within the country is secretly working with that enemy to undermine national security. Accordingly, wars have always been useful in this attempt to silence political opposition.
Ukraine, of course, is nowhere near unique in this respect in contemporary global politics. The Democratic party is attempting the same in the United States. The current circus that is the January 6 Committee in the House of Representatives demonstrates this.
In its latest narrative, the committee, led by Democrats, is accusing President Donald Trump and his allies of having pressured state election officials into “overturning” the 2020 election in Trump’s favor, NBC News reports.
This, of course, is a subversion of the political processes surrounding presidential elections and the role of state officials amid them. As individual states certify elections and send slates of electors to cast the electoral votes for presidential candidates, a case can be made that states do have a legitimate role in guarding the fate of a given presidential election against electoral fraud.
Democrats, however, refuse to acknowledge this role and paint any attempt by Republicans in 2020 to crack down on fraud as attempts to steal the election.
Similarly, NBC describes the plan to have alternate electors in states where there was strong evidence of fraud as a “plot” to replace legitimate electors with “fake electors.”
The narrative the January 6 committee ultimately spins is that Trump and his allies were trying to orchestrate an insurrection to destroy American “democracy.” Their goal is the same as that of the Zelensky government in Ukraine: Brand the opposition traitors in order to shut them down and remove all barriers to total power.
Zelensky is already getting away with it. Will the Democrats?
