Political Humour

By Walter Kish

In a world where serious events threaten the peace, stability and well-being of civilization as we know it, we need all the humour we can get to maintain our psychological and emotional equilibrium.  I have been known to use humour in this column to poke fun at people, political structures and behaviours that I find go beyond the bounds of credibility, reason or common sense.

I should note that writing something satirical or funny is not an easy task, and is in fact much harder that writing a serious piece on any given topic.  Writing one of my “Hryts” columns, for instance, usually takes me twice as long as one of my political diatribes or lessons in Ukrainian culture or history.  I therefore take great delight when I discover material that is intrinsically funny without the necessity of adding any creative wit of my own.

This past week, after a hectic month wherein I had little opportunity to indulge in my usual close scrutiny of events in Ukraine and its unstable neighbourhood, I set aside some time to go through a backlog of accumulated material, and discovered a veritable gold-mine of unintentional humour.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s recent propaganda assault on Ukraine and President Victor Yushchenko had me in stitches.  When I read of his indignation regarding Yushchenko’s “anti-Russian stance during Georgia’s barbaric aggression against South Ossetia” I could not help but wonder whether his tongue was so firmly implanted in his cheek as to cause him to choke.  As I recall, it was Russian troops that invaded Georgia (South Ossetia is a province of Georgia) and not the other way around.  In fact, the last time anyone looked, they were still there, no doubt enjoying the fine local wine.

Medvedev further lambasted Ukraine for selling arms to the beleaguered Georgians.  No doubt, the Russians are mortally afraid of the military colossus that Georgia is becoming with Ukrainian aid. Of course he made no mention of the fact that Russia is one of the world’s largest arms dealers and has no qualms about selling military supplies to anyone it wants (including the South Ossetians), to the tune of about 8 billion dollars a year.  This includes dealing selling weapons to such pariah terrorist states as Iran, Syria, and Sudan as well as numerous rogue warlords and petty dictators in Africa and elsewhere.

The official Russian grasp on reality took a further comic turn recently on the occasion of the commemoration of the start of World War II when the Russian propaganda machine, led by Vladimir Putin, mounted a ludicrous campaign to push the notion that the Poles were partially responsible for the start of the war because they aggravated the Germans, and that Stalin and the Soviets were total innocents in the affair, conveniently ignoring the Molotov-Ribbentrop collusion that saw Poland partitioned between the Nazis and the USSR.  No doubt the Russians were merely taking eastern Poland under their protective wing to save them from the Nazis.

That was followed up by the hoary old Soviet canard of painting all anti-communist movements of the time as Nazi collaborators, or as Medvedev put it – “governments in the Baltic states and even Ukraine are now essentially pronouncing former Nazi accomplices to be their national heroes who fought for the liberation of their nations.”  I guess if you are a Russian politician, political ideology is simple – if you don’t like the embrace of the Russian bear, you are undoubtedly a fascist or a criminal.  I mean what sane person would ever want to be liberated from kind, altruistic and ideologically utopian Mother Russia?

There was no shortage of unintentional humour within Ukraine this past month either.  Party of Regions leader Victor Yanukovych was particularly entertaining during a recent press conference, when in attacking the current Ukrainian government’s position on the continuing natural gas supply crisis with Russia, he stated “the entire contractual base in gas relations developed by several Ukrainian governments has been ruined.”  Now, that wouldn’t be the notorious arrangement developed under the Kuchma administration and furthered by Yanukovych himself when he was in power, whereby a small number of shady oligarchs became billionaires by siphoning off a good chunk of the price paid for gas into their own pockets, would it Victor?

Politics is a funny thing, and perhaps nowhere funnier than in Eastern Europe where fact and fiction dance merrily around in ever more dizzying circles!