If the following is accurate:
...perhaps Zelenskiy has been denying “the will of the people” this whole time.
Popular self-determination was a theme of some importance in 1919 at Versailles. Lloyd George and Clemenceau showed it little respect. They sewed nations together according to their preferences, no matter what the affected peoples would have preferred. But the ultimate determinant of what governments can get away with is what people will “suffer, while evils are sufferable:”
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. – Frederick Douglass
None of the nations patched together at Versailles has survived into the 21st Century. All have fissioned or otherwise mutated. There’s been a lot of violence in the process.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy is a dictator. All dictators cling to power, for a reason as old as The State itself:
Living in the public eye had always entailed increased risk. Historically, whenever some troublemaker had roused the rabble to a greater pitch than the Establishment of that time and place could tolerate, it had disposed of him with no compunction and extreme prejudice. There were parts of the world where that was still the inevitable price of rising to power—places where a dismissal from high office was always administered with high-velocity lead. Power seekers in such lands arrived in their palaces with their death warrants already signed and sealed; they merely awaited delivery. [Shadow of a Sword]
That’s the fate awaiting Zelenskiy, should his grip on Ukraine slacken and fail.
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