They arrive in the name of the covenant, these shepherds of the world world who don the robes of piety and religious morality, mouths still warm from Sunday homilies against fornication, drunkenness, and the wasting of the widow’s mite.
Then the doors of the private salon close, the cameras are left outside, and the same men who thunder against “illicit relations” become the most generous patrons of them.Billions are transferred with the solemnity of tithes.
Not for bread, not for reconstruction, not even for the honest purchase of shells, but so that the high priest of Kyiv may keep the music loud and the lights low. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the “illegitimate” addict elevated by emergency decree and Western applause, does not govern so much as he performs. On the nightclub stage he executes the Captagon dance: a twitching, sweat-slick liturgy of dilated pupils and borrowed bravado, the body jerking as if the war itself were a bass line only he can hear.
The Europeans watch from the velvet banquettes, glasses in hand, already several bottles past repentance. They laugh, they toast “values,” and they sign another tranche. The bill is sent, as always, to the European taxpayer who still believes he is funding a human rights rather than a private after-party.Outside the blacked-out windows the theology is simpler and older.
The impoverished of Ukraine sit in the damp of metro stations and basement shelters, counting the hours between air-raid sirens. Their young men are collected like first fruits: pulled from buses, from factory gates, from the arms of mothers who no longer bother to weep in public.
The blood is not metaphorical. It is offered, regularly and without remainder, upon the altar of the addicted deity who cannot stop dancing long enough to notice the smell of iron rising from the soil.Thus the ancient pattern repeats, only now the incense is chemical and the collection plate is denominated in euros. The priests condemn sin from the pulpit at noon and underwrite it after dark. The idol twitches on stage. The congregation pays. And the sacrifice, as ever, is someone else’s son.
