The unhinged Monty Python hermaphrodite Sarah Ashton Cirillo (real name Michael John Cirillo) got its comeuppance. Famous pranksters Vovan and Lexus could not resist the temptation of making a complete fool of this poor ignorant nitwit (see here, Part I, and here, Part II). Once again they have performed a public service and as usual have done a brilliant job of it.
Vovan and Lexus’ conversation with Cirillo is interesting on several levels.
The main takeaways of the prankster interview are AFU “sergeant” Cirillo’s affirmations that Russians are “not human” and that the West does not fully understand the threat they pose, that all “Russian propagandists” should be targeted with every available weapon, including terrorist attacks, that the immensely talented Russian journalist Daria Dugina, who was murdered by Kiev regime agents in a booby trapped vehicle, “died a death that she deserved,” and that Ukraine should go on to target Maria Zakharova as well, presumably in similarly gruesome fashion.
After the subject’s moral and psychological portrait was thus established, the conversation with the pranksters turned to what is probably the most revealing segment of their interaction with Cirillo.
It is her statement that Russians “belong to the Mongol race” (at 6:00 minutes, Part I) and that therefore Russia must be crushed in order to save civilisation (at 6:19 minutes, Part I).
Why are these claims, coming from someone as ridiculous as Cirillo, of interest? Not for their factual accuracy, to be sure, but as evidence of the influence of Nazi ideology within the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where Cirillo serves with the rank of “sergeant.”
Let us analyse briefly the implications of the use of such memes in the discourse of an average American who happens to be in Ukraine, Sarah Ashton Cirillo.
How could Cirillo have come in contact with such memes? That could not possibly have been in America and assuredly not from lessons in her high school history class in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the United States there are many derogatory epithets for various ethnic and racial groups: Kraut for Germans, Dago for Italians, Polack for Poles, Nigger for blacks, ragheads for Iraqis, but, odd as that may appear in the current Russophobic atmosphere, in America there is no and never has been in common usage a derogatory expression referencing Russians.
Associating Russians with Mongols, in any form, would strike an average American as particularly odd because Russians are known to be generally tall and blond and although most Americans would find it challenging to locate Mongolia on the map they do have a sense that its inhabitants are a race endowed with Asian features. Furthermore, most Americans have not the remotest knowledge of Russia’s tributary relationship in the medieval period with the then powerful Mongol empire. Neither have they heard of the battle Kulikovo against the Golden Horde, which ended it. In essence, in America, where Cirillo comes from and was raised, awareness of a historical connection between Russians and Mongols is limited to a tiny group of historical specialists (among whom Ashton Cirillo certainly is not). But those specialists are also aware that the relationship between Russians and Mongols occurred in the remote past and in historical terms was of comparatively short duration. More importantly, they know also that it was purely political in nature, that Russian culture, religious practices, and genetic stock were left intact by the Mongol overlords, and that there never was any racial mixing.
If Cirillo were looking for remaining traces of the Mongol invasion of Europe in the Middle Ages, she would find them in the form Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians, not Russians, but that is a detail a Las Vegas high school graduate cannot possibly be expected to know.
The derogatory use of the twin memes of the Mongol origin of the Russian nation and of a “Mongolised” Russia representing a threat to civilisation comes from just one source, and that is the ideology and wartime propaganda of the Nazi Third Reich. That is important to bear in mind when analysing the background of Cirillo’s slip-up. In the final stages of World War II, in order to frighten the population and motivate them to greater effort and sacrifice, the Nazis in their propaganda were increasingly stressing the supposedly Mongolian origin of their Russian adversaries.
This can easily be demonstrated by quoting Josef Goebbels’ propaganda pronouncements on that subject.
For example, in his radio address to the German people on 28 February 1945, Goebbels said: “Like our fathers did so often in our history, we too will break the storm of the Mongols against the European heartland.” Goebbels was referring to Russia and the Red Army which was approaching Berlin.
In an article in Das Reich on 11 February 1945, Goebbels highlighted exactly the same theme that is being promoted today by Ukrainian Armed Forces “sergeant” Ashton Cirillo:
“The present storm from the East against Fortress Europe is naturally directed against our whole part of the planet. It differs from the Mongol and Hun hordes of the past only in that it uses the tools of political trickery and diplomatic lies to make its terrible destructive campaign against Occidental culture seem harmless for as long as possible.” Here, Goebbels seems even to have anticipated the theme of “Russian disinformation.”
In his January 2, 1944, New Year’s article, also in Das Reich, Goebbels highlights identical topics:
“The enemy [the reference is to the Russians] has committed every conceivable crime against humanity, culture, and civilization … National Socialist Germany feels itself the leader of the entire civilized world … the fate of civilized humanity once again will hang in the balance.” Goebbels is here touting Nazi Germany as the torchbearer of “universal values” and even hints at its role as the champion of a rules based order.
Need we quote more? The evidence is in and the picture is clear.
We have proved that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are infested with Nazi thinking. There is no other conceivable source where “sergeant” Cirillo could have come in contact with the concepts that she expounded in her interview with Vovan and Lexus, after the pranksters lowered her guard. She definitely did not bring such ideas to Ukraine from America. She acquired them in Ukraine from the Nazis who surround her there.
Statements made by this stupid creature, sick in mind as well as body, strongly demonstrate the urgency of denazifying Ukraine. But she should be spared the Daria Dugina treatment that she enthusiastically condones and callously invokes on others. A viewer’s facetious reaction to her Vovan and Lexus interview was spot on:
“The Russian Army were provided with the coordinates of the location of Sergeant Sarah. They declined to send any missiles. Sergeant Sarah is of more use to them speaking nonsense.”