Thinking about…

Security, Freedom, Democracy, Courage, Pluralism, Perseverance, Generosity

Americans (and many others) owe Ukrainians a huge debt of gratitude for their resistance to Russian aggression. For some mixture of reasons, we have difficulty acknowledging this. To do so, we have to find the words. Seven that might help are: security, freedom, democracy, courage, pluralism, perseverance, and generosity.

Perhaps the most important and the most unacknowledged debt is security. Ukrainian resistance to Russia has vastly reduced the chances of major armed conflict elsewhere, and thus significantly reduced the chances of a nuclear war.

It is hard to overlook what Ukrainians have done to defend the idea of democracy. In a basic sense, this is what the war is about. Vladimir Putin represents the twenty-first century practice of managed or fake democracy, in which an oligarchy preserves some appearances and rhetoric of democracy, because it has no alternative to propose, while hoarding wealth and power and making any meaningful political participation impossible. The Russian system relies on a televisual spectacle that assures Russians that everyone else is just as corrupt, and so they should love their own Russian corruption because it is Russian.