Recently David Frum penned an inspirational December 2022 editorial in the Atlantic magazine on the speech by Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, to a joint session of Congress thanking America for their support in the war against Russia.
David Frum is a never-Trumper Republican, he is both a political commentator as well as a speechwriter for former President George W Bush.[1]
David Frum opens his editorial, “Of the many moving words in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, these eight may have been the most urgent and important:
‘So much in the world depends on you.’”
Never before in human history has a nation dominated world politics as does America today, whose military forces far surpass military power the combined military forces of all other countries on earth in nearly every category. Never before has a predominant power chosen to extend its power not by bullying smaller nations, but by encouraging the spread of democracy.
David Frum continues, “Zelensky came to Washington to speak for his nation. He came to Washington to ask for assistance. But above all, he came to Washington to recall Americans to themselves. He came to say, My embattled people believe in you. Embedded in his words of trust was a challenge: If we believe in you, perhaps you can again believe in yourselves?”
What keeps us, as Americans, from believing in ourselves?
Simply put, Americans can believe in themselves if they seek to show compassion to those countries and peoples in need, but when Americans instead come to seek to be cruel to other countries and peoples in need, we lose our moral fiber, we will lose our ability to believe in ourselves. Selfishness kills, selflessness brings life.
This is not a new question; this is the same question that the Old Testament prophets asked the people of Israel so many millennia ago. So many millennia ago, the Lord reminded his people, and Americans by historical extension,
You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien,
for you were aliens and slaves) in the land of Egypt.[2]
(Other verses say slaves.)
The prophets are very clear, we will lose our way if we discard our moral compass, as the prophet Zechariah exhorts us:
“Thus says the Lord of hosts,
Render true judgments,
show kindness and mercy each to his brother,
do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor;
and let none of you devise evil against his brother in your heart.”[3]
David Frum continues, “The ideal of partnership among democracies has declined, too, and perhaps even more than confidence within individual democracies. Narrow and selfish nationalism has displaced international cooperation and collective security. The slogan ‘America First’—seemingly discredited forever along with its fascism-friendly promoters of the late 1930s and early ’40s—was revived.”
Many critics will chime in, Why are we talking about the poor? Why are we talking about civil rights? What have these things have to do with Ukraine?
When civil rights for minorities are ignored, when minorities are forced to slave away at sub-minimum wages, when minorities are denied both the right to vote and the right to justice when they call the police or appear in court, democracy fails. That was the lesson this country learned after the Civil War, after Reconstruction, when the brutalities of Jim Crow ruled the land, when our democracy died.
There are both direct and indirect correlations between the struggles to overthrow Jim Crow and to overthrow Nazism, just as today the same politicians who support white supremacy also support the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin and want to cut military aid to Ukraine.
Let us not forget that the Nazi lawyers, when drafting the Nazi anti-Semitic Race Laws at the beginning of Hitler’s regime, used America’s Jim Crow laws as precedent, and bemoaned the fact that in some respects the Nazi Race Laws were more lenient than many Jim Crow laws mandating segregation and discrimination against blacks.
Let us not forget that peonage, the contract labor system in the Deep South where sheriffs arrested blacks for manufactured vagrancy offenses, forcing blacks to work under a brutal system of effective slavery in labor camps, was comparable to the Nazi concentration work camp system. These peonage labor camps often forced blacks to sleep in chains, with little food, scant medical care, and suffering high mortality rates. White southern juries refused to enforce the laws under the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, it was not until his cousin FDR was given sufficient political cover by Nazi brutalities that the peonage system was successfully prosecuted and substantially abolished.
Let us not forget that Martin Luther King directly compared the lynchings and civil rights violations suffered by many blacks to the brutalities of the Nazi regime and its Final Solution to the Jewish problem in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.
Let us not forget the warning of Benjamin Franklin at our first founding, “We have a republic, if we can keep it.”[4]
David Frum continues, “This mood of democratic recession enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. He regarded Ukraine as weak and vulnerable, and Ukraine’s allies as divided and ineffectual. When he ordered the invasion ten months ago, Putin apparently expected to roll into Kyiv in days. He seemingly expected the rest of the world to grumble, then come to terms. Russian energy, Russian cash—those were, in Putin’s mind, the hard realities. Everything else seemed to him just so much vapor.”
“What a mistake.”
Like Zelensky, Winston Churchill also addressed a joint session of Congress in 1943, to thank the American people for their assistance in fighting the war against Nazism.
Like Zelensky, Churchill showed brave leadership to the British people, while Hitler and many in England wanted Churchill to sue for peace. Instead, Churchill proclaimed, “We have good reason to believe ourselves capable of continuing the war, if necessary, alone, if necessary, for years.”
Zelensky inspired the citizens of Ukraine and the entire free world when he turned down an offer from the United States of evacuation from the capital city of Kyiv.
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky famously responded.[5]
In comparison, this was Churchill’s speech when he was appointed Prime Minister:
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.”
David Frum continues, “The Ukrainians fought. Their ferocious and successful resistance surprised Putin. Perhaps it surprised the Ukrainians themselves. Certainly, it surprised the rest of the world, democratic and nondemocratic alike. A surge of sympathy rapidly translated into the greatest joint military assistance effort since 1945. Weapons, money, intelligence, economic support, humanitarian assistance—all flowed into Ukraine, by the tens of billions of dollars, pounds, and euros. Collective security was suddenly upgraded from an antique slogan to an organizing principle.”
We are surprised that the major media does not more often not compare the bravery of the Ukrainians to the bravery of the Finnish when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in the Winter War of November 1939, shortly after Poland was invaded. Although greatly outnumbered, the Finnish Army had trained for winter combat, with special troops outmaneuvering the Soviets, fighting on skis, totally decimating the Soviet forces. Stalin sued for peace three months later, annexing the southern industrialized provinces of Finland.[6]
As part of the Nazi invasion of Russia in Operation Barbarossa, the brave Finns invaded to grab back these Finnish provinces that Russia had annexed in the Continuation War. Finland was the only Nazi ally fighting in the war who resisted the persecution of its Jewish population. Unfortunately, in the armistice agreement Finland had to surrender these annexed provinces once again and pay Soviet Russia reparations. But the brave Finns retained their independence through their bravery on the battlefield against overwhelming odds, Finland is a much smaller country by population than the Ukraine.[7]
David Frum continues, “The assistance worked. The invasion (of Ukraine) was stopped, then reversed. The intended victim began to win.”
“And as the Ukrainians began to win, all the rest of us—all the other intended victims of Putin’s aggression—began to consider that maybe we might not be such losers ourselves. Maybe our ideals were not so out-of-date. Maybe our institutions were not so broken. Maybe the people the Ukrainians needed us to be, maybe those were the people we could be again.”
Taiwan has no doubt breathed a sigh of relief. The Ukrainian conflict has many messages:
- The United States will stand behind their allies and friends when a larger bullying country invades their neighbor.
- A reminder that highly motivated and resourceful soldiers fighting for their freedom can counter invasions by their totalitarian neighbors.
- With current technology, war favors the defensive forces, due to the newly developed drones and automated anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
David Frum continues, “Zelensky spoke of ‘bicameral and bipartisan’ support in Congress for his cause. That sounded a surprising note, because an important faction in Congress and in conservative media has aligned with Putin against Ukraine. But Zelensky was using words not to describe reality; he was using words to change reality. His praise strengthened Republican friends of Ukraine such as Senator Mitch McConnell—and the reverberating applause for his praise left the friends of Putin in Congress and in conservative media more aware than ever of their ideological extremism and political isolation.”
The former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had destroyed what was left of the World War II bipartisanship which guided the United States in the post-war era. This bipartisanship was strengthened during the war by the planks advanced by the 1940 Republican nominee for President, Wendell Willkie. By supporting many of FDR’s war policies, he both helped win the war against Nazism while guaranteeing that the Republicans would lose handily the Presidential race. Wendell Willkie put country ahead of party, whereas Fox News Republicans today only seek to own the libs.[8]
David Frum continues, “Zelensky argued that assistance to Ukraine is not charity. It is an investment. That statement is obviously true by the material metrics of national security. At a comparatively small cost in American and allied assistance, the Russian military has been given a mauling it will not soon care to repeat. Ukraine’s resistance has helped secure Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, too, because the lesson inflicted on Moscow will surely reverberate in Beijing.”
“But the ‘investment, not charity’ argument is even more powerful when measured less materially. What the Western world is getting in return for its aid is a powerful recommitment to its own best self. We didn’t believe the Ukrainians could do it, in part because we didn’t believe we could do it. But they did. And so did we. And we look now at both Ukraine and ourselves in new ways.”
The United States has paid peanuts in aid to Ukraine when compared to the massive aid provided to our allies fighting Nazi Germany in World War II under the Lend Lease program. The isolationist sentiment in this country was pronounced, to convince the American people to provide aid to her allies, FDR proposed the Lend-Lease program. England would “borrow” what she needed to win the war against the Nazis, and at the end of the war, give it back. In his Fireside Chat radio broadcast FDR explained, “If your neighbor’s house caught on fire, wouldn’t you loan him your garden hose? And once the fire was put out, he would give you back the garden hose.”
The notion that we would loan England ships and planes and tanks and after the war the English would return them somewhat used and slightly blown-up was as preposterous as it was politically brilliant. No payment was expected for planes and tanks and ships.[9]
Roughly two-thirds of the economy was directed to the war effort during World War II, our aid to Ukraine is a tiny fraction of this.[10]
David Frum continues, “The extremists and conspiracists and populists, the authoritarians and kleptocrats and theocrats who have all gained so much ascendancy in recent years, they do not speak for us. That small man in the olive-green jersey at the rostrum of the House of Representatives, he spoke for us. And the reception given to him today by the president and by Congress told the world that his words had been heard and received and understood by the great democracy-minded majority of Americans.”
Another Atlantic magazine editorial was written by Anne Applebaum, an alternate history that speculates on what may have happened if the United States had abandoned Ukraine, how Zelensky and his ministers would likely be murdered, with Russian troops digging trenches on the border with Poland, with concentration camps, torture chambers, and makeshift prisons throughout the Ukraine, with Russian forces kidnapping hundreds of thousands of children, trafficking them to Russia and elsewhere, with millions of Ukrainian refugees scattered across Europe.
Anne Applebaum concludes, “Because of everything that all of us did together, Kyiv still stands. Ukrainians still control most of Ukraine. The massacres, the executions, the mass violence planned by the Russians did not take place in most of Ukraine. The legend of Russia’s military prowess has been shattered. China and Iran are roiled by unhappiness and unrest. The democratic world did not collapse but has instead been strengthened. As the Ukrainian president said last night, we ‘succeeded in uniting the global community to protect freedom and international law.’ Zelensky came to Washington to thank Americans on behalf of Ukraine, but in truth, it is we who should be thanking them.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+22%3A21&version=NRSVCE
[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Zechariah+7%3A9-10&version=RSVCE
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/a-republic-if-we-can-keep-it/605887/
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Willkie
[9] Lend Lease passed, William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, pp. 229-231 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease.
Be the first to comment