Nations do not care if you believe in them or reject them. We live within their domains of alliances and enemies and must choose accordingly – either in rejecting their supremacy and finding a way to live with that choice or to make a choice to accept our nation’s (every nation’s) often egregious actions and act within that world. What is possible? What is merely an implausible dream?
For example, Alexi Navalny has chosen to reject Putin’s Russia and is paying the price. Hundreds of thousands of other Russians have fled the country.
Iranian protesters are paying the price.
They all believe that a better life is possible than the one offered to them by their terrorist regimes.
What of those of us who live in a shaky democracy that bears its own share of terrible deeds?
We also must choose, and for me, Ukraine sharpens the vision and the choice. The Biden administration’s support and NATO’s support of Ukraine are and have been the absolutely right choice geopolitically and morally.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its conscious use of terror, rape and murder as tactics, has been a sobering experience of how power actually operates on an international level when expansionist fantasies take hold of a leader. Putin dreams of an Imperial Russ. The Ukrainians and his own people are paying a terrible price for his delusion.
One would be foolish to suppose that Putin’s desire for territory would stop with Ukraine.
Sweden and Finland see Russia and Putin clearly, as do Poland and Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, all those who live right on the edge of Russia – Russia is a gangster state led by a KGB thug who has fantasies of restoring Russia to empire. Through his theft of Russian resources, Putin is reputed to be the wealthiest man in the world. His coterie of oligarchs and ‘captains’ have all raked in illicit billions in bribes and through every kind of corruption one can imagine. The Russian Orthodox Church, thoroughly dishonored, engages in the same kind of genocidal rants as the most prominent Russian media.
Russia has also set itself up as a beacon of white nationalist restoration, a state devoid of dissent and humanity, but rigorous in its hatred of anyone outside the boundaries of “white Christian practice and belief” (whatever that means day to day). It has become a rallying point for MAGA and for nationalist right-wing movements worldwide.
As such, taking all of these facts into consideration, it is imperative for Ukraine’s survival and for our own national security to persevere in giving the Ukrainians whatever they need so that they may retain their independence.
