The fate of Ukraine’s democracy and ours is linked
Remember “freedom fighters”? Americans considered Afghani guerillas battling Soviet invaders freedom fighters. President Ronald Reagan meets with mujahedeen leaders in the White House in 1983, calling them freedom fighters. That same year he called Nicaraguan rebels fighting the Sandinist regime freedom fighters opposed to “Government out of the barrel of a gun.” America’s “mission,” Reagan declared in his 1985 State of the Union address, was to “nourish and defend freedom and democracy.” It was dubbed the Reagan Doctrine.
That was a different Republican Party. Four decades later, the Party of Donald Trump has gone squishy on freedom fighters opposing Vladimir Putin’s Russian invaders in Ukraine. Republicans have gone rather squishy on democracy here at home.
Timothy Snyder believes Ukraine’s freedom fighters represent an “affirmation of faith in democracy’s principles and its future” and “a challenge to those in the West who have forgotten the ethical basis of democracy and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, ceded the field to oligarchy and empire at home and abroad.” He invites us to view Ukraine’s fate as a harbinger of our own.
Snyder draws familiar lessons from the spread of fascism in the mid-twentieth century and argues its survival is not inevitable. Its defense must be more than rhetorical (Foreign Affairs, paywalled):
The current Russian regime is one consequence of the mistaken belief that democracy happens naturally and that all opinions are equally valid. If this were true, then Russia would indeed be a democracy, as Putin claims. The war in Ukraine is a test of whether a tyranny that claims to be a democracy can triumph and thereby spread its logical and ethical vacuum. Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny. The Ukrainian resistance is the wake-up call.
Putin’s organizing principle, already too familiar here, is “the shameless production of fiction” and remains in power via the rejection of truth and all values. “Putin stays in power by way of such strategic relativism: not by making his own country better but by making other countries look worse.” This strategy, too, is already familiar in the U.S.
For such a regime to survive, the notion that democracy rests on the courage to tell the truth must be eliminated with violence if it cannot be laughed out of existence. Night after night, Kremlin propagandists explain on television that there cannot be a person such as Zelensky, a nation such as Ukraine, or a system such as democracy. Self-rule must be a joke; Ukraine must be a joke; Zelensky must be a joke. If not, the Kremlin’s whole story that Russia is superior because it accepts that nothing is true falls to pieces. If Ukrainians really can constitute a society and really can choose their leaders, then why shouldn’t Russians do the same?
Do not discount the effectiveness of Russian up-is-downism, Snyder cautions. The events of Jan. 6th, the spread of white Christian nationalism and right-wing domestic terrorism in the U.S. validate his concern. We have seen what Republican/Russian/QAnon propaganda and embrace of “alternative facts” can do on this continent:
Russia embodies fascism while claiming to fight it; Russians commit genocide while claiming to prevent it. This propaganda is not entirely ineffective: the fact that Moscow claims to be fighting Nazis does distract many observers from the fascism of Putin’s regime. And before North Americans and Europeans praise themselves for winning the battle of narratives, they should look to the global South. There, Putin’s story of the war prevails, even as Asians and Africans pay a horrible price for the war that he has chosen.
By this, Snyder means the choking off of Ukrainian grain exports. As Stalin did before him, Putin is using famine as a weapon, not just against Ukraine, but the world.
For his part, Putin’s actions are all about grievance. In a speech declaring his annexation of several of Ukraine’s eastern reaches, Putin asserted his invasion is a reaction the western efforts to weaken Russia, as if capitalism did not have more pressing interests than Putin’s political legacy (Yahoo News):
All of this, according to Putin, is the fault of the United States and its European allies, whom he accuses of trying to fulfill a long-standing project to weaken Russia — a project in which Ukraine is, in this cynical vision of the global order, nothing more than a pawn.
“Putin seems desperate to blame the West for everything, which isn’t unexpected, but the intensity of the sentiment makes you wonder what lengths they will go as a result,” Ben Friedman, a policy expert at the security think tank Defense Priorities, told Yahoo News. “Annexing territory Russia seems likely to have trouble holding, and hinting about nukes to defend it smacks of desperation and should make all reasonable people nervous.”
Domestic desperation among adherents of what was once conservatism should concern us as well. For the longest time, it was easy to view Trump as an insecure would-be autocrat emulating a real one, Putin. Now, it’s not clear who is imitating whom. Just as Hitler took lessons from America’s Jim Crow regime, Putin (I’m stretching here) seems to be emulating the Party of Trump’s nihilism. It’s not clear who is influencing whom.
“Russia’s support of fascism, white nationalism, and chaos brings it a certain kind of supporter,” Snyder writes and “its bottomless nihilism is what attracts citizens of democracies who are not sure where to find ethical landmarks.” As it does here.
The party that once embraced freedom fighters may cut off Ukraine’s should they regain control of all three branches of government in 2022 or 2024.
Snyder concludes:
Most urgently, a Ukrainian victory is needed to prevent further death and atrocity in Ukraine. But the outcome of the war matters throughout the world, not just in the physical realm of pain and hunger but also in the realm of values, where possible futures are enabled. Ukrainian resistance reminds us that democracy is about human risk and human principles, and a Ukrainian victory would give democracy a fresh wind.
Read between the lines: Our fates are linked.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us