When Words Matter
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky standing his ground in Kyiv.
Like all of you, I have been watching a live-streamed war slowly evolve in a part of the world that seemed to believe this wouldn’t happen again. And yet it is.
It’s surreal. It’s horrifying. It seems truly unbelievable.
And it, like so much of recent history, is fueled by straight up lies based on the deep belief that Americans and Western democracies are too stupid or too distracted to pay attention to blatant acquisitive aggression.
I don’t believe that’s true.
When Putin seeks to overthrow – what he calls – a neo-Nazi regime, he’s assuming no one will ask how that could be true. How could the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors embrace the dictatorial rule based on intense nationalism and mass narcissism that professed all non-Germanic peoples as “less than”. A Slavic Jew? How does that fit any sort of truth?
So that’s a lie. Ukraine’s government is not a neo-Nazi regime after all.
He also says the Ukrainian people want Russian rule.
Doesn’t look like it, does it? Watching old men kneel in front of tanks. Hearing the “F^#& you” of martyred Ukraine border defenders. Reading the story of the soldier who blew up a bridge and himself to stop the progress of tanks. All playing out on the global networks of media produced by citizens and people – not professional newsrooms or editors.
Here in the US, we also see former leaders praising the brilliance of Putin. Partisan hacks saying this is all good for the freedom of Ukraine’s people – that Putin is “anti-woke” and that culture issues are more important than “abstract ideas”.
Our entire country is based on abstract ideas – ideas and concepts and principles that we now see Ukrainians willing to die for – to lie down in the streets for, and to fight for.
Abstract concepts like freedom, liberty, and democracy within the framework of a legal document called the U.S. Constitution that guides our progress.
Those abstract ideas are precisely what supports the right of hacks on the far left or far right to pronounce as they will, to demonstrate in the streets, and to protest rigorously without fear of imprisonment – which is now happening in Putin’s homeland, on Putin’s orders.
We’re watching bravery in action in the form of Ukrainian President Zelensky. We’re seeing what patriotism truly looks like. Watch closely so we can all learn that abstract ideas fueled by truth can be as powerful as weapons – which is what Putin is truly afraid of.