Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us
Who better than a prisoner can weigh the value of a free, unchained life? Who else knows at such a personal level the cost of living under tyranny’s lock and key?
March 16, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
You have likely been as alarmed and dismayed as I have been over the scenes of slaughter and devastation in round-the-clock news coverage of the Russian assault on Ukraine in the past few weeks. Regardless of the final outcome for the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, the unrestrained tyranny of Russian President Vladimir Putin has left a permanent imprint on civil society. To purposely target civilians in a time of war is a war crime, and Putin has done so with impunity.
U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, highly touted in President Biden’s State of the Union address, are proving more painful for the people of Russia than for Putin himself. History tells us that sanctions have rarely resulted in the reconsideration of tyranny. Sergey Alekshenko, a former Russian bank official now in the U.S., recently told The Wall Street Journal that the economic sting of sanctions will be sorely felt by the Russian people, but this is Vladimir Putin’s war, not theirs. As his people suffer, Putin will still have food on his table and gas in his chauffered limousine. His strong-arm military will still be fed.
After two decades as Russian president, Putin now demonstrates that he cares little for the Russian people who are standing in long lines at banks as the Ruble collapses. Putin scoffs while tightening the chains of communist dictatorship. At this writing, he has already arrested and jailed over 8,000 Russian citizens for having the audacity to protest his war. With threats of nuclear destruction, he means to bring the Free World to heel, and it is working.
And as described in these pages a week ago, the leader of the Free World is compromised. The government of Poland has recently agreed to provide Ukraine with Russian-built war planes that Ukraine pilots could fly. It would go a long way to stopping the relentless slaughter of innocent civilians from the air. The deal required that the U.S. replace Poland’s fighter jets with American ones. The Pentagon agreed. The decision went all the way to President Biden’s desk. To the great dismay of battered Ukraine, the American President vetoed the idea fearing that it would provoke Putin. The same happened in Afghanistan resulting in American humiliation as Mr. Biden’s decision for a rapid exit was based on his fear of provoking the Taliban. Putin’s quest to bring the world to heel is manifested not only in Ukraine but in America.
As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine geared up, I had to wonder about some of the tone deaf headlines that came from America’s highest priced news media. Just as Russia began to rattle its saber at Ukraine, The New York Times ran an editorial with this headline about Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky: “The Comedian-Turned President Is Seriously in Over His Head.”
While most of the world stood by in shock at the manufactured tyranny Putin has aimed at Ukraine, it is difficult to believe that someone at the Times wrote that editorial, that an editor let it fly, and that both still have a job three weeks after printing it. Just two weeks later, the entire Free World hailed President Volodymyr Zelensky as a courageous leader and an icon of freedom.
The collective leaders of the European Union gave him a standing ovation for his compelling and impassioned plea that this fight is also their fight. Without intervention, this violently medieval conquering of Ukraine will leave a hostile nuclear-armed, Soviet-inspired communist government at the door of the European Union.
A reader recently wrote to me that, “In this troubled time, The Wall Street Journal is a resource like no other.” In a pair of recent editorials, the WSJ laid out the true nature of this war:
“A new cold war has arrived, and Biden has to meet the challenge ... For years a complacent West has erred by treating Putin like a reasonable geopolitical partner. He has made it clear he doesn’t want a place in the international order. He wants to blow it up.
“On Sunday [February 27] Mr. Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert in response to what he called threatening comments from NATO leaders ... The threats shouldn’t stop the growing support for Ukrainian resistance. The stakes of this war are very high, including for American interests. Mr. Putin is trying to restore Greater Russia and make himself the dominant European state and a global power. He wants a new world disorder.”
I do not agree with a whole lot that comes from editorials in The Washington Post, but this bit of wisdom by Max Boot gave me pause:
“We are all Ukrainians now. As Putin pursues his fantasy of rebuilding Russia’s lost empire, Ukrainian resistance is the only thing holding back a lawless new phase of world history. Their fight is our fight too.”
A Measure of Freedom
Compare Putin’s state of mind with that of President Volodymyr Zelensky. When it was suggested by U.S. officials that they could arrange a hasty exit to get him safely out of Ukraine, he said, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” President Zelensky has emerged as a global hero. Imagine what he and other Ukrainian citizens could now do with the $80 billion in advanced weapons and ammunition left behind for the Taliban in our last war. I described it in “Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility.”
I have been listening to some of our Special Forces operatives in the U.S. who report having a very hard time staying on the sidelines as innocent Ukrainians are slaughtered. The United States cannot sustain a role as the world’s democracy police, but must our retreat be so total and dramatic? In just one year, the extent to which America has shrunk from tyranny is alarming.
I am certainly no fan of war, but I believe there are effective measures this nation could take but did not. Severe sanctions targeting Russia’s energy production were not taken because they could roil the energy markets and cause some economic pain for Americans as well. If this is so, it is only because production in the U.S. has been restrained and pipelines have been shut down by progressive agendas. How do we explain this to the people of Ukraine?
And then this humbling development came my way. Just one day before Russia launched its self-aggrandizing assault on Ukraine, I had someone look at both countries in our weekly BTSW traffic report. No one from Russia came to Beyond These Stone Walls, but on the very day Russia launched its invasion, several people in Ukraine spent time with us. They were looking at a specific post: “Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.”
I could not imagine this. For those who don’t believe we are on the eve of destruction, think about why — with a nuclear-armed demagogue launching a hostile assault upon their front door — people in the Ukraine chose to celebrate freedom with Pornchai Moontri. I told him about this in a telephone conversation just before typing this post. His response was a pensive silence, as though the weight of freedom had revealed itself. Freedom is never just for those who now are free. It carries within it a mandate to restore and preserve it for others.
Recent events all around us form a somewhat surreal and ironic backdrop to what is happening in Ukraine. As Communist Russia invades this sovereign state intent on destroying the freedom of its people, many Americans took in stride the heavy hand of oppression to our north as Canadian truckers were forcibly dispersed from the right of protest and a democratic government became demonstrably less so. Some in our news media went along, openly describing the truckers as staging shameful assaults and destruction, none of which was true.
American parents in Virginia rose up this year to refute the agenda of a political party that told them they should have no say in what is taught in their schools. And in nearly socialist San Francisco, voters ousted its three farthest left-leaning school board members by upwards of 79-percent of the vote because the school board had been more interested in renaming schools with “woke” icons than opening them as the pandemic winds down.
When a father in Loundon County Virginia complained to his elected school board members that his 14-year old daughter had been sexually assaulted in a gender-confused school lavatory, he was arrested. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described this case as “the Right’s Big Lie about a sexual assault in Virginia.” The teenage boy was wearing a skirt and identified as “gender fluid” so in her world this could not have been a sexual assault. This was just one of the intellectual distortions propagated by the school board. The “gender fluid” boy was transferred to another school where he did the same thing again.
When an increasing number of parents showed up at school board meetings asking for representative government and reconsideration of progressive content taught in schools, the U.S. Attorney General ordered the Justice Department to investigate, not the school board, but the parents. CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin chimed in recently,
“It’s really important to remember why we are talking about school boards at all; because it’s all about white supremacy, and that’s on the rise in the Republican Party.”
What might the people of Ukraine say today about the priorities for the American progressive movement promoting a totalitarian society while Ukraine’s citizens die trying to fend off communist control? I wrote of our own progressive oppression in “The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education.”
Vladimir Putin Betrays God
In 1991, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States worked to guarantee the sovereignty of Ukraine as a bridge between East and West. At that time, Ukraine had the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons with over 5,000 warheads. The United States and the United Kingdom were worried that these weapons could fall into terrorist hands, so the two Western nations, along with Russia, signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum which agreed to a transfer of these nuclear weapons to Russian control in exchange for a commitment by Washington, London, and Moscow to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and borders.
Vladimir Putin violated that pact first with his annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. At the time, both the U.S. and U.K. agreed that more should have been done to defend the pact than mere sanctions. That was but a test. Now Putin has broken that agreement on a much larger scale and he is again faced only with sanctions.
The United States may itself be partly responsible for this war. On November 10, 2021, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership in which the two countries agreed to pursue membership for Ukraine in NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a move that a crazed despot like Putin could not abide on his own doorstep. Now both NATO and the United States are shrinking from that agreement.
Some religious conservatives in Western Culture have excused Putin’s aggression with a misplaced respect for his positions on cultural issues like same sex marriage, transgender ideology, and progressive agendas. His respect for these issues has nothing to do with anything akin to religious fidelity. It is not in the Name of God that he acts. It is in the name of Lenin and a Marxist disdain for free peoples and independent states.
You may have seen news footage of a Russian rocket striking a communications tower in the Babyn Yar area of Kyiv. Whether a strategic strike or the height of irony is unknown. That very spot was the site of one of the most deadly massacres of Jews during the Holocaust. Ukraine’s people are deeply religious. The majority practice Ukrainian Orthodoxy with smaller numbers of Roman Catholics, Eastern Rite Catholics, and smaller Evangelical congregations. Ukraine is also one of the few European nations with a vibrant Jewish community. Its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, is one of them.
If Putin is not stopped, Zelensky will surely be killed. If that happens without intervention from the Free World, the only voice left may be that of God Himself to Cain (Gen.4:10):
“Listen to the sound of your brother’s blood calling out to me from the Earth.”
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To the Readers of Beyond These Stone Walls: Speaking of tyranny, you may know from reading last week’s post, that I posted an entirely true and well researched account of an event in Germany that violates absolutely none of the publishing standards at Facebook. Nonetheless, on March 5th Facebook announced that it is disabling and removing our account. We have filed an official appeal of that decision. Meanwhile, for the next several weeks we are barred from sharing this post or any others on our Facebook page. However, you are not so barred. So please share this post.
You may also be interested in these related posts:
Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression
A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War
