I’ve been in many fights in my life, but only two involved coming to blows with fisticuffs. Both occurred in my youth, both were on the playground, and both involved me standing up to a bully who was picking on someone.
If we were keeping score, I’d say Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, is the greatest bully this century.
Like the neighborhood bully, Putin has gone after the far weaker kid next door. Putin’s iron fist continues to flail away, indiscriminately and with wanton disregard for human life. He miscalculated Ukraine’s resolve, but he will not back down.
Ukraine, the underdog fighting a heavy weight, has heroically defended itself but is clearly on the ropes. There’s no referee stepping in to stop the fight.
As it happens with nearly every human war and catastrophe in this digital age of 24/7 media reports, there comes the tendency for all of us to spring back into our own personal lives and daily problems. My fear is that this war, too, like the ones we fought ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan, will start to fade away and become a mere abstraction for Americans.
Then there’s the even greater existential fear of nuclear retaliation should we step further into the ring. With Putin, the nuclear option will always be the “give in to me or else” tactic. That’s how bullies act. But Ukraine, which at one time, was the third largest nuclear power, gave up its nuclear weapons under a 1994 agreement brokered by the U.S., the United Kingdom and Russia. What good are future non-proliferation assurances if Ukraine now faces its utter destruction?
I agree with Alexander Vindman, the retired Army lieutenant colonel and former director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, who says we need to support Ukraine now with a lend-lease program on the scale of what we delivered to Europe during World War II.
The proper response to this war is to boost our support to Ukraine militarily and economically to include fighter jets, unmanned aerial vehicles, and anything else the Ukrainian defenders need.
If we don’t save Ukraine, who will be next? Moldova? Are we really letting a bully bludgeon his victim because the victim wasn’t allowed to join our exclusive NATO club? The Kremlin also has its eyes on the NATO countries in the Baltics.
The Ukrainian people are calling out to us, pleading for our intervention. A people yearning to remain free are being mass murdered. Their indomitable courage in the face of Putin’s insatiable egotism and sadism needs more than our admiration or the waving of the Ukrainian flag or our thoughts and prayers.
My spouse, Denise, and I recently re-read “The Moon is Down,” John Steinbeck’s not well known but very fine book about a military invasion and the occupation of a town in Europe.
The theme of simple courage and standing up to bullies is a strong one with Steinbeck as anyone who has read “The Grapes of Wrath,” his best-known masterpiece, will tell you. In the “Grapes of Wrath,” he takes on the banks that pushed Dust Bowl tenant farmers off their land, the people who exploited them, and the fearful locals who disparaged them as “Okies.”
Steinbeck was masterful in using fiction as a platform to fight for the underdog and as a catalyst for empathy. My wife and I have loved all his books, but “The Moon is Down” is our favorite.
It’s a simple tale but a deeply humane depiction of the reactions of freedom-loving people under the domination of a conquering force. It’s a timeless story of people being crushed by war and then resisting their captors. Sound familiar?
The place is left nameless. The setting is merely a village — any village — which is at first surprised, and then overwhelmed and, as the weeks go by, adjusts to resistance and quiet heroism. The book’s Mayor Orden is the courageous symbol of the will of his people, standing up to the occupiers in his village, just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is today the courageous symbol of his nation.
In Steinbeck’s generation, the free world came to the rescue of villages just like the one he wrote about in “The Moon is Down.” But today, we have grown too accustomed to extremism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism in too many places around our planet as world leaders and those in comfort look away.
History tells us that bullying doesn’t stop on its own. The moon may have been down when Russian forces invaded their neighbor. It’s now up to the free world to ensure the sun rises on a free Ukraine.
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a monthly column. He can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.