David smote Goliath (1 Samuel 17). Is that Old Testament account of the triumph of good over evil an appropriate metaphor for what could happen in Ukraine?
The war in Ukraine is about to become more intense, perhaps even decisive militarily. But, as crucial as victory there over naked evil (Putin’s Russia) is for freedom everywhere, for sovereign integrity, for the rule of law, and for social progress in Europe, the punishing military contest – like David’s triumph over Goliath -- also represents this generation’s defining confrontation: Can human civilization overcome its most base instincts and emerge on a higher plane? Or is civilization as we know it effectively suicidal?
Whatever the eventual outcome of the Ukrainian cataclysm, achieved either on the battlefields of the Donbas or around a conference table in Geneva, the Biblical allegory at least gives us hope that an underdog can in fact overcome the preponderant numbers of soldiery and equipment of a powerful invader and oppressor. Just as David succeeded in slaying the bully, so Ukraine’s fewer but better motivated defenders may be able to surprise their foe. Yet, expecting Zelensky or his backers to be able to hand Putin over to the International Criminal Court (or some other special judicial body) is probably too much to predict.
When facing Goliath of the Philistines, the Old Testament tells us that the young shepherd David, on King Saul’s behalf, disdained the king’s armor and, armed only with a sling and five stones, challenged the massive Goliath: “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I have the Lord on my side.” Then, says Biblical lore, “David put one of the five stones into his sling, swung it around his head, and let the stone go. It hit Goliath’s skull, and he fell face-down to the ground.”
“Even without a sword or armor, David killed Goliath and saved the Israelites from becoming enslaved to the Philistines. David then grabbed Goliath’s sword and used it to cut off the giant’s head. The Israelites gasped in disbelief before cheering for David’s victory. The Philistines realized their defeat and fled from the battlefield.”
Putin’s aggression is but the most egregious example in this century of autocracy’s attempt to squelch autonomy, essential freedoms, basic human rights, and ignore even supposed constitutional safeguards of minority populations and of free-speaking persons and groups within majority populations. We need only recall China’s repression of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang or China’s erasure of the quasi-sovereign autonomy promised in 1997 to Hong Kong.
Indonesia denies free expression to separatists in Papua, the government of the Solomon Islands curbs the freedom of those who live on the island of Malaita, India does what it can to repress the rights of its massive Muslim minority, the Taliban keeps 50 percent of its Afghan people from going to school or working outside the home, Iran maims and imprisons women for not keeping their hair covered, mobs in Bangladesh and Pakistan kill alleged blasphemers with impunity, and so on.
Afghanistan and Iran do not claim to be democratic. But the other Asian countries pay at least lip service to democratic practice (India wants to be known as the world’s largest democracy) and hold regular elections (whether controlled and rigged). Indeed, the list of autocracies masquerading as democracies steadily grows longer. Sweden’s The Varieties of Democracy Institute says that whereas ten years ago 46 percent of nations were autocratic, now 76 percent are, a list that includes an increasing number of formerly democratic nations that have become electoral autocracies.
That category includes the likes of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam in Asia; of Algeria, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Rwanda, Uganda, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe in Africa; of El Salvador and Venezuela in the Americas; of Turkey in the Middle East (with Israel leaning in that direction), etc. The Sudan, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Myanmar are outright military states and eSwatini is an absolute monarchy. Equatorial Guinea and Eritrea hardly pretend to give their people’s any say. Some states, such as Angola and Madagascar, teeter uncomfortably, pretending to be democracies while preferring to operate autocratically. And a few places hold genuine electoral contests without being able to reduce heavy handed, corrupt, leadership – like Nigeria.
If Putin were to win in Ukraine, the two-penny despots that rule dictatorial states like Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (which just approved a new constitution cementing one person rule), and the outright murderous autocracies like China, Iran, Myanmar, Russia, and Syria, will learn that oppression and double-dealing pay. They well be relieved that freedom no longer rings out, that world order is irrelevant, and that evil can overcome good -- that the Old Testament was wrong, or at least incomplete.
Such deniers of human rights and essential freedoms of expression and assembly want to keep their people(s) down. They want to deny fundamental individualism and what political scientists call “voice” -- the ability of subject peoples to articulate their complaints, seek redress without being killed or imprisoned, and ultimately protest. Autocracies want to avoid accountability, preferring to steal from state coffers.
Putin, implicitly representing by his ambitions and goals fellow tyrants like Xi Jinping and even pusillanimous potentates like Viktor Orban, seeks to realize the aims of his imperial narcissism by conquering Ukraine on behalf of global repression and outright tyranny
Ukraine’s warriors are now the world’s front line against such evils. They are fighting for the ideals on which these United States were founded; for the revolutions that established our country and France; that made the Bolivarian independencies of South America; and that motivated more modern transformations like that in Germany and Italy, in Mandela’s South Africa, and in Brazil after the ouster of a military junta.
It is a time for all manner of support for the freedom fighters in Ukraine to be redoubled, for munitions and missiles to be rushed to the front, and for the David of Ukraine to be enabled to overcome the pompous might of Putin’s Goliath. Let a single symbolic stone be slung from an F-16 - a more modern sling.
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Truly....which makes it doubly horrifying to hear Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggest in an interview yesterday that the US could entertain China (in the form of Xi Jinping or one of his minions) playing a role in 'mediating' an end to the War in Ukraine that in any sense recognizes the overwhelming culpability of Russia and Vladimir Putin in its launch and continuation !
You mention several instances of countries(Goliaths) suppressing the freedoms of their minorities. Though I certainly oppose Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine, I believe that Ukraine contributed to some of the rebellion in Donbas by curtailing the official use of Russian language. The same separatist movement in Quebec was aborted by allowing French Quebecois language rights.