9 - Strong Leadership Distinguishes Good and EVil
When Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the U. S. Congress this morning American Representatives and Senators will hear the voice of authentic leadership for good, with Nelson Mandelan-like overtones. Let’s hope that they listen with their hearts as well as their heads for Zelensky superbly represents not only a particular people striving for freedom and decency against the juggernaut of dictatorial depredation but also everyperson humanity, searching for existential confidence.
Although Zelensky will ask for more of the assistance that we are and should be giving, and will probably reiterate his desire that we do much more militarily to keep the Russians from bombing his people, he will silently be urging Congress to unite behind President Biden, and to demonstrate passionate nonpartisanship in this ongoing decisive crisis to save Europe and, indeed, to resuscitate the post-World War II focus on enlightened democratic progress. Without necessarily using key words this morning, Congress will learn that President Zelensky stands for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms -- for the right of everyone on the planet to live without fear, secure in their towns and villages from wanton attack and willful despoliation. (President Roosevelt’s speech, Congress might note, was delivered on January 6, 194l, not a later January 6 that now lives in infamy.)
Congress, denied for years now of an abundance of principled leadership in its own ranks, will find its members in the presence of a personage who at a time of acute danger and distress has shown uncommon courage, but additionally uncommon gifts of leadership. We should all take heed.
Grasping the challenge of combating evil personified, what President Reagan called “the evil empire,” President Zelensky has emboldened his Ukrainian people (and all Europe, for that matter) not only be defying the dictatorial despotism of a sociopathic adversary, but by showing immense integrity under daily stress. Integrity, a condition which his people now emulate, consists of courageous opposition to Putin and Russian-perpetrated heinous war crimes. But it says more. President Zelensky has stood strong, refused to flee, and asked for fuel and reinforcements rather than an air ticket to escape. Without that personal bravery and consistent defiance, Ukrainians might not have resisted the Russians so determinedly and so well.
President Zelensky almost singlehandedly has given his people a reason to persist and to battle in the streets, in the forests, and from the rooftops of cities and towns under siege. The citizens of several dozen Ukrainian cities have surprised Russians and the rest of the world with their courage – and ingenuity – in the face of overwhelming odds. No one – least of all Putin -- anticipated such valor and practical skill. But little of it would have been likely without the inspiration, day after day, of President Zelensky.
His profile of courage is obvious. But he has also performed, miraculously, the feat that only truly great leaders are able to accomplish. He has given his people (and the rest of the world, for that matter) reason to fight, reason to persist, and reason (as he said) “to be.” Only the globe’s most memorable leaders are able to give their people a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. That translates into a belief that the individual is a part of a worthy enlarged enterprise. President Zelensky has conveyed that togetherness and mutual trust in the manner of Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has channeled Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He has also unconsciously but effectively echoed Mandela’s embrace of all humanity. We shall remain in his debt well beyond what happens in and to Ukraine.
It is ironic, of course, that President Zelensky is a Jew leading a country that saw severe pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then lost millions of Jews to Hitlerian German and then Stalinist Soviet massacres both before and during the Holocaust. Without necessarily being motivated by those histories of repression, a Jew of comedic training now stands defiant before the guns of a Russian despot who (despite claiming that Ukrainians are really Russians) intends to kill and maim as many women and children as well as manly fighters as he can.
No one wants the war except Putin. No one profits or obtains an ego boost except Putin, the example of a sociopathic leader. As President Ronald Reagan said in 1983, the Soviets (and now we can say Putin’s followers) are “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Putin bombarded Grozny; pummeled Georgia: poisoned Alexei Navalny, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and others who stood in his way; and now wants to show his personal might and czarist power cravings by depriving Ukraine of its independence (and all Russians at home of their freedom to express themselves openly).
President Zelensky will today ask America, once the keeper of the flame of universal freedom, to stand up to Putin, to save the spirit as well as the land of Ukraine from rape and pillage. Will we not heed his call?