Our Quote of the Day comes from The Bulwark’s William Kristol, who writes this in an article titled “A New Period of Consequences” subtitled “It’s 1936 again”:
I wonder if we fully appreciate the heroism of the Ukrainian people and the unpayable debt we owe them for their stand.
Because if President Zelensky had fled, and the government of Ukraine had collapsed or quickly sued for peace, we would now be accommodating the new reality, as we did after 2008 and 2014. Putin would have succeeded. We’d be continuing our drift downward, trusting in “procrastination, half-measures, soothing and baffling expedients, delays.”
There would be no real prospect of an awakening in the United States and Europe were it not for the stand the Ukrainians have made.
We would still be denying the threats we face. We would still be turning away from the urgency of the task we face. We would even, I daresay, still fail to appreciate the preciousness of the freedom and decency we have the obligation—and the honor—to defend.
It is the Ukrainians who have shown us what free men and women can do, and what they are sometimes required to do, in defense of that freedom. It is the Ukrainians who have shown the world that we are in a new period of consequences. It is the Ukrainians who have given us the example of what it means today to fight back against brutality, and to fight for freedom.
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Graphic: Dreamstime
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.