Anyone with access to the news and a moral sense knows who is responsible for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine. Yet realistically many of those confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tanks won’t survive their heroic effort. So instead of waiting for history’s verdict, this is the moment to thank the Ukrainians for coming to freedom’s defense by nominating them for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was a flood of deja vu that suggested the potential of a nomination campaign for the Ukrainians. Kyiv’s devastation triggered memories of similar scenes in the 1940s: Nazi bombers attacking long lines of refugees fleeing Paris and the ruins of Warsaw and Berlin.
Today’s news is a haunting replay of the overture to World War II. Adolf Hitler’s conquests began with his demand that Czechoslovakia give up a border region populated with German speakers. They were persecuted, he claimed. He would be their liberator, much as Putin says he is not invading, but liberating, Ukraine.
Frightened out of pacifism, France and England posed as mediators in 1938. In fact, they legitimized Hitler’s demands. Having given him a slice of Czechoslovakia, the British prime minister proclaimed the Munich meeting with the Nazi dictator a success.
“I believe it is peace for our times,” Neville Chamberlain told a welcoming London crowd. “Now I recommend you go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”
The following year, Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia. Poland was next.
This time, Russia’s aggression has been widely denounced. About the only cheerleader for Putin is former President Donald Trump, who said: “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that is pretty smart.”
Trump proved no better at cost accounting than ethics. The devastating sanctions President Joe Biden promised have shaken Russia’s economy, sending its stock market into a nose-dive. BP PLC and Shell Oil have pulled out of joint ventures in Russia’s energy sector. Russian ships and airplanes are not welcome in other countries.
That is new. Talk of sanctions often ends when war begins. American corporations continued to do business with Germany right up to World War II, some even longer. Ford claimed compensation for the European factories the U.S. bombed.
Now, it’s not just nations that are launching reprisals on Russia. Ordinary folks are venting their anger. A Michigan tavern owner took Russian vodka off his shelves. The director of La Scala told a Russian conductor that unless he denounced Putin’s invasion, he’d never wave another baton in the Milan opera house.
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy openly intervened in the Spanish Civil War, using it as a proving ground for the airplanes and troops they would deploy in World War II. The Western democracies self-righteously declared an embargo on arms shipments to Spain, which crippled the elected government and aided Gen. Francisco Franco’s rebels.
Other nations are rushing military supplies to Ukraine. Expatriate Ukrainians are free to join their embattled brethren, some with military kits provided by the countries of their residence. Like Hitler before him, Putin is a crybaby. Both claimed to be victims, not aggressors, even as their bombs were killing innocent civilians. But this time, that linguistic sleight of hand isn’t working.
When Switzerland and Sweden shed their long-standing neutrality, something is clearly afoot. Ditto when protesters in Russia risk arrest.
The Ukrainians have become the world’s home team. I’m not alone in rooting for brewery workers filling beer bottles with gasoline and delighted by the name “Molotov cocktails,” a borrowing from Russia’s guerrilla resistance to Nazi invaders.
I see my grandmother who fled the czar’s tyranny when a babushka-wrapped Ukrainian woman tells Russian soldiers, “Go home!”
Clearly, the Ukrainian resistance has awakened our collective moral sense. It’s no longer fashionable to dismiss civilian war casualties with a wave of the hand and a disclaimer: “That’s just politics.” Or to put profits ahead of saying “No!” to murderous dictators.
Predicting history’s next twist or turn is risky business. But I have a gut feeling — fortified with prayer — that the era of accepting dictators as an unpleasant fact of life is drawing to a close.
Let us mark it with a Nobel Peace Prize. The citation could read something like:
“To the Ukrainians of 2022. For reminding us that while dictators mouth the shibboleths of democracy, their real vocabulary is a pack of lies. For unhesitatingly shedding their own blood in freedom’s cause. For asserting the principle that the earth does not belong to kings or tyrants. And for demonstrating in their trenches that workaday folks have an inalienable able right to shape their destiny.”
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Ron Grossman is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
