1. The welcome of refugees by Poland and others is a generoisity of immense proportions. To date 3.3 million refugees have been sheltered in private homes without the stablishment of refugee camps. My daughter's Polish friend's family is hosting her Ukranian's friends familhy.This is heartening!
2. The willingness, indeed the eagerness, of Ukrainian men to fight and die, en masse, for their country, their families, their values, and their legacy is a striking revival of masculine heroism. A world turned hopeless and timid is seeing in the Ukraine: THERE ARE THINGS WORTH DYING FOR! This earthly life is NOT the final or only value. Their fight is proundly inspiring and encouraging!
3. The West, far down the road of decadence and polarization, has found a moral cause and a new, unexpected unity in supporting these victims and this just cause.
4. There are some, how many we cannot know, in Russia who have suffered imprisonment and death to resist the war.
5. In the spectacle of men fighing to the death and women drawing their children-elderly-sickly to safety, a world woke, sterile, and neutered is given a dazzling iconography of the forms of masculinity and femininity in their splendour.
6. A universe of individualism, isolationism and libertarianism sees in the Ukraine the primacy of the corporate person, the community, the greater good.
There are grounds for hope! Actual deaths to date are difficult to count, but it is in the 10s of thousands. By contrast, global deaths from covid are over 6 million; the Rawandan and Bosnian genocides each took over a million; Pol Pot killed almost 2 million. The destruction to buildings and economic infrastructure will be in the billions; but all of that can be rebuilt in time. We can only pray that the war stop soon!
Not since World War II have we seen a global event with such moral clarity. Putin is the bad guy; Zelinsky is the good guy. We are back in the John Wayne and Gary Cooper days! A return to moral clarity and certitude. There is, after all, black and white...good and bad...right and wrong.
But some are still confused. Pope Francis is, as so often, disappointing. Earlier this week he told Patriarch Kirill that there is no longer such a thing as a just war. He avoided a direct confrontation and implied a moral equivalence between the invaders and the defenders in the Ukraine. This dishonored the heroic Ukranian warriors. Fortunately, yesterday he clearly asserted the right of the attacked to self defense and a national sovereignty and identity of their own choosing. But his message remains contradictory, incoherent, confusing.
A different befuddlment afflicts some conservatives of the isolationist persuasion who mimic the far left in rooting most global evil in American adventurist foreign policy. The Post-Vietnam Syndrome has become the Post-Iraq Syndrome and afflicts both ends of the political spectrum. Doug Bandow, in The American Conservative faults American aggressiveness in the Ukraine and its area for provoking Putin's insecurity. Rod Dreher says that the situation is complex and not straightforward. If this invasion is not straightforward than nothing in this world is! There seems to be an assumption, as in a Holywood plot, that the CIA and other dark forces are always lurking in the shadows and doing damage. But it seems to be common sense that the West would welcome the eagerness of the countries formerly under the USSR to enter the universe of free enterpise, democracy and rule of law.
Similarly, moral conservatives (like myself) may have been endeared to Putin by his fierce renunciation of woke culture and glanced away from his brutality. Not now!
Nevertheless, in the long run I rate dictators like Putin as the least of our formidable global enemies: first I place Cultural Liberalism, second Communism, third Jihadism, with dictatorship a distant fourth. History is back! This four-part axis of evil is even more ominous and apocalypic than that which afflicted the globe 80 years ago! The devastation in the Ukraine, like that of the Spanish Civil War, may be a harbinger of worse to come.
We pray for a swift end to this horror!
We pray for God to bring good out of this evil!
We pray for the strength and wisdom to prevail in the face of the Evil of the present and the future!
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