Whither goest Ukraine?
Mike walker, Col. USMC (Retired)
Courage is a hard and costly word.
It seems the world is once again at a crossroads where courage is demanded and the junction is called Ukraine.
The Unites States has sailed into the path of isolationism to a degree not seen since the 1930s.
This isolationism is a bipartisan consensus and not simply an American problem. Europe, for example, has been more feckless than the United States and like the 1930s, never has an appeal to brute force been better received in the darkest quarters of humanity.
The parallels to the 1930s are frightening.
As then, the world’s liberal democracies are going through trying economic times, authoritarian regimes are rising in number and seem to be embracing naked military aggression to achieve their aims.
The appeasers and apologist are many. We recently had a United States senator sing praises of the repressive Cuban Regime that beggared belief to an extent unheard since Lindberg’s praise of the Nazi Germany.
Do not the destabilizing and cynical acts of Putin, falling on the heels of the Sochi Olympics, bring to fore memories of Hitler after the Berlin Olympics?
Is today’s conflict in Syria any less brutal, less significant, than the Civil War in Spain?
Are North Korean labor camps that different than those of the Nazis in the 1930s?
And what are we to say to the Filipinos who recently vowed to protect their nation from rapacious ultranationalists that hold too great a sway in Beijing? One leader compared their “David versus Goliath” struggle against Chinese militarist with that that of Czechoslovakia when it faced Nazi Germany.
What are we to make of a China who this week officially referred to our outgoing ambassador as a “banana,” a base racial slur aimed at his Chinese ethnicity meaning “yellow” on the outside and “white” on the inside?
Just who are these men in charge in Beijing?
Just how wrong were the appeasers and apologists for Putin and his host of likeminded tyrants?
Do we have the courage to do the right thing?
Are we fated to repeat the mistakes of the past?
Whither goest us?
