The American national anthem celebrates “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Canada’s speaks of “the true north strong and free.” Great Britain’s pleads that the “Lord make the nations see/That men should brothers be.” And Ukraine’s national anthem opens with this haunting phrase: “Ukraine’s glory has not perished.”
In the past weeks, Ukraine’s glory has done more than not perish, though the country itself is under grave threat of perishing. Its fighters have shown courage and valor, its refugees have provided an eloquent statement about the human yearning for freedom, its president has displayed remarkable audacity and fortitude, making him the video version of Louis Kossuth, the 19th-century Hungarian revolutionary hero who toured the United States trying to raise arms and support for his country’s doomed war of independence.
Kossuth failed, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy might in his own heroic star turn in the global spotlight; he spoke in his address to the American Congress of the fatalistic right “to die when your time comes.” The Hungarian insurrectionist traveled the country for more than a half-year. It is impossible to underestimate the half-life of Zelenskyy.
Kossuth left memorials and monuments in his path — they still remain in, among other places, New York and Cleveland — and his visit is commemorated on the American map, with his name on an entire county, in Iowa.
Can anyone doubt that future Americans will attend a Zelenskyy Elementary School or that new American byways will bear the name Zelenskyy Avenue? A section of Ontario Street in Montreal’s downtown was renamed Avenue du President-Kennedy after the assassination of the 35th president.
Would Zelenskyy deserve anything less, having been what Kennedy would have described, in remarks prepared for a speech on Nov. 22, 1963, but never delivered, as one of “the watchmen on the walls of world freedom”?
The allusion was to Psalm 127, which speaks of “arrows … in the hand of a mighty man” and compares them with children — and no one who witnessed the poignant video that Zelenskyy showed in his remote visit to the Capitol on Wednesday will forget the images of the children burned, injured and killed by the Russian onslaught.
“President Zelenskyy is now one of the most amazing figures of the early 21st century,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview in the Stanford Daily. “I’ve always said countries sometimes get fortunate. The strength that he has shown, the bravery that he’s shown, the commitment to the Ukrainian nation but also to the values of Europe is just extraordinary. I think Ukraine is extraordinarily fortunate that it is Zelenskyy.”
In his Capitol remarks, Zelenskyy said, “We need you right now” — an eerie echo of the words of Winston Churchill, who in a July 1940 letter to Franklin Roosevelt, asking for military aid, wrote: “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do NOW.”
Wednesday morning, members of the House and Senate — witnesses themselves to an assault on democratic values, still fresh in memory, still draped in disgrace — stood and cheered as Zelenskyy attempted to rally them to his country’s defense.
The precursor to today’s Congress sought similar aid from France during our own revolution. In that effort, Benjamin Franklin played the Zelenskyy role, the spokesman for keeping the flickering flame of liberty burning. The American Battlefield Trust describes France’s eventual assistance as “the tipping point” in the struggle for independence.
Now the world watches, in near-unified horror, as another tipping point approaches.
“Wars tend to lead to places no one can anticipate at the time,” said Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. “They have their own afterlife that no one can control. We can’t look into the future, but we know that there is an incredibly destabilizing thing going on.”
During the Second World War, Vice President Henry Wallace injected the phrase “Century of the Common Man” into the global lexicon. Wallace was a visionary with clouded vision, a product of, and spokesman for, rural America who became something of a hero in many of the urban enclaves of the country.
He crafted that notion in 1942, inspiring Aaron Copland, another visionary but one with a clear vision of the American character, to write his “Fanfare for the Common Man,” still played by orchestras worldwide even though Wallace’s phrase has disappeared from the world’s conversation.
It turns out that one was a wishful thinker, the other a wishful composer. The century between Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome of 1922 to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Kyiv in 2022 is more properly the century of the tyrant.
And while Zelenskyy is the spiritual heir to Franklin and Kossuth, Putin is the spiritual heir to Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and other petty but deadly despots, from Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and Nicolae Ceausescu to Lon Nol and Bashar al-Assad.
Against that parade of dictators stands Zelenskyy, reminding Americans in his Capitol speech that Ukraine is fighting against “a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values” and that Ukrainians have stood bravely and resolutely, resisting capitulation. “We have not even thought about it for a second,” he said.
Second thoughts abounded in the Capitol complex that afternoon — about whether enough aid has been sent to Ukraine; about whether the no-fly zone that Zelenskyy wants could be imposed without triggering a wider war with nuclear implications; perhaps even about American devotion to democratic values in light of the insurrection mounted 14 months ago in the very chamber where the lawmakers sat and applauded the world’s reigning symbol of those values.
It is well to consider that last point, at this moment of drama and decision, and perhaps of destiny. In cities across Ukraine as in communities across America — where, in different circumstances but with hauntingly similar consequences — democracy is at an inflection point. In Ukraine, the question of its survival will be decided within months, perhaps weeks. In the United States, the process will take longer to be resolved.
Zelenskyy said he was living through “the darkest time for our country.” The men and women sitting in their safe seats in the House — a phrase with two meanings — may not realize that they are doing the same.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
