In rejecting Russia and defending their homeland, Ukrainians are choosing freedom over slavery, and democracy over autocracy. But they are also choosing the ability to think for themselves and speak their minds over a stifling conformity that is now pervasive across Russia. It is a choice that everyone is faced with as they break out on their own in life, only in this case it is a whole society that is choosing it—and their choice to fight for freedom is critical to its global future.
Ukrainians are choosing reason over the social perversions of fascism, which twists every truth into its opposite, and overturns the moral order, placing the worst at the top, while the best are ground to dust. In this way, they are fighting for the right to think for themselves, speak their minds, and join with others in crafting the institutions that shape their lives. Thus, choosing to fight means choosing freedom. And insofar as Ukrainians have made this choice, they have placed themselves on the front lines in the fight against globalized fascism.
And for that they deserve everything we can give.
Democracy is not just about choosing elected officials. It is about living as moral and political equals with the most powerful members of society. Democratic institutions protect us from the powerful, who seek to exploit us in the quest to achieve their own ends. That might mean extorting our businesses, exploiting our labor, or taking our property. It might mean polluting our waters or sexually violating our bodies. Undemocratic societies are typically lawless places where, in the words of Thucydides, the strong take what they want and the weak suffer what they must.
So, Ukrainians are also fighting for the rule of law, an end to corruption, and freedom from domination—for us all.
Democratic institutions ensure respect for our dignity by subordinating us all under the same set of laws. And they protect us from domination by assuring our legal and political rights. That neither means they can save us from the little humiliations that are inherent to everyday life, nor that every country calling itself a democracy succeeds in protecting its citizens’ dignity. But genuinely democratic institutions protect us from exploitation by assuring our legal and political equality. And that can spell the difference between life and death in a poor society that might otherwise be ruled by oligarchs and thriving in a lawful society where power is constrained.
Democratic institutions help us shape our collective fate through participation in society. In this way, they bind us to one another through our moral and political equality and our participation in shaping a collective future. And they bind us together in imagined nations comprised of millions of people caught up in the same shared communities of fate. Yet, democracy doesn’t tie us together from the top down through chauvinistic propaganda but rather binds us together though participation in shared political institutions. In this way, it enriches our lives by protecting our agency and provides us a forum by which we might make them better.
In this sense, Ukrainians are not simply fighting for their lives and homeland, but also for their freedom from domination. What that means in practice is freedom from exploitation at the hands of oligarchs. It means freedom from the rapacity of unaccountable government elites, who take without giving anything in return. It means freedom from an oppressive social system that conditions children for conformity, as opposed to shaping citizens for free expression. And it means living in a world with open horizons in which each person might lay down a life path and walk it.
Ukrainians are fighting for our own freedom by taking on the only state that has threatened it, for Russian attacks on democracy threaten us all.
Russia has sought to undermine the most powerful democracies in the world by interfering in their elections. Putin almost destroyed the first and most powerful democracy through a massive disinformation campaign that put a fascist in the White House. He almost broke up the European Union by funding a disinformation campaign that encouraged voters to leave it, to the detriment of their lives and economy in Britain. Putin has funded rightwing nationalist and fascist extremists in all of the world’s leading democracies, most notably Marine Le Pen in France, who just came closer than ever to becoming its head of state. And he has served as an inspiration for their authoritarian visions.
It may not be true that no one is free until everyone is free, but when more of us are liberated, the rest of us can breath a little more freely. So, if the prospect of nuclear devastation sets limits on our ability to support Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, we should step up our support in every other way we can. That means assuring that every Ukrainian soldier is provided the most up to date equipment needed to protect them from harm and the most advanced weaponry needed to fend off Russian attacks. It also means using every mechanism at our disposal to isolate Russia internationally and pressuring it with maximal sanctions.
America and Britain “assured” the territorial integrity of Ukraine, while Russia committed to respecting it, when Ukraine handed over 4,000 nuclear warheads to Russia at the signing of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. The language of assurances, as opposed to a more hard and fast “guarantee,” was carefully crafted so as to avoid locking the United States into a nuclear standoff with Russia. But it implied giving them what they needed to maintain the territorial integrity of their state. What no one could have imagined at the time was that our own freedom would ever become so intertwined with Ukraine’s.
In this way, assuring the freedom of Ukrainians means fulfilling our treaty obligations. But is also means assuring our own freedom, for while we might not be bound together by a commonly shared nation, we share the same community of fate, which is increasingly global. It is increasingly a community where freedom is threatened, and in the words of Benjamin Franklin, we all must stand together or hang apart. And it is a community of billions of people, who deserve the same freedom and dignity, and only need to be organized in order to attain it.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy