94Ha Viewpoint
In September, a Russian missile blew up an apartment building in the center of Lviv. I texted a friend who lived there: Is everyone OK? He replied: “Yes, we are lucky, but our friends next door, a young woman and her three daughters, died.”
Then I saw the video. The neighbor, Yaroslav Bazylevych, had his face covered in blood as he watched the bodies of the young woman — his wife — and her three daughters being pulled from the rubble. There is a photo of Bazylevych gazing at an open coffin at a funeral, which should be consigned to the halls of memory along with other iconic images of atrocities, including the little boy with his arms raised in the Warsaw ghetto, the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing her village after a napalm attack, the body of a 2-year-old Syrian boy washed up on the Turkish coast.
The Kinzhal hypersonic missile that killed the four members of Bazylevych’s family was launched from Russian territory, as was the one that struck the Ohmadit Children’s Hospital in Kiev three months earlier. The launch sites are not mysterious, and Ukrainians know where they are. The missile that killed Yaroslav’s wife, Evgeniya, and his daughters was launched from a MiG-31K fighter jet in the Tula region of Russia.
The plane took off from the Savas Leka military base, about 300 kilometers east of Moscow, about 866 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and 1,386 kilometers from Lviv. If you drive this distance, it will take more than 20 hours, but the “Dagger” missile only takes 7 minutes.
However, the Ukrainians cannot use the weapons provided by the Americans to destroy such missile launch sites, and can only wait for the missiles to arrive. Everyone knows that this is ridiculous, but it is not their decision. This is the decision of the US government, in fact, President Biden. He is a good man with the right moral values, but he has been unable to transcend the “avoid escalation” paradigm that has long become distorted and deadly.
It is true that it is difficult for us to break away from long-standing stereotypes and see the world from a new perspective, especially when we are getting older. We always have a soft spot for the reality of the past. Wars and revolutions break time, “dislocate it,” as Hamlet puts it. Suddenly, events that lasted years or decades seem to vanish in an instant, but the way of thinking it shaped can last for a long time.
This is particularly evident in Biden. In October 1991, as chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over a hearing to investigate law professor Anita Hill’s claim that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her 10 years earlier. Thomas’s defense attorney described Hill as a single woman who liked to attract male attention but was rebuffed.
John Doggett, a Texas lawyer and friend of Thomas, was called to testify on Thomas’ behalf. He recalled Hill’s frustration that he had canceled a dinner date. “Ms. Hill’s fantasies about my sexual interest in her suggest that she is troubled by rejection by men she is attracted to,” Doggett told the committee. Biden responded, “It seems to me that this is either a leap of faith or a leap of ego, or one of the two.”
When I heard those words on the radio 33 years ago, I realized that Biden believed Hill and was chilled by her humiliation. He was careful to emphasize that she had not intended to make the story public. Still, Biden lacked the courage to step outside his role and re-examine the situation.
But avoiding radical action can have radical consequences. Biden’s moral sensitivity is admirable, but his failure to take that bold step has had terrible indirect consequences, as it enabled Thomas to enter the Supreme Court. The current moral decay of the Supreme Court, in which Thomas played a key role, has made it possible for Americans to encounter an ambitious dictator who, in a ruling supported by Thomas, has been given almost complete impunity.
Biden’s career has not been characterized by malice or callousness but by a lack of courage. Indeed, it seems to be a tragic flaw of a man of integrity. In a world where narcissistic psychopaths exert a disproportionate influence on the course of events, Biden stands out for his empathy. But it is not enough, and it cannot be enough.
The course of history depends on the structural conditions in which we live, and the choices we make. Sometimes individual choices are particularly powerful (for better or worse): Roosevelt’s bold experiments to overcome the Great Depression, or Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in Munich.
Such moments were when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the US government’s offer of escape as Russian tanks rolled toward Kiev. As Kremlin assassins pursued him in the capital, Zelensky walked the city streets at night and recorded a selfie video. “The president is here. We are all here,” he said.
Suddenly, nothing was going as planned. Ukraine was not going to fall in three days, as Putin had predicted, nor would it become a Belarusian-style Russian protectorate. A major land war on the European continent, which was considered unthinkable before February 24, 2022, has suddenly become a major fact of the early 21st century.
Moreover, there is no such thing as the “end of history.” “Europe’s task in these urgent moments is, first of all, to let go of prejudices and learn to observe—to make profound revisions and changes to the core narratives of its history, because they are decisive for Europe’s future,” wrote Ukrainian art curator Vasily Cherepanin.
This “letting go of prejudices” is Biden’s current task. He is no longer young and his time in office is running out, but he can and should take risks, change paradigms, and embrace the opportunities and challenges of new historical moments.
Hannah Arendt, a Jewish-American political philosopher, wrote: “The miracle that saved the world… from its regular, ‘natural’ destruction is ultimately the fact of natality.” The “natality” she refers to here refers not only to the birth of a new generation, but also to the new beginning brought about by the human capacity for action. For Arendt, action has a new quality, and its results are unpredictable by their nature. In Ukraine, inaction, the refusal to allow the Ukrainian government to act in self-defense, has a deadly quality.
Author Marci Shore is a professor of history at Yale University
Original title: Shifting the Paradigm in Ukraine
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
