THE NEW YORK TIMES: What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? The Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin.
Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither.
I don’t know if it’s a boomer thing, a modern thing, an elite thing or some other thing, but in my lifetime, in this country, among many of my generational peers, there has been a sense that people had learned particular lessons and were evolving past extremes of pettiness and barbarism, certainly in the corners of the globe deemed more enlightened.
In Europe, so devastated and so educated by World War II, sovereign nations wouldn’t be invaded just because their neighbors were mightier, meaner and more rapacious. That was a grandiosity and folly of the past — before the European Union and before all of our “advances,” a word we’ve used so frequently and clung to so tightly, as if the accretion of knowledge and the epiphanies of science were guarantors, or at least harbingers, of affluence and peace. » | Frank Bruni | Thursday, February 24, 2022
THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD OPINION: No Justification for a Brazen Invasion »
