The fight for freedom in Ukraine and the fight for freedom in America is the same fight

There is a lot of confusion surrounding Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine, and why shouldn’t there be? War sows confusion, often as a deliberate strategy. Those of us bystanders and even professional warriors grope about trying to get a purchase, any purchase on its slippery slopes and cutting edges. But Putin has presented us with a relatively easy case — not the easiest, but the easiest since World War II, which was hell to fight, but at least we knew that we had to fight, and what roughly we were fighting for. If you asked a GI or my father, for instance, what WWII was all about he would have said what everyone said — we were fighting for freedom, for the right to govern ourselves, for the right not to enslaved by the Nazis or the Japanese. Disagreements among us, and there were plenty, could be set aside for the time being. There was unfortunately a war to be won, as horrible as it was.

The War for Ukraine is not our war but there is no doubt on whose side we should be on. In it, an old foe of ours, the former Soviet Union, now styled the Russian Federation, seeks to impose itself on the new country, but not the new nation — for its an old nation — of Ukraine. Some of those on the muddled mess that is the Right in this country have argued that we should stay out of this war because Russia has legitimate security interests which it must protect out of self-preservation.