Is Despotism's Long Winning Streak At An End?

Has 2022 turned things around? For 17 years in a row, democracy has been in retreat around the world. Are the good guys finally winning?

We may have turned a corner.

That’s the case I make in my National Post & Ottawa Citizen column this week. It’s a year-in-review assessment of the obligatory sort that appears in the press around this time of year. I don’t think I was trying too hard to put a brave face on it. National Post headline: 2022 — the year democracy struck back. In ways nobody predicted when 2022 began, democracy is winning and the tyrants are losing.

Back in October before things really kicked off in the streets of China and Iran and before the Ukrainians had taken back half the territory the Russians had occupied in the south and west, I wrapped up a background feature for the Post on democracy’s global eclipse. My focus was on the way certain sinister and profitable arrangements and accommodations in the democratic world had brought on the darkness, but I noticed some light was starting to get through: The West's greedy and unholy bargain with dictatorships is unravelling.

Freedom House says the long night began 17 years ago. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute says long shadows began appearing shortly after the Cold War ended, around 1992.

In any case, something happened this past year. A ghastly, bloody year, but the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis and its many satellites and satrapies are collapsing in on themselves. That’s the case I make. Ottawa Citizen version: As 2022 ends, there are glimmers of hope for democracy. A wee Christmas present for all of us then.

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From my column, the argument is that it’s no boast the liberal democracies can make that it has taken this long for the political and corporate classes to understand that free trade is impossible with unfree countries, that there is only so much oppression people can take before the torches come out. It’s profitable in the short term — reliance on slave labour always is — but sooner or later, the slave will rise against his master.

And that is what happened in cities across China a few weeks ago, and that is what is still happening every day in cities across Iran, and the Ukrainian people have risen up against the genocidaire Vladimir Putin, with his Iranian drones and his Chinese money and his blundering army of rapists, looters and torturers.

In Like A Lamb, Out Like A Lion

It has been awful, and I don’t know if I’m being optimistic about the way the year is coming to an end, but while I was putting the column together the leader of the free world was secretly making his way to Washington, D.C. to make an historic address to the U.S. Congress. And when Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke, what a reception he got.

“Against all odds and doom and gloom scenarios, Ukraine did not fall. Ukraine is alive and kicking. And it gives me good reason to share with you our first joint victory. We defeated Russia in the battle for the minds of the world. We have no fear. Nor should anyone in the world have it,” Zelenskyy said.

“. . . And we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield. Yes, this battle is not only for the territory, for this or another part of Europe. This battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation, which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.”

Haiyun Jiang photo for the New York Times. Volodymor Zelenskyy gives the bipartisan mainstream of America something to unite around for a change, with fire in the belly.

Both Democrats and Republicans rose in several ovations, leaving a rump of a half-dozen Trumpists to disgrace themselves by remaining seated, but even they stood in shame towards the end of Zelenskyy’s remarks.

Out in the undrained swamps of social media, Donald Trump Jr. was braying like the bastard cocaine-addled son of “anti-war” icon Noam Chomsky and “maverick” Democrat Tulsi Gabbard. He called Zelenskyy "an ungrateful international welfare queen."

Even the often-sensible contrarian Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of "Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy," struggled to maintain a modicum of decency. “It is possible to admire President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people's bravery, resilience, and fortitude in the face of a malevolent, godless foe while also recognizing that his interests are not our interests, his fight is not our fight, and his requests should not be granted.”

Now, where have I heard those words before?

Back in 2015, when it really mattered, this is what the Kurds and the Yazidis and the long-suffering Syrian revolutionary democrats heard from the West, from the “left” and the “right.” They heard the high-society pacifism of New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair, “this is not our fight,” and the sneering of the gobshite Brexiteer Nigel Farage, “this is not our war.”

And so the world’s democracies sat and watched as Russian bombers, Chinese financiers, Khomeinist generals and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s ISIS combined with the Baathist mass murderer Bashar Assad to turn Syria into a smoking tomb. Half a million dead. The bloodiest eruption since the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.

Fashion Week In Washington

It is quite something that in the face of such valour and sacrifice as the Ukrainians and Zelenskyy have shown the world that the commonplace isolationist response to the event in Congress was to riff on the drab green military pullover Zelensky was wearing.

Here’s somebody named Benny Johnson, whose profile singles out “God, Family, America,” and who hosts a popular radio show on Newsmax, and boasts more than a million followers on Twitter: “This ungrateful piece of sh*t does not have the decency to wear a suit to the White House -- no respect the country that is funding his survival. Track suit wearing eastern european con-man mafia. Our leaders fell for it. They have disgraced us all. What an incredible insult.”

Johnson and those other ungrateful sons of bitches have got it backwards. It’s Zelenskyy and his citizen-soldiers who are owed a debt.

Anne Applebaum, a favorite of mine, put it well in the Atlantic magazine this month. She describes the kind of world my column this week would have been about were it not for the Ukrainian resistance and the mass upwelling of popular support from Ukraine’s friends around the world:

Russian soldiers, strengthened by their stunning victory, would already be on the borders of Poland, setting up new command posts, digging new trenches. NATO would be in chaos; the entire alliance would be forced to spend billions to prepare for the inevitable invasion of Warsaw, Vilnius, or Berlin. Millions of Ukrainian refugees would be living in camps all across Europe, with no prospect of ever returning home; the tide of sympathy that originally greeted them would have ebbed long ago; the money would be running out, the backlash under way.

. . .This disaster would not have been confined to Europe. On the other side of the world, Chinese plans to invade Taiwan would be well under way, because Beijing would assume that an America unwilling to defend a European ally, and now totally bogged down in a long-term battle against an emboldened Russia, would never go out of its way to help an island in the Pacific. The Iranian mullahs, equally cheered by Russia’s success and Ukraine’s defeat, would have boldly announced that they had finally acquired nuclear weapons. From Venezuela to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, dictatorships around the world would have tightened their regimes and stepped up the persecution of their opponents, now certain that the old rules—the conventions on human rights and genocide, the laws of war, the taboo against changing borders by force—no longer applied. From Washington to London, from Tokyo to Canberra, the democratic world would be grimly facing up to its obsolescence.

That is not the way the year 2022 ended.

And here is Winston Churchill visiting the White House in December, 1941, during the depths of London’s near-incineration during the Blitz, shortly after the Japanese imperial air force bombed Pearl Harbour. Like Zelenskyy, Churchill didn’t have “the decency to wear a suit to the White House” either.

The British wartime prime minister and fashion icon Winston Churchill wearing his trademark once-piece drab green “siren suit” during his 1941 visit with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Now that the penny is finally starting to drop that the ‘rules-based international order’ has pretty well collapsed, we’re conveniently overlooking the role played by certain politicians (Whose side is Jean Chretien on?) and our own prime minister (Justin Trudeau went all in on China a decade ago — and nothing can shake his resolve) and quite a few corporations (China’s billionaires on cross-country tour to meet Canada’s corporate and political elite) and globetrotting palm-greasers (see Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part 1 and Part 2) in the enrichment and entrenchment of the world’s gangster states and gargoyle regimes.

This matters, because if we forget how we got here we’ll be lying to ourselves about the state we’re in, right now. Those lies and occlusions and euphemism-laden pretexts and fashionable alibis persist, even now, throughout the establishment.

And now we are all at war. It’s just that Chinese dissenters of the “blank paper” rebellion and the women of Iran and Afghanistan and quite a few other places, and the citizen-soldiers of Ukraine, are doing the fighting for us.

Signing Off With A Song

There’s so much going on these days at home and away, and quite a few stories I’m going to try to avoid working on until next week. The snow has been amazing and glorious and terrible and it’s disrupted my plans to make the rounds on the mainland. I’ll be able to dig myself out, but I’ll miss that Yalda evening with Afghan friends I mentioned in the last edition of this newsletter. I was really hoping to get to that. I’ll just have to make a special trip down the road. I expect I may have to wait for a visit with my brothers and the kids and my ma until after Christmas. We’ll see.

The breaking news I had on hand for this newsletter will still be breaking next week. And now that I’ve looked back at 2022, in next week’s column I’ll be looking forward to 2023.

The thing that keeps a spring in my step is that I have some ideas about what the future holds but I don’t know what will happen. Nobody does. All manner of emancipation might break out everywhere in 2023, for all I know. I’ll shy away from clairvoyance but I do have some almost-predictions about 2023 that I’ll be making quite confidently.

Because covering pro-democracy liberation movements has taken up a pretty wide swathe of my beat for coming on 20 years now, I’m once in a while reminded of How Can I Keep From Singing?, an old hymn from the 1860s. These are the verses in it that come to mind when writing columns of the sort I wrote this week:

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear, and hear their death-knell ringing,
  When friends rejoice both far and near, how can I keep from singing?

  In prison cell and dungeon vile, our thoughts to them go winging.
 When friends by shame are undefiled, how can I keep from singing?

Nobody knows who wrote the original hymn, but those verses were in fact added to a marginally popular folk version of it in 1950, it turns out. Just the other day, thanks to a three-year-old post on a web log written by Joel Reece, the local-history librarian at the Iredell County Library in Iredell, North Carolina, I learned that those words were composed by a local woman by the name of Doris Troutman Plenn.

She was born on Christmas Day in 1909 and died in 1974, and she’s buried in Iredell with her husband Abel Plenn. She was quite an accomplished poet, songwriter, editor and publisher. Doris spent several years in Puerto Rico, where the Spanish-language editions of her books The Violet Tree and The Green Song went on to become children’s classics.

The Green Song is about the adventures of a frog found only in Puerto Rico that somehow ends up in New York, and The Violet Tree is about a mysterious tree and a lizard who can somehow “feel” what’s happening in the Mona Passage between the main island of Puerto Rico and a smaller island, Isla de Mona.

Boy, that was a digression. Here’s another one. It’s related. Trust me.

The Irish singer Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin from Gweedore recorded a rather ethereal version of How Can I Keep From Singing? with Doris Troutman Plenn’s verses. This came after Eithne moved on from her family ensemble, Clannad, changed her name to simply “Enya” in the early 1980s and started in on a sort of Celtic New Age music that was popular in Americaland at the time. Did fabulously well for herself. Good for her, too.

Here’s Enya’s take, in a music video. Fun facts about it: In the video’s newsreels there’s footage of the 1991 release from Hezbollah captivity of the British journalist John McCarthy, the longest-held Briton in the Lebanon Hostage Crisis. For five years, John was a prisoner. Most of that time no one knew if he was alive or dead. Years later, John interviewed me in London for BBC Radio 4 about this book I wrote.

I’d have preferred to interview him.

Just in case subscribers might think I’ve gone a bit soft or maudlin, linking to Enya music videos, well, maybe I have because of the time year, but only a little bit. There’s no white-poppy vibe in Doris Troutman Plenn’s verses, and only a few weeks ago in this newsletter I was making out the case for a sustaining article of faith in my way of thinking: The Moral Necessity of Tyrannicide.

So. . . Marg Bar Diktator, Death to the Dictator. Slava Ukraini, Glory to Ukraine. 打倒共產黨, Down with the Communist Party. Here’s the anthem Glory to Hong Kong, from the uprising. Take heart in the knowledge, or at least in the determination, that one day, the people will win.

Happy Christmas to everybody. No surrender.