Recently David Frum penned an inspirational December 2022 editorial in the Atlantic magazine on the speech by Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, to a joint session of Congress thanking America for their support in the war against Russia. David Frum opens his editorial, “Of the many moving words in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, these eight may have been the most urgent and important: ‘So much in the world depends on you.’” For more interesting videos, please click to subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ReflectionsMPH/?sub_confirmation=1 Shortcut: https://www.youtube.com/@ReflectionsMPH YouTube video Ukrainian President Zelensky Speaks to Joint Session of Congress, Reflections on David Frum Editorial in Atlantic Magazine: This blog includes footnotes:: https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ukrainian-president-zelensky-speaks-to-joint-session-of-congress-reflections-on-david-frum-editorial-in-atlantic-magazine/ © Copyright 2022 We also reflect on: • How the Russian forces were ordered by President Vladimir Putin to invade the Ukraine. • The editorials in the Atlantic Magazine by David Frum and Anne Applebaum. • The admonition by the prophet Zechariah, and many other prophets, not to oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor. • How “America First” policies have adopted by Trump and Republicans. • How after the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Jim Crow legal system was adopted by many Deep South states. • How Nazi lawyers, when drafting the Nazi anti-Semitic Race Laws at the beginning of Hitler’s regime, used America’s Jim Crow laws as precedent. • How FDR was finally able to prosecute and abolish peonage, or convict labor, after Nazi brutalities gave him political cover. • How Martin Luther King directly compared the lynchings and civil rights violations suffered by many blacks to the brutalities of the Nazi regime and its Final Solution to the Jewish problem in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. • How Benjamin Franklin warned us, “We have a republic, if we can keep it.” • Comparing the speeches and actions by Volodymyr Zelensky and Winston Churchill. • How Zelensky famously refused to flee, saying, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” • Comparing the current war in Ukraine to the Finnish Winter War and Continuation War, when Finland successfully fought to remain independent. • How the wartime aid provided to Ukraine is but a tiny percentage of the Lend-Lease aid delivered to the allies in World War II.

2. Today we will reflect on the recent inspirational
December 2022 editorial by David Frum in the
Atlantic magazine on the speech by Volodymyr
Zelensky, President of Ukraine, to a joint session of
Congress thanking America for their support in the
war against Russia.
David Frum is a never-Trumper Republican, he is both
a political commentator as well as a speechwriter for
former President George W Bush.

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/volodymyr-zelensky-us-congress-address-ukraine/672546/
David Frum opens his
editorial, “Of the many
moving words in President
Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech
to a joint meeting of the U.S.
Congress, these eight words
may have been the most
urgent and important:
‘So much in the world
depends on you.’”

5. Never before in human history has a nation
dominated world politics as does America today,
whose military forces far surpass the combined
military forces of all other countries on earth in nearly
every category. Never before has a predominant
power chosen to extend its power not by bullying
smaller nations, but by encouraging the spread of
democracy.

7. David Frum continues, “Zelensky came to Washington to speak for his nation. He came to
Washington to ask for assistance. But above all, he came to Washington to recall Americans
to themselves. He came to say, My embattled people believe in you. Embedded in his words
of trust was a challenge: If we believe in you, perhaps you can again believe in yourselves?”

8. What keeps us, as Americans, from believing in ourselves?
Simply put, Americans can believe in themselves if they
seek to show compassion to those countries and peoples
in need, but when Americans instead come to seek to be
cruel to other countries and peoples in need, we lose our
moral fiber, we will lose our ability to believe in ourselves.
Selfishness kills, selflessness brings life.

9. https://youtu.be/576TYemgA8o

10. This is not a new question; this is the same question
that the Old Testament prophets asked the people of
Israel so many millennia ago. So many millennia ago,
the Lord reminded his people, and Americans by
historical extension,

11. You shall not wrong or
oppress a resident alien,
for you were aliens (and
slaves) in the land of
Egypt.
Exodus 22:3
(Other verses say slaves.)
Jew with Torah, by Marc Chagall, 1925

12. The prophets are very clear, we will
lose our way if we discard our moral
compass, as the prophet Zechariah
exhorts us:
“Thus says the Lord of hosts,
Render true judgments,
show kindness and mercy each to his
brother,
do not oppress the widow, the
fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor;
and let none of you devise evil
against his brother in your heart.”

13. David Frum continues, “The
ideal of partnership among
democracies has declined, too,
and perhaps even more than
confidence within individual
democracies. Narrow and selfish
nationalism has displaced
international cooperation and
collective security. The slogan
‘America First’—seemingly
discredited forever along with
its fascism-friendly promoters of
the late 1930s and early ’40s—
was revived.”
FDR Addresses Joint Session of Congress, 1941

14. Many critics will chime in, Why are we talking about the poor?
Why are we talking about civil rights? What have these things
have to do with Ukraine?
When civil rights for minorities are ignored, when minorities are
forced to slave away at sub-minimum wages, when minorities
are denied both the right to vote and the right to justice when
they call the police or appear in court, democracy fails.

15. Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Worship Freedom From Fear
Freedom From Want
The Four Freedoms

16. That was the lesson this country learned after the Civil War, after
Reconstruction, when the brutalities of Jim Crow ruled the land,
when our democracy died.

17. https://youtu.be/UciDV5laOLg

18. There are both direct and indirect correlations between the
struggles to overthrow Jim Crow and to overthrow Nazism, just
as today the same politicians who support white supremacy also
support the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin and want to cut
military aid to Ukraine.
Let us not forget that the Nazi lawyers, when drafting the Nazi
anti-Semitic Race Laws at the beginning of Hitler’s regime, used
America’s Jim Crow laws as precedent, and bemoaned the fact
that in some respects the Nazi Race Laws were more lenient than
many Jim Crow laws mandating segregation and discrimination
against blacks.

19. https://youtu.be/_td3jPGD5TI

20. Let us not forget that peonage, the convict labor system in the
Deep South where sheriffs arrested blacks for manufactured
vagrancy offenses, forcing blacks to work under a brutal system
of effective slavery in labor camps, was comparable to the Nazi
concentration work camp system. These peonage labor camps
often forced blacks to sleep in chains, with little food, scant
medical care, and suffering high mortality rates. White southern
juries refused to enforce the laws under the administration of
Theodore Roosevelt, it was not until his cousin FDR was given
sufficient political cover by Nazi brutalities that the peonage
system was successfully prosecuted and substantially abolished.

21. https://youtu.be/2TCXcEpohaM

22. Let us not forget that Martin Luther King directly
compared the lynchings and civil rights violations
suffered by many blacks to the brutalities of the Nazi
regime and its Final Solution to the Jewish problem in
his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

23. https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k

24. Let us not forget the warning of
Benjamin Franklin at our first founding,
“We have a republic, if we can keep it.”

25. David Frum continues, “This mood of
democratic recession enabled Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against
Ukraine. He regarded Ukraine as weak and
vulnerable, and Ukraine’s allies as divided
and ineffectual. When he ordered the
invasion ten months ago, Putin apparently
expected to roll into Kyiv in days. He
seemingly expected the rest of the world to
grumble, then come to terms. Russian
energy, Russian cash—those were, in Putin’s
mind, the hard realities. Everything else
seemed to him just so much vapor.”
“What a mistake.”
Fighters of the Sheikh Mansur Battalion on a
captured Russian vehicle.

26. Like Zelensky, Winston Churchill also addressed a
joint session of Congress in 1943, to thank the
American people for their assistance in fighting the
war against Nazism.

27. Winston Churchill addresses the United States Congress in 1943

28. Like Zelensky, Churchill showed brave leadership to
the British people, while Hitler and many in England
wanted Churchill to sue for peace.

29. https://youtu.be/wyjWBAG6xrc

30. Instead, Churchill
proclaimed, “We have good
reason to believe ourselves
capable of continuing the
war, if necessary, alone, if
necessary, for years."

31. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html
Zelensky inspired the
citizens of Ukraine
and the entire free
world when he
turned down an offer
from the United
States of evacuation
from the capital city
of Kyiv.
“The fight is here; I
need ammunition,
not a ride,” Zelensky
famously responded.

32. In comparison, this was Churchill’s speech
when he was appointed Prime Minister:
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil,
tears, and sweat. We have before us an
ordeal of the most grievous kind. We
have before us many, many months of
struggle and suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to
wage war by land, sea, and air. War with
all our might and with all the strength
God has given us, and to wage war
against a monstrous tyranny never
surpassed in the dark and lamentable
catalogue of human crime. That is our
policy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htHKbsUKDDw

33. https://youtu.be/NiuWNsy4x4Q

34. David Frum continues, “The Ukrainians
fought. Their ferocious and successful
resistance surprised Putin. Perhaps it
surprised the Ukrainians themselves.
Certainly, it surprised the rest of the world,
democratic and nondemocratic alike. A
surge of sympathy rapidly translated into
the greatest joint military assistance effort
since 1945.”

35. “Weapons, money, intelligence,
economic support, humanitarian
assistance—all flowed into Ukraine,
by the tens of billions of dollars,
pounds, and euros. Collective
security was suddenly upgraded
from an antique slogan to an
organizing principle.”

36. We are surprised that the major media does not more
often not compare the bravery of the Ukrainians to the
bravery of the Finnish when the Soviet Union invaded
Finland in the Winter War of November 1939, shortly after
Poland was invaded. Although greatly outnumbered, the
Finnish Army had trained for winter combat, with special
troops outmaneuvering the Soviets, fighting on skis, totally
decimating the Soviet forces. Stalin sued for peace three
months later, annexing the southern industrialized
provinces of Finland.

37. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

38. Simo Häyhä, legendary Finnish sniper,
known as "White Death" by Soviets.
Dead Soviet soldiers and their equipment after being encircled.

39. As part of the Nazi invasion of Russia in Operation Barbarossa,
the brave Finns invaded to grab back these Finnish provinces that
Russia had annexed in the Continuation War. Finland was the
only Nazi ally fighting in the war who resisted the persecution of
its Jewish population. Unfortunately, in the armistice agreement
Finland had to surrender these annexed provinces once again
and pay Soviet Russia reparations. But the brave Finns retained
their independence through their bravery on the battlefield
against overwhelming odds, Finland is a much smaller country by
population than the Ukraine.

40. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War

41. Finnish soldiers pass by a destroyed Soviet T-34 tank
A Finnish soldier with a reindeer in Lapland. Reindeer were
used to pull supply sleighs in snowy conditions.
Finnish soldiers crossing border, start of 1941 invasion.

42. David Frum continues, “The
assistance worked. The invasion (of
Ukraine) was stopped, then reversed.
The intended victim began to win.”
“And as the Ukrainians began to win,
all the rest of us—all the other
intended victims of Putin’s
aggression—began to consider that
maybe we might not be such losers
ourselves. Maybe our ideals were not
so out-of-date. Maybe our institutions
were not so broken. Maybe the
people the Ukrainians needed us to
be, maybe those were the people we
could be again.”

43. Taiwan has no doubt breathed a sigh of relief.

44. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/12/taiwan-xi-jinping-china-invasion-us-support/672336/

45. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/12/taiwan-xi-jinping-china-invasion-us-support/672336/
The Ukrainian conflict has many messages:
• The United States will stand behind their allies and friends
when a larger bullying country invades their neighbor.
• A reminder that highly motivated and resourceful soldiers
fighting for their freedom can counter invasions by their
totalitarian neighbors.
• With current technology, war favors the defensive forces,
due to the newly developed drones and automated anti-
tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

46. David Frum continues,
“Zelensky spoke of
‘bicameral and
bipartisan’ support in
Congress for his cause.
That sounded a
surprising note,
because an important
faction in Congress and
in conservative media
has aligned with Putin
against Ukraine.”

47. “But Zelensky was using
words not to describe
reality; he was using words
to change reality. His praise
strengthened Republican
friends of Ukraine such as
Senator Mitch McConnell—
and the reverberating
applause for his praise left
the friends of Putin in
Congress and in
conservative media more
aware than ever of their
ideological extremism and
political isolation.”

48. The former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had destroyed
what was left of the World War II bipartisanship which guided the
United States in the post-war era. This bipartisanship was
strengthened during the war by the planks advanced by the 1940
Republican nominee for President, Wendell Willkie. By
supporting many of FDR’s war policies, he both helped win the
war against Nazism while guaranteeing that the Republicans
would lose handily the Presidential race. Wendell Willkie put
country ahead of party, whereas Fox News Republicans today
only seek to own the libs.

49. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Willkie

51. David Frum continues,
“Zelensky argued that
assistance to Ukraine is not
charity. It is an investment.
That statement is obviously
true by the material
metrics of national security.
At a comparatively small
cost in American and allied
assistance, the Russian
military has been given a
mauling it will not soon
care to repeat.”

52. “But the ‘investment, not charity’
argument is even more powerful
when measured less materially.
What the Western world is getting
in return for its aid is a powerful
recommitment to its own best self.
We didn’t believe the Ukrainians
could do it, in part because we
didn’t believe we could do it. But
they did. And so did we. And we
look now at both Ukraine and
ourselves in new ways.”

53. The United States has paid peanuts in aid to Ukraine when
compared to the massive aid provided to our allies fighting
Nazi Germany in World War II under the Lend Lease
program. The isolationist sentiment in this country was
pronounced, to convince the American people to provide
aid to her allies, FDR proposed the Lend-Lease program.
England would “borrow” what she needed to win the war
against the Nazis, and at the end of the war, give it back.

54. B-24 Liberators on the production line at Willow Run Airport, Michigan, 1943

55. B-24 Liberators on the production line at Willow Run Airport, Michigan, 1943
In his Fireside
Chat radio
broadcast FDR
explained, “If
your neighbor’s
house caught
on fire,
wouldn’t you
loan him your
garden hose?
And once the
fire was put
out, he would
give you back
the garden
hose.”

56. The notion that we would loan England ships and
planes and tanks and after the war the English would
return them somewhat used and slightly blown-up
was as preposterous as it was politically brilliant. No
payment was expected for planes and tanks and
ships.
Roughly two-thirds of the economy was directed to
the war effort during World War II, our aid to Ukraine
is a tiny fraction of this.

57. David Frum continues, “The
extremists and conspiracists and
populists, the authoritarians and
kleptocrats and theocrats who have
all gained so much ascendancy in
recent years, they do not speak for us.
That small man in the olive-green
jersey at the rostrum of the House of
Representatives, he spoke for us. And
the reception given to him today by
the president and by Congress told
the world that his words had been
heard and received and understood
by the great democracy-minded
majority of Americans.”

58. Another Atlantic magazine editorial was written by Anne
Applebaum, an alternate history that speculates on what may
have happened if the United States had abandoned Ukraine, how
Zelensky and his ministers would likely have been be murdered,
with Russian troops digging trenches on the border with Poland,
with concentration camps, torture chambers, and makeshift
prisons throughout the Ukraine, with Russian forces kidnapping
hundreds of thousands of children, trafficking them to Russia and
elsewhere, with millions of Ukrainian refugees scattered across
Europe.

59. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/zelensky-congress-speech-us-ukraine-support/672547/

60. Anne Applebaum concludes,
“Because of everything that all of
us did together, Kyiv still stands.
Ukrainians still control most of
Ukraine. The massacres, the
executions, the mass violence
planned by the Russians did not
take place in most of Ukraine.
The legend of Russia’s military
prowess has been shattered.
China and Iran are roiled by
unhappiness and unrest.”

61. “The democratic world did not
collapse but has instead been
strengthened. As the Ukrainian
president said last night, we
‘succeeded in uniting the
global community to protect
freedom and international law.’
Zelensky came to Washington
to thank Americans on behalf
of Ukraine, but in truth, it is we
who should be thanking them.”

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