‘For Our Freedom and Yours’

President Biden made a statement, and he did so while wearing a couple of symbols:

This video was circulated by the Daily Wire, a media company on the right. I imagine the circulators considered the video “dunking” material — something to be “dunked on,” or mocked. That is certainly what the Heritage Foundation did, in what has become its customary style:

The Heritage Foundation was once a serious institute, part of the coalition that helped win the Cold War. This coalition was headed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. In the effort to help Ukraine, Joe Biden is acting more like Reagan than the Republicans are.

Reagan would know that Putin’s assault on Ukraine is not a “border dispute.” He would know the importance of Ukraine’s fate to the United States, and to the prospects of freedom in general.

Thinking about Biden’s tie and pin — his Ukraine symbols — I thought of Reagan in December 1981. The Communist dictatorship in Poland declared martial law. Poland’s ambassador in Washington defected to us. He asked President Reagan to light a candle in a White House window on Christmas Eve. This would show solidarity with the beleaguered Poles.

Reagan agreed to do so, and, in a national address, he asked all Americans to place their own candles in their own windows.

Can you imagine what today’s Right would do to Ronald Reagan? What our America Firsters would say? What CPAC and all the rest would say?

Here is what Reagan said, in his address of December 23, 1981:

Tonight, in millions of American homes, the glow of the Christmas tree is a reflection of the love Jesus taught us. Like the shepherds and wise men of that first Christmas, we Americans have always tried to follow a higher light, a star, if you will.

Reagan went on to say,

When 19th-century Polish patriots rose against foreign oppressors, their rallying cry was, “For our freedom and yours.” Well, that motto still rings true in our time. There is a spirit of solidarity abroad in the world tonight that no physical force can crush. It crosses national boundaries and enters into the hearts of men and women everywhere. In factories, farms, and schools, in cities and towns around the globe, we the people of the Free World stand as one with our Polish brothers and sisters. Their cause is ours, and our prayers and hopes go out to them this Christmas.

Some more, from that president:

Once, earlier in this century, an evil influence threatened that the lights were going out all over the world. Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished. We are blessed with a freedom and abundance denied to so many. Let those candles remind us that these blessings bring with them a solid obligation, an obligation to the God who guides us, an obligation to the heritage of liberty and dignity handed down to us by our forefathers, and an obligation to the children of the world, whose future will be shaped by the way we live our lives today.

This is what the Republican Party and the conservative movement once thrilled to. (So did other people, in America and around the world.) They were right to do so.

Reagan mentioned the slogan “For our freedom and yours.” A close companion to that is “For your freedom and ours.” That slogan appeared on a placard in Red Square on August 25, 1968. This was after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, to crush out the Prague Spring. A small band of Russians went to Red Square, to protest. Their protest lasted only a few minutes — then KGB agents did their terrible, bloody work.

But those brave Russians, the protesters, had sent a message. They had expressed their solidarity with the Czechoslovakians — and they knew the fates of the two countries were connected.

I learned about the Red Square protest from Vladimir Kara-Murza — who is today a political prisoner, confined to an isolation cell in Siberia.

Two days ago, it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. There was a celebration at the Reagan Library in California, and the keynote speaker was Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement, back in ’81.

What does all this have to do with our world today? A lot.