A Close Call, But We Survived
"The positive news for an increasingly violent and confrontational world is that democratic societies in 2022 withstood assaults from dictators, demagogues, environmental destroyers, and election deniers. Life globally and locally did not get much better, but outcomes could have been immeasurably worse.
Vladimir Putin believed his tanks would roll into Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv within days of Russia’s offensive on February 24. As happened at the turning point of World War II, 80 winters ago, Ukraine and its NATO allies have demonstrated that democracies, for all their messiness, can mobilize to turn back authoritarians.
He struggled, but France’s President Emmanuel Macron took nearly 59 percent of the vote in defeating far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, to the dismay of Putin and to the immense relief in the European Union. In Brazil, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva barely defeated the extreme right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
Why should we care? Well, take Brazil. The rainforests of the Amazon, extending into nine countries, are the lungs of planet Earth. They have been cut down and burned at an unprecedented rate, with Bolsonaro encouraging the environmental carnage. Amazonia, instead of sequestering carbon, threatens to become a carbon emitter.
In our own country, media forecast sweeping victories for Trump-backed candidates in the mid-term elections, fueling the would-be Caudillo in his bid for a return to the White House. Instead, most of the election deniers, the “We are at war” nominees, were defeated.
Trump came away demonstrating truth to an old adage: The empty drum bangs loudest."
Reprint of article by US journalist Joel Connelly
Vladimir Putin believed his tanks would roll into Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv within days of Russia’s offensive on February 24. As happened at the turning point of World War II, 80 winters ago, Ukraine and its NATO allies have demonstrated that democracies, for all their messiness, can mobilize to turn back authoritarians.
He struggled, but France’s President Emmanuel Macron took nearly 59 percent of the vote in defeating far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, to the dismay of Putin and to the immense relief in the European Union. In Brazil, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva barely defeated the extreme right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
Why should we care? Well, take Brazil. The rainforests of the Amazon, extending into nine countries, are the lungs of planet Earth. They have been cut down and burned at an unprecedented rate, with Bolsonaro encouraging the environmental carnage. Amazonia, instead of sequestering carbon, threatens to become a carbon emitter.
In our own country, media forecast sweeping victories for Trump-backed candidates in the mid-term elections, fueling the would-be Caudillo in his bid for a return to the White House. Instead, most of the election deniers, the “We are at war” nominees, were defeated.
Trump came away demonstrating truth to an old adage: The empty drum bangs loudest."
Reprint of article by US journalist Joel Connelly
