The wide sunlit plateaus

On June 18, 1940, Churchill gave his famous speech “Finest Hour”.

The British Army had been evacuated from Dunkirk.

France, under Pétain, had decided to surrender.

“Hitler knows he will have to destroy us on this island or he will lose the war,” Churchill told the House of Commons.

“If we can do it, all of Europe can be free and the life of the world will be able to move towards broad and sunny plateaus. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including everything we’ve ever known and cared about, will sink into abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of perverse science”.

Two of those sentences – “wide and sunny plateaus“Y”the abyss of a new dark age”— should be ringing in our ears as we near the end of this pivotal year in history.

Wide and sunny highlands are the women of Iran who take off their hijabs the same way Berliners tore down the wall.

and soldiers Ukrainians raising his banner over Irpin, Lyman, Kherson and other cities liberated from Russian barbarism.

and protesters Chinese demanding – and achieving – an end to his regime’s cruel and insane COVID lockdowns by holding up blank sheets of paper, on which there was no need to write anything because everyone already knew what they meant.

The wide and sunny highlands were the victories of Emmanuel Macron about the fascist Marine Le Pen in France.

They were the defeat of nearly every denial voter in the United States who showed up to oversee the statewide vote.

It was the defeat of the majority of candidates selected by Donald Trump in hotly contested midterms, even in states like Georgia, where non-QAnon Republicans have won hands down.

They are a COVID death rate that, in the United States, no longer skyrockets a few weeks after the case count.

They are proof that a fusion reaction produced in the laboratory can create more energy than it consumes.

They are launching a telescope which allows us to peek into the confines of space and return to the beginning of time.

It’s not just a list of the year’s good news.

It demonstrates the ability of people of all cultures and circumstances to demand, defend and define freedom;

challenge those who want to deny it; and to use freedom to expand the limits of what we can know, do and imagine.

But that’s not the only thing 2022 has shown.

We continue to look into the abyss of a new dark age, provoked not only by the malice of the enemies of freedom, but also by the complacency and the illusions of its defenders.

The complacent are those who think there is no vital American interest at stake in a Ukrainian victory or the outcome of Iranian demonstrations.

Or that China’s recent woes, coupled with Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine, might be daunting Xi Jinping try to grab Taiwan.

Or that the collapse in inflation has been overcome.

Or that the rising tide of immigration across the southern border, caused by the collapse of government in much of Latin America, is a peculiar right-wing obsession rather than a real crisis which will stir up a furious populist backlash if not handled competently.

As Britain fought for its survival in 1940, much of the United States remained unaware of what, if anything, the moment demanded.

Churchill posed the choice: the sunlit uplands or the abyss.

This is still our choice today.

Happy holiday.