This year, give thanks for several things that have happened because, when Russia launched its attempt to extinguish a European nation and that nation’s president was offered a flight to safety, he reportedly replied: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Be thankful for the nobility the war has elicited from those attacked, and for the demonstration that individual leaders still matter. In a 1925 speech titled “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” a 51-year-old British parliamentarian who had already seen war and would see much more of it lamented the widespread supposition that history in the modern age was made not by “exceptional human beings” but by “mass processes.” Fifteen years before he would become, in May 1940, a refutation of that supposition, Winston Churchill and his romantic temperament made him regret what he considered the “obliteration of the personal factor in war.”Read the full opinion at washingtonpost.com.

Source: Washington Post November 24, 2022 13:10 UTC