Historian Timothy Snyder Compares Ukraine’s Resistance With Twin Cities Response at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Historian Timothy Snyder, author of the books “On Freedom” and “On Tyranny,” gave an hour-long talk titled “Blueprint for Freedom” last week as part of the Westminster Town Hall Forum at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Presbyterian News Service, which reported the event from Louisville, noted that a recording of the address is available and that Snyder is introduced at the 32:45 mark.

Snyder is the Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto. According to the report, the crowd that filled the sanctuary cheered when he compared Ukraine’s defense against a sustained Russian attack with the response of people in the Minneapolis area to Operation Metro Surge.

In a question-and-answer exchange with the Rev. Dr. Jessica Patchett, Westminster’s senior pastor, Snyder said that others often carry the work, suffering and risk that sustain democratic life while the rest of society “just move[s] on with our lives.” He said that in the United States, most of that work over the past 150 years has been done by African Americans and women. He also said that Ukraine, which has been fighting for nearly five years in what he described as “the largest and most terrible war in the world since 1945,” offers a strong example of the value of democracy. He described the country’s resourcefulness alongside “incredible grief and suffering,” and argued that its resistance had given other democracies time and that the rest of the world owed Ukraine a large debt.

Snyder pointed to what he called hundreds of small Ukrainian groups, formed among friends and neighbors who trusted one another, that organize support for soldiers at the front. He said the response in Ukraine and in the Twin Cities area shared a pattern of self-organization grounded in relationships of trust built during earlier periods of stress. He also argued that both places were targeted because their political systems were working, citing functioning public transit, public parks, and the integration of native and immigrant communities as examples. He acknowledged that such systems are “not easy” but said they “work.”

Turning to economic and civic questions, Snyder said that only government could respond to the levels of greed he attributed to some of the nation’s billionaires, and he said that “only a government animated by some idea of freedom” could regulate large companies. On free speech, he traced the idea to the Greek playwright Euripides and argued that protecting it begins with those most at risk of punishment for criticism. He criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to free speech cases, saying that it allows wealthy parties to treat their money as expression. He concluded that citizens need to be prepared to speak, which he said requires “facts, science, and, above all, local journalism.”

Source: Read the original report