True greatness is the choice not to look otherwise

In its autobiography “Patriot“, Alexei Navalny, killed in a Russian prison a year ago, asks if Leo Tolstoy’s idea that big people are not alone responsible for the story of history is correct.

His experience endured the brutality concerned with Russian President Vladimir Putin made Navalny believe that Tolstoy was wrong. Also, the consequences of other regimes in Russia, Boris Eltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev must be taken into account. Did these men not twist the current of the events in completely new ways?

And, of course, consider Navalny himself. His life of incredible grace under pressure, his courage in the face of death, was certainly a force that undermined the totalitarian state in which he lived, right?

However, at one of his speeches “the last word” in a Russian court in 2014, Had that to say:

“On one side of (the battlefield) are scams who have taken power in our country, and on the other there are people who want to change this. We fight for the people who look differently, the people who shrug, the people who are in a situation where all they have to do is do not do something coward, to do it anyway. “

I think this paragraph undermines the idea that big people simply control history with the use of the word “us”.

As I think that the resumption of work in my own memory, a personal history about the cruelty I have experienced as a teenager, it was never clear to me that we are all to blame. Also, we all deserve honor when we chose not to be cowards, when we choose not to look far.

Consider the recent revelations about the beloved writer Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. How terribly sad, how indignant she was so many of her readers to find out that she stayed with a man who sexually abused her third daughter. We wanted this wise woman, eloquent to be better than I learned.

But, when you count the number of people who protected Munro from information, from her first husband to Munro and those who refused to publish something about it until she died or who failed to follow, there is an ordinary army of people who look at another way.

The author was actually criminally prosecuted when Andrea Munro made the police report at the age of 29. New Yorker article About this story, published in his issue of December 23, 2024, “there were journalists at Courthouse in Goderich (Ontario).” But the conviction for the indecent attack of one of the most famous people in Canada was not reported.

Staying on the realm of personal history, you think -how do we always ask, why do abused women (and men) do not leave their abusers? How can I stay? But it’s not the question instead, how can I go? They know I’m in danger if they are leaving. They know that we have not been able to keep some alive. It takes extraordinary courage to leave a violent internal tyrant. Our society has resources for their protection, but they are not always enough.

It takes a village, a city, a city, a state to keep the internal tyrants back from their worst behavior. If I had known when I had 13, 14, 15 that other people in my city would protect me and take me, I would have left my own tyrant in a heartbeat.

To get back to the question and take another approach, World War II would have ended if Hitler had been assassinated? Certainly, the incredible brutality of the third Reich was a projected car that would be survived. Think about the collusion that this war effort assumed. Think about the villages located next to the concentration camps; Architects, builders, poisonous gas suppliers – there were so many who worked so much that they would continue.

And we are.

We are facing another dramatic moment in the history of the world with Donald Trump’s presidency. History is what we will do together, to our shame, if we look different. But he is not under control. We are.