The New Thermopylae: What Ukraine’s Fire Revealed About Us
Silhouettes of protesters stand atop a barricade amid smoke and snow during Ukraine’s “Winter on Fire.” In a cold college apartment, huddled over a laptop’s glow, I watched history burn on the streets of Kyiv. Winter on Fire, the documentary about Ukraine’s 2013–2014 Maidan uprising, flickered before my eyes. I saw unarmed students singing their national anthem in the freezing night as riot police closed in; I watched grandmothers in kerchiefs passing sandwiches to scarred young men on barricades of tires and wood. In those images, something in me was irrevocably lit. It was as if a dormant part of my moral imagination had awakened in the fire of that winter. I realized that the struggle unfolding in a far-off square — young citizens rallying for dignity and freedom, willing to bleed for the idea of Europe — was not a foreign story at all. It was the oldest and newest story of civilization. In the courage of ordinary Ukrainians, I recognized the echo of every people’s fight for liberty, the ur-struggle of good versus tyranny playing out in our own century. In that moment, I felt a spark of purpose, an urgent clarity: their fight was calling forth something in me.
A Soldier’s Son and a Call to War
I was raised in a military family, under the silent tutelage of duty and honor. My father’s dress uniform hung in the closet like a promise; stories of ancestors who fought in wars for freedom were the bedtime tales of my childhood. I grew up believing that when evil arises, good men and women pick up a rifle and stand a post. So when a new war darkened Europe’s sky in 2022 — when Russian armor poured across Ukraine’s borders and missiles rained on its cities — I felt that familial call to arms. In those first frantic weeks, as the world watched Kyiv stand and Mariupol suffer, I was seized by a single impulse: I must fight. Ukraine’s struggle had become a clarion call to my own values. Here was a nation, smaller and outgunned, making a valiant stand for the same ideals I had been taught to revere: liberty, democracy, the right of a people to determine their own destiny. How could I remain at home, an ocean away, enjoying safety and freedom bought by others’ sacrifices, while a free people bled to uphold the Western ideals that shaped my life?
I tried to answer that call. I remember presenting myself at a volunteer portal, ready to enlist in Ukraine’s nascent foreign legion. I was not naive about war’s horrors — I had grown up with flag-draped coffins and whispered prayers for fallen friends — but I felt in my bones that not fighting this new tyranny would be a deeper betrayal. Yet the response I received was an unexpected one: “No, thank you.” Whether it was my lack of combat experience, a surplus of volunteers, or sheer logistical chaos, I was politely turned away. In an instant, I found myself standing in a strange new territory of powerlessness. I, who had always imagined I would rise to the occasion of great events, was being asked to stay home. It was as if history had mustered me — only to tell me to sit down.
What followed was a season of quiet despair. Shame crept in: shame at my relief (if I was honest) that I would not be facing Russian artillery, and shame at my shame, knowing others had no choice. Each night I watched the news from Kyiv and Donetsk, seeing civilians just like me huddling in basements or taking up arms, and I felt a gnawing guilt. Why them and not me? Who was I, enjoying a warm bed and the luxury of safety, while a boy my age in Ukraine lay cold and determined in a trench? In those weeks I tasted a bitter truth: the hardest moral trials are sometimes those of inaction. I felt the way Dr. King described the agony of watching injustice from the sidelines: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”en.wikipedia.org. The freedom I enjoyed in Michigan was bound by invisible threads to the freedom being fought for in Mariupol. If that thread snapped — if tyranny prevailed in Ukraine — something would tear in the fabric of the world that clothes us all.
From Powerlessness to Civic Resolve
Slowly, through that discomfort, I began to sense a new purpose. If I could not fight as a soldier, I would fight as a citizen. In turning me away, the Ukrainian cause had, unwittingly, given me a different mission: to transform my powerless anger into civic resolve. I recalled that many of history’s greatest battles for justice were won without rifles or brigades. My mind turned to examples of moral courage I had studied: Martin Luther King Jr. marching unarmed in Selma, Mahatma Gandhi fasting in defiance of empire, Václav Havel writing truth in a Prague prison. These were warriors of a different kind. “We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear,” King wrote during a dark timekinginstitute.stanford.edu. The courage to stand firm in one’s principles — nonviolently, steadfastly — is its own form of warfare against injustice. I realized that this age, our age, calls for that same inner steel. The battleground is not only at Donetsk and Kherson; it is in every community and capitol, every courtroom and classroom, where the values at stake in Ukraine must also be defended.
So I dedicated myself to a new kind of fight. I threw myself into what one might call the “home front” of democracy. I began speaking out at local meetings, writing op-eds, organizing fundraisers for Ukrainian relief, and volunteering in voter education initiatives. Each small act felt like a brick in a new barricade — the civic barricade — meant to hold the line against cynicism and apathy here at home. I came to see that one need not wear a uniform to serve. As Aristotle observed, courage is the virtue that undergirds all others, the sine qua non of moral actionblenheimpartners.com. One can exercise that virtue in daily life: by standing up to a bully, by telling the truth when it’s costly, by refusing to shrug at injustice. My military family had taught me to honor sacrifice and bravery; now I learned that those same qualities could sustain a citizen’s life of purpose. I no longer felt like an impotent spectator. I felt enlisted in a deeper war — the perennial struggle to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the worldjfklibrary.org.
Thermopylae Reborn in Kyiv
As I worked and reflected, I found history speaking to me in new ways. I thought of ancient Greece, that cradle of Western liberty, and realized that what I had seen in Winter on Fire was a modern Thermopylae. In 480 BC, at a narrow pass in the Greek mountains, a few hundred free Greeks under King Leonidas made a defiant stand against an invading empire. They knew they were outnumbered a thousand to one; they knew their stand would cost them their lives. Yet they also knew that some values are worth that price. Their sacrifice bought time for the fledgling idea of democracy to survive. On the stone lion monument at Thermopylae, an epitaph attributed to Simonides addresses us across millennia: “O stranger, tell the people of Sparta that we lie here, obedient to their commands” culture.lamia.gr. In other words: Stranger, go tell our folks back home that we kept our word, that we held the line. It is a message of duty unto death, a testament that free citizens did not break faith even when all was lost.
On a frigid February morning in 2022, when Russian columns bore down on Ukraine’s capital, the world witnessed a kindred spirit. Outgunned Ukrainian soldiers and civilian volunteers stood and fought in the streets of Kyiv and Kharkiv rather than yield. Their valor electrified the world. A Ukrainian border guard on Snake Island, when ordered to surrender by a warship, famously radioed back, “Russian warship…go to hell.” That blunt refusal — Molon labe, “come and take them,” as Leonidas said to Xerxes — instantly joined the annals of liberty’s lore. Like the 300 Spartans, Ukrainians were saying they would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. They were telling us, the watching strangers, that the torch of Thermopylae still burns.
History does not repeat, but it rhymes. In those early days of the invasion, President Zelenskyy was offered evacuation and replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” It was a line worthy of Aeschylus or Thucydides. Indeed, Thucydides wrote that “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.”en.wikiquote.org The Ukrainians had that clear vision. They knew the danger: an overwhelming foe, a cruel road of sorrow and loss. They also glimpsed the glory: the defense of their homeland, the preservation of their freedom, and an example to inspire the world. And notwithstanding, they went out to meet it. Watching them, I realized that the lineage of courage runs unbroken from the hot gates of Thermopylae to the cold streets of Kyiv. Ancient Greeks spoke of aretē, virtue or excellence, often exemplified by courage in defense of the polis. I saw aretē alive in modern attire — young men and women in sneakers and winter coats, stuffing sandbags, tending the wounded, or simply refusing to flee when the bombs fell.
East and West, Good and Evil
What, after all, were those Ukrainians fighting for? Not just a piece of land, but a principle of human dignity. They were fighting for the idea that free people have the right to chart their own destiny — a birthright of liberty that stretches back to Athens and Rome, and forward to every democratic nation today. In their fight, I saw a mirror of our own values. Their enemies — corrupt autocracy, imperial domination, the rule of brute force — have always been the enemies of liberty, whether at Thermopylae, or on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, or in the streets of Hong Kong in our time. This was a struggle as old as humanity: the free citizen versus the tyrant, dignity versus domination.
President Lincoln, facing the cataclysm of the Civil War, called America “the last best hope of earth” abrahamlincolnonline.org. That was not merely true of one nation in one era; it is a truth that each generation must claim for the cause of freedom itself. If free nations falter, if we let oppression and conquest go unanswered, we “meanly lose the last best hope of earth”abrahamlincolnonline.org. Watching Ukraine, I felt the weight of that responsibility. The moral stakes could not be higher. As Dr. King wrote from his Birmingham jail, injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere, for “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality” en.wikipedia.org. A tyrant’s victory in one country emboldens tyrants in others; a citizen’s stand for dignity sends ripples of hope around the world. This is why millions around the globe rallied to Ukraine’s cause, flying blue-and-yellow flags in their towns and city squares. On some deep level, we understood that Ukraine’s fight was our fight — not a distant conflict, but one front in the universal struggle for freedom.
Even beyond state-on-state aggression, the 21st century has seen the rise of new, shadowy forces of tyranny. The threat from violent non-state actors — terrorist cells, extremist militias, cyber-criminal networks — is, as one international report noted, “increasing”, posing transnational dangers that every nation must address. regjeringen.no. On a sunny September morning, 19 fanatics with box cutters proved that even the mightiest nation could be struck a grievous blow by a handful of non-state actors. Civilization is fragile; its enemies, whether armies or nihilistic cells, are relentless. We live under the constant near-shadow of what one leader called the “awful grace” of tragedy. jfklibrary.org — the sobering knowledge that peace and order can be shattered in an instant. The line between order and chaos is patrolled not only by soldiers on the frontier, but by the courage of ordinary people in everyday life. Do we give in to fear and faction, or do we “tame the savageness of man” within and around us? That question confronts us in crises great and small.
The New Frontiers: Technology and Tyranny
Even as we contend with age-old evils, new dangers emerge from human innovation. Our science has outstripped our governance. We now possess technologies that the ancients would have thought the province of gods. Artificial intelligence, in particular, promises tremendous advances — curing diseases, connecting continents — but it also lurks as a potential instrument of oppression or catastrophe. As the late Stephen Hawking warned, “the rise of powerful AI will either be the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which.” cam.ac.uk Powerful autonomous weapons powered by AI could be wielded by tyrants or terrorists; advanced algorithms might empower mass surveillance and the “oppression of the many by the few”. cam.ac.uk. The same tools that might liberate us could, in the wrong hands, enslave us. We stand on a moral razor’s edge with these technologies. Our generation’s task is to imbue our innovations with our values — to ensure that AI, biotechnology, and cyberpower are used to uplift human dignity, not strip it away.
I often think of an image: a lone coder in a hoodie, writing lines of code that could protect a network or, if misused, bring a city’s infrastructure to its knees. In a connected world, that lone individual might hold as much power as a division of tanks. Indeed, when Ukraine was invaded, it didn’t just call upon its soldiers; its government did something unprecedented — it openly enlisted an “IT Army” of volunteer hackers worldwide to join in its defenseen. wikipedia.org. Thousands of civilians around the globe answered, launching cyber operations to disable the invader’s propaganda and infrastructure. It was the first time a nation-state crowdsourced its cyber defense in this way, blurring the line between soldier and civilian, frontline and home front. This is the new face of conflict: programmers and analysts are as crucial as pilots and infantry. A distributed network of brave citizens can outmatch a centralized army of drones.
Yet technology alone, however advanced, will not save us. Character will. The more complex our tools, the more critical the conscience of those who wield them. In this age of drones and deepfakes, the heroes are increasingly those who wield principle and intellect rather than swords. The figure of the lone hacker for good, the whistleblower, the investigative journalist exposing corruption, the teacher opening young minds to critical thinking — these are the modern counterparts to the knight on horseback. A civil servant refusing to certify an illegal order, a scientist raising an alarm about a dangerous bias in an AI system, a doctor caring for the vulnerable amid a plague: these are acts of heroism holding civilization together.
The Heroes We Need Now
It becomes ever clearer that in our time the heroes are not just soldiers with rifles, but civilians with courage. Yes, we will always honor the warrior who risks life in combat — but we must broaden our understanding of valor. Consider the public health officer who withstands threats while enforcing a quarantine to save lives, or the election worker who perseveres under intimidation to count every vote. Consider the software engineer who leaves a lucrative job to build encryption tools that dissidents can use against censorship, or the community organizer who rallies a neighborhood to stand against violent extremism recruiting their youth. These people have no medals, no uniforms, but they are quietly defending the ramparts of civilization.
It has been said that “there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall”ieer.org. Why do they fall? Because of the accumulated moral courage of countless individuals who refuse to yield to fear. Gandhi called nonviolence “the weapon of the strong” ieer.org, greater than any force of arms. King reminded us that silence in the face of evil is itself evil, and that our lives begin to end when we become silent about things that matter. In every generation, it is the voice of ordinary citizens — speaking, voting, teaching, creating — that ultimately thwarts the designs of tyrants. Our era is no exception.
Think of the brave women and men in Russian cities who, at great personal risk, went into the streets to protest an unjust war; or the Iranian girls who dared to remove their headscarves and march for freedom against a theocracy; or the Polish judges who stood firm against political pressure to erode rule of law. None of these people carried weapons. They carried something mightier: conscience. They are part of the same story as the Ukrainian programmers fending off cyberattacks and the Ukrainian farmers towing abandoned enemy tanks with their tractors — the story of civilians with courage changing the course of history.
Moral Courage: Our Greatest Weapon
The stakes before us are as stark as ever. We live in an age of exquisite promise and terrifying peril. Humanity has never had such capacity to solve problems — to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to connect cultures — and yet we have never been so capable of collective self-destruction, whether through nuclear weapons, ecological collapse, or unchecked technological dangers. Our tools have evolved, but our fundamental choice remains the same as in Aristotle’s day, as in Lincoln’s and King’s days: to choose courage over complacency, right over might, love over hate. We may not get to choose the crises we face, but we do choose how we respond.
In this tumultuous time, I hear the quiet exhortation of those who came before us. I hear Lincoln urging that “we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth” abrahamlincolnonline.org. I hear Robert F. Kennedy, on a dark night in 1968, invoking the ancient Greeks: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” jfklibrary.org I hear Gandhi’s resolve that “the spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism”, and that we must be ready to sacrifice even comfort and blood for the higher cause of freedomieer.org. These voices converge into a single imperative for us: we must find within ourselves that same moral courage — the civic fire that refuses to be extinguished by the winds of fear and hatred.
In the end, moral courage is the greatest weapon we have. It does not rust, it does not run out of ammunition, and it is universally available to rich and poor, strong and weak. Moral courage is what compelled a lone man to stand before a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square; it’s what drives a Ukrainian schoolteacher by day to become a volunteer medic by night. Moral courage is what causes a young coder to forgo comfort and join a risky hacktivist effort to disable a tyrant’s propaganda machine, armed with nothing but a laptop and an unyielding sense of right. It is what makes a parent in a war-torn region leave the relative safety of a shelter to guide others to refuge, because conscience will not allow otherwise.
We must remember that civilization is not an inheritance but an achievement — one that every generation must labor to build and defend anew. The marble columns of law, art, and freedom stand on the foundation of shared civic virtue. If that virtue cracks, the whole edifice can crumble. But if that virtue endures — if we endure in our willingness to stand up, speak out, and sacrifice for the good — then no weapon, no tyrant, no terror can ultimately prevail against us.
Our time in history is calling for heroes of a new kind. Let us answer that call. Let us, each in our sphere, be as brave as the Ukrainians on the Maidan, as steadfast as the Spartans at Thermopylae. Let us make gentle the life of this world by the force of our example and the example of our force of characterjfklibrary.org. The future will remember not the tribulations of these years, but how we responded to them. Will we, as Lincoln challenged, rise with the occasion and act anew, disenthralling ourselves from the complacency of the pastabrahamlincolnonline.org? I say we must. We stand at a new Thermopylae — not a literal narrow pass, but a narrowing window of choice: whether to uphold the flame of human dignity, or to let it be snuffed out by fear and submission.
Stranger, when future generations ask what we did in this hinge of history, let us be able to say that we kept the faith. Let us ensure that free people everywhere can echo the ancient pledge: Here we stand, obedient to our principles. And if tyrants demand our surrender, let us answer, now and always: “Come and take it.” For we will not yield. We will fight for the life of the world — to make gentle the life of this world — and in so doing, tame the savageness within and around us. jfklibrary.org. Our weapons will be our words, our compassion, our unbreakable will. And with them, we will bend the arc of history once more toward justice.
