Though we should never court tragedy, we know our true selves really only in it. Catastrophe, adversity of any kind, reveals character. So what does the Belarusian hijacking of a Ryanair jet tell us about ourselves?
It tells us what we have known all along in our fractured age, what we have seen with the pandemic, which is that we can’t come together in a crisis, because we can’t think clearly about it.
No sooner had Belarus dictator Alexandr G. Lukashenko forced down the aircraft to arrest dissident journalist Roman Protasevich than the public finger pointing began in a kind of circular firing squad. Why didn’t the Ryanair pilots, en route from Athens to Vilnius in Lithuania just continue on their flight plan, after a MiG fighter jet ordered them to follow it to Minsk, under the pretext that a bomb was on board the plane? As if you would take the chance of the MiG shooting down the plane and everyone aboard being killed.
Why did Protasevich risk flying over Belarusian airspace? Do you know every country you’re flying over when you fly? Ryanair flies under the Irish flag. So while on board Protasevich was for all intents and purposes in Ireland.
What about when the United States did something similar to get at Edward Snowden? (A traitor). What about the U.S. treatment of journalist Julian Assange? (Not a journalist). What about when the world did nothing to prevent or avenge the brutal Saudi Arabian murder of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggii? (A disgrace). What about the Israeli-Palestinian situation? (More complex than it appears). What about this and what about that? People, we can go down Memory Lane and survey every civilization that has acted badly toward every other civilization throughout history only to wind up exactly where we are now, which is hoping against hope that Protasevich doesn’t become the next Khashoggi. But the look of fear in his eyes after he was arrested tol you he probably will be.
By far the most idiotic comments have come from the isolationist, head-burying ostriches who say, What’s it to us? The most eloquent answer comes from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote from a Birmingham, Alabama, jail on April 16, 1963: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
The European Union has shown its understanding of this by isolating Belarus, cutting off its flights from using members’ airspace and airports. The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have condemned the act. It will certainly be on the agenda when President Joe Biden meets with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva.
Here again the noncritical thinkers point out that sanctions will only drive Lukashenko further into Putin’s arms. (OK, not the image we want but you get the point.) Here, however, we fail to see Putin as he really is — a man playing a weak hand well. It’s still a weak hand. Russia isn’t China. Putin doesn’t have the cash to keep rogue Belarus and the politically fickle Lukashenko going forever. Even the Russian oligarchs, who are in it to make money, will ultimately come to see Lukashenko as a bad investment.
Now is not the time to second-guess confrontation. Now is the time to stand united against an act of terrorism that takes us back to the hijackings of the 1970s. Now is the time for clear-thinking. Why should we respond with outrage to the hijacking of the Ryanair flight? Because leadership and compassion depend on it, because we can surmount challenges at home and abroad simultaneously, because the “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” demands it.