“I couldn’t believe I would hear Russian propaganda talking points on American television,” Kasparov said. Trump’s supporters in Congress vote against aid to Ukraine and his cheerleaders on Fox News, especially Tucker Carlson, are telling Trump supporters that Putin is justified in the war. He is concerned that former President Donald Trump will win another term in 2024 and cut off support for Ukraine. But he said President Joe Biden’s administration is doing the right things to support Ukraine. administrations of both parties are to blame for not being tougher with Putin. Speaking to reporters after the speech, Kasparov said U.S. “The Ukrainians have reminded us what it looks like to fight for your land, your freedom, your family,” he said. Now, he said, Ukraine is paying the price of appeasing Putin. “It was a brutal lesson to learn how high that cost was,” Kasparov said. In the 1930s, he noted, the appeasers of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in Britain and France were seeking peace at any cost. But Western Europe and the United States were more interested in accommodation, seeking profit in the revived Russian economy and ignoring the increasing repression. He’s been warning about the rise of Putin since 2001, Kasparov said. “In 1991, unlike in 1946, we had managers instead of leaders,” Kasparov said. Unlike Churchill and President Harry Truman, who brought Churchill to his home state for the 1946 speech, world leaders did not act to preserve the freedom won at the end of the Cold War, he said. “It was a glorious day, a day of celebration and a huge step forward for global freedom,” Kasparov said. He became involved in politics after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. He was the world’s highest rated player when he retired in 2005. Kasparov grew up under communism in the Soviet Union and became the youngest world chess champion in 1985 at the age of 22. “If only Russian men were as brave as Iranian women,” he said. Russians should be in the streets protesting Putin, Kasparov said. Amini’s death has sparked weeks of violent protests across Iran. Mahsa Amini fell into a coma and died after being arrested in Tehran by the morality police, for allegedly violating the country’s hijab rules. In Iran, women have taken to the streets in protest of strict Islamic controls on their lives.Ī woman holds a sign during a protest over the death of Iranian Mahsa Amini outside the Iranian Consulate on Oct. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, Church, bombed in London by the Nazis in World War II and moved to Fulton to house the National Churchill Museum.Īs he began his speech, Kasparov recognized other dissidents who accompanied him and who are fighting for freedom in their home countries, including Syria, Venezuela and Iran. He delivered his half-hour talk in the restored St. Crosby Kemper Lecture during the 39th International Churchill Conference sponsored by Westminster.
Kasparov, who left Russia in 2013 as his political activity made life there more and more uncertain, made his remarks as he gave the Enid and R. It is still unclear if the free world is willing and able to meet this challenge.” “Today there is a clear and present danger,” Kasparov said.
In 2015, Kasparov wrote a book titled “Winter is Coming” warning that the weak international response to Russia’s invasion of the Crimea would embolden Putin. Kasparov, a long-time critic of Putin, said a “grand alliance” of democracies can show dictators that freedom, and not profits, will define their future relations. On the Missouri campus where Winston Churchill warned in 1946 that the Soviet Union was cementing its hold on Eastern Europe behind an “Iron Curtain,” Kasparov said it is again time to confront the evil of authoritarianism.Ĭhurchill’s speech, “The Sinews of Peace,” helped inspire President Harry Truman’s policies of containment and the creation of NATO.
– The invasion of Ukraine awakened free countries to the threat posed by Russia and Vladimir Putin, but whether they will sustain that resistance to dictators is an open question, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov said Friday during a speech at Westminster College.
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