Surely we have bigger things to worry about than "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
That quote comes from Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the U.K. at the time. He said it in 1938, when Adolf Hitler was about to seize the Sudetenland, part of what was Czechoslovakia. And you know what came next.
Now compare that sentiment with some of the notions bandied about today regarding the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. People "have bigger problems than Ukraine,” says Robert Fico, a pro-Russian former prime minister of Slovakia, who just won another election. In the U.S., Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur and aspiring populist firebrand, is more specific: "Why,” he wonders on his own social media platform, "do so many American politicians from both parties care 100 times more about the Ukraine border than the USA border?”