On the 28th of August 1963 in front of Washington D.C.s national mall more than 200,000 people gathered. They had come from across America. That day the sun was burning down and people were fainting from heat and humidity. Yet the crowd stayed. And they listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

On the 21st of December 1989 a very different crowd had gathered in front of the Communist Party headquarters in Bucharest. Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s dictator, was the one giving the speech that day. It began as it always did, with rigged applause. But then a few brave souls booed. Then a few more. Two hours later Ceaușescu had fled and four days later he had been found and executed.

On the 24th of February 2022 Russian airborne troops launched a helicopter assault to seize the Hostomel airport north-west of Kyiv. They expected a swift win, and a foothold for the march on Ukraine’s capital. Yet the surprised, outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainians did not run. Instead they put up a fight and the rest is now history.

There seems to be a growing sense that value based policy is paramount to weakness. And that it is internally incoherent. This is in fact exactly what the Kremlin would love us to believe. Russian propaganda ridicules our values, but it is not stupid. It takes shots at those values that are the easiest to attack, it writes “the effeminate West is rotting under the onslaught of decadence, feminism and political correctness.”

But these values are not the their real targets. Freedom of speech, the right to self determination and the dignity of life. This is what they aim to undermine.

And when these values are attacked, and we once again come to grips with the reality of their absence then we see their power. Each of the earlier stories shows this. The danger of decadence is not that we acquire too many values but that we loose touch with the most important ones.