“Courage is seeking the truth and speaking it,” Jean Jaurès, the French philosopher and Socialist party leader, told a group of high school students in 1903. “It is not yielding to the law of the triumphant lie as it passes, and not echoing, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, mindless applause and fanatical jeering.”

When the first world war reared its ugly, pointless head, Jaurès refused to give in to mindless fanaticism and attempted to coordinate a Franco-German general strike to stop the rush to war. In 1914, he paid for those efforts with his life when a 29-year-old French nationalist shot him twice in the back.

Courage among ordinary people is not in short supply. The doctors and humanitarian workers who rush to war zones and refugee camps to care for those who need it. Rümeysa Öztürk, the PhD student who was arrested in the US for voicing an opinion against the relentless bombing of Gaza. Israeli conscientious objectors and an increasing number of other refuseniks. The protesters in Tbilisi, Belgrade and Istanbul who have repeatedly faced down their governments’ attempts at repression.

Examples of political courage from those in power, though? These feel less numerous. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has displayed it endlessly. French judges did too, when they upheld the rule of law – which in normal times would simply be doing their duty, but in our times........

© The Guardian