The Night They Drove Old Kyiv DownBy Rod Dreher
February 26, 2022
An American friend who supports Ukraine resistance to the Russians wrote to say there is a US Civil War angle to thinking about it here too:
Think of the people in Appalachia, poor mountain-dwellers, trying to coax a life out of the rocky soil. They didn’t hold slaves. Yet their homes were destroyed, sons and husbands killed, women raped, goods looted. They were patriots who found enemy soldiers on their home territory. All the non-wealthy people in the south who didn’t own slaves. Blacks themselves suffered violence and theft. When crops were burned, it wasn’t like only the wealthy slave-owners went hungry.
It’s hard to think through. How can that injustice be avoided, when seeking a higher justice?
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I appreciate the point — and okay, Appalachia, which was more pro-Union than the South in general, might not be the best example, but you get the point — and it’s something we Americans should consider when thinking about our Civil War. As far as I know, none of my ancestors who fought for the South owned slaves. They did it because as they saw it, their country had seceded from the Union, and soldiers of a foreign power were on their land. If you believed that the South had a right to self-determination and sovereignty if that’s what its people chose, and if you didn’t think slavery was wrong, then wouldn’t you have felt duty-bound to attack the invaders? Columbus Simmons, the ancestor on whose grave I place a candle every Christmas Eve, was badly wounded in the Battle of Port Hudson, fighting for the Confederacy, and went back to keep fighting as soon as he had barely healed enough to walk again. He left no writings behind, but when you read accounts by other rebel soldiers like him, they didn’t fight because they were necessarily pro-slavery; they fought because they believed Union soldiers were foreign invaders.
I think that one reason why some of the victorious Union leaders tried to be magnanimous in victory was because they understood that about their enemy: that they were flawed men who did what most men would have done if thrown into that situation. This, incidentally, is why I support the Ukrainians today: because whatever the complicating historical and geopolitical factors in this conflict, the fact is that the Russians chose to invade their land. Under those circumstances, patriots fight. I remember watching Ken Burns’s long documentary series about the Vietnam War, and having the deeply unsettling feeling that I could understand the Viet Cong fighting to get the French, and then the Americans, off of their land. This in no way justifies Communism, but if you can’t understand how an ordinary man thinks and feels under those conditions, you don’t know the human heart.
That’s the tragedy of the American South captured so beautifully in The Band’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
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Hear me clearly: I am not saying that the South was justified back then. What I am saying is that war is a complex phenomenon. If you were a pro-Union, anti-slavery white Southerner at the time, the social and psychological pressure to set aside your convictions and fight to defend your homeland would have been extremely difficult to resist. It is very easy to look back on events 150 years ago with moral clarity, and impute that same moral clarity to the people who fought in the war. But it’s wrong.
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I wonder about young Russian soldiers who have nothing against Ukrainians, but who were ordered to attack them by Vladimir Putin, the leader to whom they, as soldiers, owe loyalty. I wonder about Ukrainians who have no desire to kill Russians, but who have to defend their land from the invaders. And I wonder how pro-Russian Ukrainians are feeling tonight, seeing what’s happening. As you may know, part of what makes the Ukraine situation so hard to parse is that it has elements of a civil war too. Eastern Ukraine is more inclined to support Russia, and union with Russia. Putin has exploited that for a decade. One can easily imagine that there are Ukrainians who have wanted all along for their country to maintain close ties with Russia, based in shared history, religion, and culture, and who now feel savagely conflicted about what to do. We should resist turning human beings who are faced with this kind of moral choice into mere abstractions.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-night-they-drove-old-kyiv-down-ukraine-russia/
