The Night They Drove Old Kyiv Down
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
The Night They Drove Old Kyiv Down
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?
But as far as the cause of the war was the glory of the Union which must never be sundered, as far as it wasn’t about freeing the slaves, it’s pretty similar to Russia saying “don’t draw Ukraine away from us.”
I’ve always had melancholy thoughts about the Southerners who suffered undeservedly from Union troops, and what you wrote triggered that line of reminiscence. I agreed with what you wrote about having the right to defend your home territory.
But they did fight, probably. And were slaughtered. They never could have won. War is hell.
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
I can’t believe I have to say this, but we live in a stupid era, so here goes: I’m not justifying the Confederacy. I’m glad the South lost the war, because holding human beings as slaves is an evil so great that claims of sovereignty can’t possibly outweigh it. But as we look back at that horrible war, we ought to have the humility to grasp that it was not at all clear to Southern people back then, as it is today, that slavery was such a great evil. If you were a white person who had lived in the South back then, all you would have known was a society in which black people were held in bondage. Evil as that was, this would have been normal to you — and this, I believe, is a damnable flaw of the Christian churches of the era (and, in turn, of the Jim Crow period). When confronted by war, even if you were not a slaveholder, or benefited economically in no way from slavery, you would almost certainly have felt the same get off my land sense of instinctive patriotism that Ukrainians rightly feel today.
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. In the song, the narrator, the Southern farmer Virgil Cain, writes of his brother, “just eighteen, proud and brave,” who “took a rebel stand,” but was “laid in his grave” by a Yankee bullet. The lyric sets that up as a statement of family loyalty, of the narrator being loyal to the memory of his farmer father and his dead soldier brother. The verse ends:
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can’t raise a Cain back up
When he’s in defeat.
It’s a song about a poor Southern farmer trying to make sense of the loss of his brother, his livelihood, and what he considered to be his country. The fact that the lyricist, Robbie Robertson, named the narrator “Cain” indicates that in a war between brothers — which is what a civil war is — the Southern brother was marked by evil — the evil, of course, of slavery. Nevertheless, he is a human being who was caught up in the savage currents of war and history, and is left to make sense of his ruin — and therein lies the pathos.
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.
One of the most evil deeds that Vladimir Putin has done here is to deepen the hatred between Ukrainians, and create what also amounts to civil war. In Live Not By Lies, Father Kirill Kaleda, a Russian Orthodox priest, laments the state media propaganda that was turning Russians against Ukrainians. He told me that in 2019; now we see where that campaign of hatred ended. I fear too that with our blundering since the end of the Cold War, the US may have played a similar role in laying the groundwork for this war. Both sides using the Ukrainians as pawns in the Great Game.
Hear me clearly: I’m not saying there is a moral equivalence. Putin was the one who started this war. It is primarily he who turned brother against brother. But as with the US Civil War, this is not a Hollywood movie, with a tidy black-and-white moral. There are mothers and fathers in both Ukraine and Russia who are mourning their dead sons tonight, or who will have cause to do so, in a war that was chosen by Vladimir Putin.
It’s night here in Central Europe. The papers say they are fighting for Kyiv:
I hope the Ukrainians hold the Russians off, but given the disparity in firepower, it’s hard to be optimistic. A Ukrainian immigrant friend texts today from the US to tell me his brother-in-law, aged 62, quit his job in Warsaw and went back home to Kyiv to fight Russian invaders. (My friend also said that his fellow Americans should look at what’s happening to Ukraine today and never, ever give up the Second Amendment.) Heroes are being made today. Whatever you may think about the roots of this war (who is to blame, to what degree, and so forth), it has become plain that the Ukrainian people’s resistance to the invaders has been incredibly inspiring. Heroes are being made now, including Volodomyr Zelensky, the TV comic turned unlikely president whose courage will probably get him killed, and if so, the Russians will have made a global martyr who will hurt them far more in death than he could do in life. If Russia wins this, I believe it will ultimately prove to have been Putin’s Waterloo — and whether he lives or dies, the spiritual Duke of Wellington will have been Zelensky.
Kyiv may fall tonight, or if not tonight, tomorrow night. If it does, the Ukrainians who went down fighting for it, unlike US Southerners, will not have to bear the tragic burden of having fought for a bad cause. But then, had the Confederacy prevailed, we probably today wouldn’t think that their cause was bad. Such is the moral contingency of history.
If the Russians do prevail, ultimately, they will set up a puppet government and begin Reconstruction. Many of us Americans — me, for sure — will naturally sympathize with Ukrainians who resist the government of occupation. But let us recall that this is how a lot of ordinary Southerners will have regarded the Reconstruction-era state governments. This is not to say they were right — the South owned slaves, a great moral evil that brought down the righteous judgment of God in the form of war and occupation — but in thinking people, it ought to make us consider the human element in a war that the ideologues have told us can only be regarded according to a simplistic good-and-evil narrative. War really is hell, and its consequences last long after the shooting stops. This is why I have been so fervently against warmongering voices in the United States, eager to jump into this thing on the basis of emotion.
In the same way, as much as I despise what Russia has done, knowing what I do about the role of Kyiv in Russia’s religious consciousness, I can’t see the Russian people as simple villains here. The fact that Putin had to spend a decade propagandizing his people to hate Ukrainians, and even still is seeing antiwar resistance, should tell you something. My friend the great contemporary Russian novelist Evgeny Vodolazkin is a Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, but who was born and raised in a city he grew up calling Kiev (the Russian pronunciation). I just sent him an e-mail assuring him of my prayers. I imagine his heart is shredded tonight. If you are tempted to simplify this war in your mind, think of men and women like him. The Russians aren’t all Vladimir Putin, you know.
UPDATE:Vodolazkin has come out against the war. [UPDATE: Took down most of this update, simply because I don’t want to make life harder for him when he returns to Russia. — RD]
UPDATE.2: My old TAC boss Daniel McCarthy remains, as ever, a principled critic of warmongers. In his new Unherd piece about Putin and Ukraine, McCarthy condemns Putin’s aggression, but warns against the alarmism in the media that could get us into World War III. Excerpts:
Automatically comparing every crisis with the Second World War is a dangerous habit. It’s a reflex that helped stampede the United States into a needless war in the Middle East 20 years ago. Iraq was an “Islamo-fascist” dictatorship with “weapons of mass destruction”, a threat on par with a nuclear Nazi Germany. Most of America’s policy and media elite bought into the idiotic idea, with disastrous consequences — most of all for the people of Iraq.
Putin’s Russia is a much more serious threat than Saddam’s Iraq. But it’s a new menace, not another Nazi Germany. So President Biden deserves credit for refraining from hyperbole in his remarks this week. He rightly noted — with Cold War lessons and perhaps with America’s own rueful experience in Afghanistan in mind — that “history has shown time and again how swift gains and territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of mass civil disobedience, and strategic dead ends”.
He’s right to praise Biden’s handling of this crisis, I think. Biden has been far more measured than some Republicans, and some in his own party, have been. More:
An editorial in the Kansas City Star likewise claimed that Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley “has clearly provided aid and comfort to Putin and hard-liners in Russia”. As the article acknowledged, Hawley has stated that “America has an interest in Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. And we have a strong interest in deterring Russian adventurism.” But because Hawley does not believe Ukraine should be part of NATO or that America should “fight Russia over Ukraine’s future”, he is morally libelled in the language of treason.
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, those who doubted the wisdom of George W. Bush’s war were subjected to similar obloquy. Then as now, conservatives counseling restraint were denounced as less than truly American. Today Tucker Carlson is the enemy of all right-thinking votaries of liberal democracy. Twenty years ago conservative columnists like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak were the enemy, branded by David Frum as “unpatriotic conservatives” in the pages of National Review on the eve of the Iraq conflict.
This narrowing of American political discourse did not wind up doing the Iraqis or Afghans any favors two decades ago, and it is not doing the Ukrainians any favours today. Now, as then, there is a need for something other than Washington’s reflexive apocalypticism. Realism, cool-headedness, and scepticism are more important than ever in a time of emergency. This is not the moment for Republicans, in particular, to discard the hard-won wisdom of the last two decades, purchased at great price after the follies of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read it all. You can and should be disgusted by Putin simps like Nick Fuentes and the far-right Groyper dimwits chanting for the warmonger in Moscow ... but whatever you do, resist the urge to demonize all voices against the war. I feel so strongly about this because that was a mistake I made in 2002, and regret it to this very day. In times like this, we need more than ever to listen to dissident voices. They might be wrong, but they might also be telling us something important that we need to know to avoid serious trouble down the road.
Just now I heard from a friend back in the US, a military veteran, who writes:
Someone put on the internet earlier today the question: would we in the US fight invaders like the citizens of Ukraine are at this moment? I’ve thought about it, and the answer is no, not in the same way anyway. Ukrainians share a common history and ethnicity which has helped them build solidarity. Here in the US, we don’t all have the same history or ethnicity and the things that did help us build solidarity—pride in the ideals of our country, a recognition of it as a flawed place that continues to get better, that has been shit on by our elites—especially from the left, so now we are left fragmented, angry and demoralized. Sure some would fight, but they probably would out of self defense for their communities and less out of a belief in the solidarity of the US.
I think he’s on to something. This is what I mean when I talk about the national security threat from wokeness. That view of mine has been caricatured as “he supports Putin because Putin is anti-woke,” which is bullsh*t, and the kind of bullsh*t that is meant to stop people from thinking.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-night-they-drove-old-kyiv-down-ukraine-russia/
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