Putin and Lincoln: Two Scorched-Earth Legacies
By all rights, any American who thinks the American Civil War was righteous, fair and necessary should come out in full support of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Hear me out. I will not argue with you that the War Between the States (Civil War) was not partially, or even primarily, about freeing the slaves. But it was not entirely about freeing the slaves. The "states' rights" argument was real, and it was important, and it is the states' rights argument with which this post is concerned. How is Putin's invasion of the Ukraine not just as much a Civil War as was Lincoln's invasion of the Confederacy? The states that formed the Confederacy believed that the federal government, by its persistent denial of states' rights, had dissolved the legal and political ties between the federal government and the states. The Confederacy, in other words, no longer wanted to be governed by what it considered a despotic government. And isn't that what Ukraine did wh