I’ve been thinking about the terrible (but hardly unavoidable) failures of Reconstruction in the U.S. after the American Civil War. I am hoping that once Putin’s brutal, genocidal war on Ukraine comes to an end and Ukraine has survived, those countries and people in power currently claiming to be Ukraine’s friends and allies do not immediately rush simply to renew friendship and alliances (financial, political, and otherwise) with Putin and his criminal circle of kleptocratic bazillionaire oligarchs, both here in the United States and around the world.

This band of internationally interconnected criminals have already done, and continue to do, so much damage to democracy and the most vulnerable among us everywhere, not to mention the planet itself. They must be stopped. They must be called to account. I hope that we learn the lessons our culture of impunity for the rich and powerful everywhere is trying so hard to teach us.

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, powerful white northerners far too quickly sought to restore a distorted and corrupt “peace” with white southerners, most notably with the very planters who had instigated the war in order to defend their vast wealth in human and other property. These white northerners quickly allowed the planters to win politically (and in the nationally accepted “Lost Cause” narrative) what they had failed to win on the battlefield. We live with this terrible heritage still.

I hope what follows Putin’s war on Ukraine moves the whole world permanently in a more just and humane and equitable direction than Reconstruction did in the U.S. I hope.

 

Elizabeth Leonard

Waterville

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