On Being America’s Red-Headed Stepchild
Are you puzzled and irritated by the viciousness and falsity of most of what is being published these days about the South and Southern history? The beginning of all wisdom on this subject is to know that in American public discourse and so-called scholarship there is usually no effort to understand the South, like any other human phenomenon, as it is. Rather the South is raw material in a morality play about American, that is, about Northern righteousness.
The South is the red-headed stepchild in the American family. Or as Thomas Landess has put it, the South is a swarthy villain who threatens to carry off the fair maiden America unless he is suppressed by the strong and noble blond hero of the North. I can predict with absolute certainty that the upcoming observance of the 150th anniversary of the "Civil War" will be produced in terms of this melodrama. It will be the official and pervasive theme of the celebration, with which every educational institution and media outlet will be saturated.
My favourite example of this type of mind was a statement a few years ago by an Ivy League intellectual. America, he said, is threatened by increasing violence because of the spread of the “Southern gun culture.” This was written at the time of Timothy McVeigh from New York and the U.S. Army, the Unabomber from Harvard and Berkeley, and the Columbine shooters—none of whom were Southern or, except for the latter, used guns.
You see the assumption guiding this great thinker. If there is evil in America it must be because it is oozing out from Dixie, known to all good people as the source of bad things in an otherwise pure and righteous country. The distorted thinking, the hatred, and the projection of aggressive emotions onto other people is evident. Unfortunately, much of the history of the South is being written today by people who accept without question the unexamined and self-flattering assumptions of this person.
Another story to get at my point. A few years ago, when the controversy of the Confederate flag on the South Carolina capitol was raging, I read that the students at the University of Washington State, out on the Pacific, were rioting over the flag. I daresay that a Southerner can go for months without even thinking about Washington State (though I did enjoy the trip with my children to see the whales in Puget Sound). A Southerner would never be so presumptuous and unneighbourly as to attempt to dictate to the people of Washington State, but they feel it is their right to discern our faults and correct them. We are talking about two different national characters here. I strongly suspect that those folks up in Vermont who talk about independence for themselves would not hesitate to trample out our grapes once more if they got the chance.
The young son of a family I know, museum-quality specimens of Midwestern liberals, recentl;y wrote to the President about the oil situation. Mr. President, he said, you should do away with cars and make everyone ride horses. However much a Southerner might prefer horses to gas-guzzlers, it would never occur to one of us that the first thing to do was to demand that the government undertake universal enforcement of our preference. This is normal behaviour for a Yankee and is even considered a mark of superior virtue and intelligence.
I could cite a thousand examples of how all this strange mentality vents itself among historians who at the present time have distorted not only Southern, but American and African-American history to the point of pervasive falsification.
In the 1830's a publisher called Jonathan Elliot collected and brought out a work called The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. At that time very little documentation about the formation of the Constitution was available. A well-known American historian once told me that the publication of "Elliot’s Debates" was part of a devious conspiracy by John C. Calhoun. Elliot was not a Southerner and his work was good scholarship that made available some authentic documents about vital mattters that ought to have been welcomed by anyone. But since the thrust of the documents supported the Southern view of the Constitution, their publication was obviously evilly motivated. This is the explanation that fit his unconscious bad-South scenario of American history.
Another example: Historians have been at great pains to explain why South Carolina was so exercised about the tariff that it defied the federal government by Nullification. Why were they so hot an bothered about this unimportant matter? They must have really been crazed with fear of their slaves, or they were lashing out because of their anxiety over soil exhaustion and population loss. Historians can’t accept what they plainly said: that they were tired of being ripped off by federal legislation that picked their pockets to benefit some rich people at the North, that they could prove that this was the real economic effect of the tariff, and that they thought the Union should be of mutual benefit to all rather than a burden to some and benefit to others. But since we know that Southerners, unlike Northerners, are always up to no good and we can’t believe anything they say, historians have to look for the hidden cause.
A common trick of the falsifiers is to neglect to ask the question—compared to what? For instance, it is commonplace to assert, without any real evidence, that the antebellum South was dominated by a few of the wealthiest slaveholders who lorded it over the rest of the population. Granted that rich people have more sayso in any society than poor people, we ought to ask the question: did the wealthy in the Old South have more power than the wealthy in the North or Europe? Or less power? Or the same amount? It is never even felt necessary to ask the questioin. We announce that we have found something in the South that we don’t like; ergo, we are free to assert that this bad thing particularly characterizes the South.
The current fad is to treat everything good that Southerners say about the Confederacy as part of a "Lost Cause Myth" that Southerners made up after the fact to rationalize their failure and their evilly motivated attempt to destroy the "greatest government on earth." Robert E. Lee was not really a great general, Confederate soldiers were not really brave and out-numbered, the people really did not support the Confederacy, a distinct Southern culture was merely a pretense to defend slavery, etc., etc., etc. In the face of vast contradictory evidence, it is simply declared that everything Southerners said about themselves was a lie they made up and told after the fact. A catalog I picked up just a few days ago reported new books: The Myth of Jefferson Davis and The Myth of Bedford Forrest. You see, Southerners always make up flattering stories about themselves while Northerners just tell the true facts.
Southerners are intrinsically evil and Northerners intrinsically good. The South is not to be understood for itself, as it is and was, as something with its own life and identity. It exists only as the bad side of America. Casting us in the villain's role is not in the least affected by the facts—that the South is now the only part of the country where a majority of black people say they feel at home, and that racial tension and hatred is more prevalent today in the big liberal states than in the South. It leads the Southerner to suspect that all the furor about imposed equality in the last half century is motivated by something less seemly than the pure thirst for justice.
It is a strange and not comfortable feeling to be the object of hatred of great numbers of people you have never met and to whom you have never done any harm. On the upside, it does give one some objective distance from the myth of unique American virtue, a false belief far more pervasive and destructive than admiration of the Lost Cause.
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"It is a strange and not comfortable feeling to be the object of hatred of great numbers of people you have never met and to whom you have never done any harm. On the upside, it does give one some objective distance from the myth of unique American virtue.."
Southerners and honest Roman Catholics have at least this much in common. Very well said, true to the nth degree, and being exploited and exercised on a daily basis before our very eyes. The virtue that too few Southerners and Roman Catholics lack today is courage or fortitude -- and I don't mean that aspect of courage which attacks the enemy; rather the more noble aspect of courage that simply endures the enemy without capitulation to his will -- may the "old rugged cross" of Christ teach them both in these trying times. And thank you, Dr. Wilson, for a lifetime example of such courage.
And, of course, the Republican Party is failing because of the South, and not the because of the failed, leftist policies of a Connecticut carpetbagger.
"It is a strange and not comfortable feeling to be the object of hatred of great numbers of people you have never met and to whom you have never done any harm."
Professor Wilson this is exactly the feeling that Serbian-Americans had during the 1990s when the Balkans version of the Yankee morality play was in style. More than once I was told to my face by a preachy do-gooder that "my people" should be "ashamed" and that we were "nazis". Would have been news to my own ancestors who died or were decorated veterans of battles against nazis. (When told how silly of an epithet this was there were some who actually refuted that Serbs were members of the Allies alongside the British and Americans in WWII. Talk about denying basic facts...)
When some of us second and third generation born Americans publicly held dissenting views agianst the Balkans propoganda more than once we were told by mobs that all of us Serbs were "unpatriotic". Again, would have been news to men like Lance Sijan, Serbian-American and most decorated US air force pilot ever (who died in a cell in Vietnam because he refused to be paraded on film to be used for anti-American propoganda purposes).
All of this would have been upsetting and unsettling enough, but what really got me was how the Great Big Propoganda Machine turned long-time friends against so many of us Serbs. This was deeply hurtful and scared me more than anything else.
And, as with the South and her culture, Serbia and Serbs will continue to be trashed by the very same people.
Yes, Eagle, these folks will stop at nothing. It is to the point now that not even the perpetual satisfaction of their own desires will satiate their thirst for more destruction. It has always been so when this type gets insinuated into positions of power. The barbarian has always been described as a destroyer, "he can befog and destroy," but he cannot sustain, create or make anything. Or still again, " we sit and watch him, we tolerate him, in long stretches he is harmless enough and we are unafraid. At times we are even amused are tickled by his irreverance and comic inversion of old certitudes and fixed creeds... But as we laugh or smile at this decadent and silly behavior, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile."
What have we created recently? It is the same today with every permanent institution: Marriage? Church? Culture? Creeds? Habits? --All replaced with only destruction? More progressive notions have replaced these old certitudes such as divorce, parentless children, roving adolescent gangs in our state schools and city neighborhoods, a renewal of interest in witches, warlocks, occult practices, and of course the increase of this feral population quickly becoming part of the largest prison population in the world?
Southerner, Serb, Christian civility, it doesn't matter to the destroyer it is simply something in his way. And so has it always been for civilizations.
robert writes: "Southerners and honest Roman Catholics have at least this much in common."
I was thinking the same while finishing the piece, focusing on the modern British origins of both hatreds. The two peoples that antebellum and Gilded Age Yankees of New England Anglo-Saxon ancestry hated with a fury were white Southerners and Irish Catholics.
BL. Pope Pius IX highlighted the connection by sending the crown of thorns to Jefferson Davis as he was imprisoned. When American Catholics stop acting and thinking like Boston Brahmins or Philadelphia Quakers and begin acting and thinking in accord with Bl. Pius IX, they will set the tone the country needs.
"4 Comment by robert on 19 April 2010:
Yes, Eagle, these folks will stop at nothing. It is to the point now that not even the perpetual satisfaction of their own desires will satiate their thirst for more destruction. It has always been so when this type gets insinuated into positions of power. The barbarian has always been described as a destroyer, “he can befog and destroy,” but he cannot sustain, create or make anything. Or still again, ” we sit and watch him, we tolerate him, in long stretches he is harmless enough and we are unafraid. At times we are even amused are tickled by his irreverance and comic inversion of old certitudes and fixed creeds… But as we laugh or smile at this decadent and silly behavior, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”
What have we created recently? It is the same today with every permanent institution: Marriage? Church? Culture? Creeds? Habits? –All replaced with only destruction? More progressive notions have replaced these old certitudes such as divorce, parentless children, roving adolescent gangs in our state schools and city neighborhoods, a renewal of interest in witches, warlocks, occult practices, and of course the increase of this feral population quickly becoming part of the largest prison population in the world?
Southerner, Serb, Christian civility, it doesn’t matter to the destroyer it is simply something in his way. And so has it always been for civilizations."
Neocons are honest about it, with their talk of creative destruction. The key is to get people to see that the same is true of Honest Abe and 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian' Sherman, true of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, true of Elizabeth I and Disraeli, true of Bismarck and Garibaldi.
Jake@5 When American Catholics stop acting and thinking like Boston Brahmins or Philadelphia Quakers ....
Yes, but before we can give anything to our neighbor, we must first restore something in our own souls. One cannot give what one does not have. It is the same for the South. It is hanging by a thread. Once upon a time it meant something to be a practicing Catholic, a Southerner, a red neck, or even a conservative or liberal but it means less and less with each passing year. Soon we will all be servants in the polyglot boarding house of globalism that our dear leaders have desired for us for some time now. I hope some black cassocked priest has prayed some old Latin prayers over my corpse before the then.
I see no chance of resurrecting the America we lost so long as the left has a stranglehold on pop culture and the media that disseminates it. I am becoming more and more convinced that what is needed as much as anything is a Kill Your Television movement. It is simply inconceivable that a truly conservative, decentralist movement could ever coalesce when literally every home in America contains within it a cultural marxist propaganda machine.
There are two problems that I have when defending the south.
1. The slavery thing. White guilt for this is still immense. It seems clear that we should be able to evaluate a society without fixating on one single aspect of that society, but when it comes to slavery in the south people just can't do that. As we saw recently, even talking about the confederacy or the civil war without mentioning slavery makes people lose their minds. Apart from that, chattel slavery really was a pretty lousy thing, and I've yet to figure out a way to reconcile it all together.
2. As far as I know, the south today is still the backward part of America, with the highest crime rates, worst literacy rates/education, lowest IQs, general lack of development, etc. It's hard to defend a place when by all our accepted rubrics it's lacking.
"As far as I know, the south today is still the backward part of America, with the highest crime rates, worst literacy rates/education, lowest IQs, general lack of development, etc"
If these are the hallmarks of "backwardness", then the "backward part of America" is the minority-dominated inner city.
"The slavery thing"
The WBTS was fought between two slave-holding nations, both of which respected the institution of slavery for the entirety of their existence. The Stars and Stripes flew over more slaves for far more years than the Stars and Bars ever did.
10 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 19 April 2010:
“As far as I know, the south today is still the backward part of America, with the highest crime rates, worst literacy rates/education, lowest IQs, general lack of development, etc”
If these are the hallmarks of “backwardness”, then the “backward part of America” is the minority-dominated inner city."
That truth only makes it worse, because of 'white guilt,' which is at root is not about whites truly believing whites cause blacks produce endless Haitis and Zimbabwes and Detroits; instead, white guilt is about whites feeling so sorry for blacks because they are what they are - in and of themselves - and so want to help uplift blacks out a sense of misguided charity that they will punish their own, or at least punish whites they see as different from their own.
So northern whites hearts bleeding for blacks being black means they blame and want to punish Clyde Wilson and others like him. The Southerner is the whipping boy. If blacks are not held accountable for their own actions, which means for endless violent crimes and failures, then somebody else must be punished in their place.
When you fail to punish the guilty, you guarantee the innocent will be punished.
Heresy is taking something that is true and breaking it all out of proportion, denying it altogether or elevating it far out of place to the detriment of other truths. Modern 'civil rights' is a heresy, for it operates on a Manichean scale: black = angelic victim, and white = evil victimizer; non-Christian = victim, and orthodox Christian = oppressor; homosexual = victim, and traditional Christian family = every horror imaginable.
In June, I will be giving a paper entitled "The South: A Prophet Against the Anti-Culture?" The anti-culture is fairly easy to define, being that it is the medium in which we currently exist. In the anti-culture, the ancient principles, processes and institutions, i.e. culture, which restrain the whims, compulsions, and desires of the individual are being or have already been removed, marginalized or deconstructed. The "autonomous" individual has been freed or emanicpated from his responsibilities, duties and obligations to God, to family, to Church and to the genius loci. Character which is the aquisition, internalizing and living out of the cardinal, capital and theological virtues is replaced by personality and the cult thereof along with the vapid "values" which are attendant.
The prophet pleads against the emerging culture (anti-culture) and takes his stand for the order of being/created order. He calls us back and is the antithesis of the Puritan, do-good proselytizer.
Dealing with the "South" is dangerous. It is all too easy to turn it into a sentimental abstraction, taking up the crippling habits of the enemy. The South is real people living today who have accepted the legacy of their forebears, warts and all, and live out that accepted legacy as their heritage, nurturing it to pass it on to their offspring as a legacy.
The work of the prophet is not easy, for he is usually despised by his own; but he works toward hope, a hope anchored in the order of being and not in its overthrow.
@13 Mr. Peters,
I hope Chronicles will publish a version of your talk in some future issue.
Matt@9 It seems clear that we should be able to evaluate a society without fixating on one single aspect of that society, but when it comes to slavery in the south people just can’t do that.
Yes, but some day this intense focus on the part to the exclusion of the whole, will come back to haunt its practitioners. Bill Clinton for instance once asked that he not be judged simply by the bald face lies he told to the country he was supposedly leading but also on those occassions when he spoke the truth to his country. It is a reasonable request to make, especially to other politicians like Newt Gingrich G. W. Bush, John McCain and other professional liars, but one should not base the ethics of an entire culture on the ethics of its worst leaders. In similar fashion, anyone who equates "the South" with the love of slavery is not qualified to speak about such matters.
All too true, although I was not aware until now of leftist students trashing the Confederate flag on the University of Washington campus. Over the years I have spent hundreds of hours in the UW's library, and the campus itself is beautiful. In fact, in 1980 or '81 I took Joe Brown and two of his seminary students on a tour of the campus, which features a spectacular and architecturally gratifying view of Mt. Rainier from Red Square. Hard to beat.
The idiots are a small minority at the U-Dub, as locals call it. Most students are quite normal. The administration and humanities faculty is, of course, filled with the usual weak-spined characters. All in all, the Jesuit school nearby, Seattle University, is far more self-righteous and leftwing than the University of Washington. As for Seattle itself, the less said the better. Second-rate architecture, aesthetic pretention galore, intellectual mediocrity, and general overratedness typifies the city of Seattle. But the University of Washington is deserving of accolades, not condemnation, if only because the vast majority of its students are not self-styled elites or navel-gazing coffeehouse intellectuals.
robert m. peters:
The paper sounds very good. Any chance you will later place it online?
robert:
The reason people cannot see the South as anything but slavery is that the Elites cannot allow them to do so. It is the continual waving of the Bloody Flag of the Sacrosanct Union. The Left must have a cause to justify its wrecking of the vestiges of Christendom, and making people believe that only blacks have ever been enslaved and only white Southerners owned slaves and unless the Left makes slavery the be-all and end-all of discussions regarding the South and Southern culture that slavery will return is the best way for the Left to hoodwink gullible, well-meaning white Christians into backing it.
And then there is the perhaps deeper reason: unless we paint the South as evil incarnate, more people will see that Lincoln's war was unjustified, which means all of the new centralized post-Lincoln US is based on a bad precedent. Very few people can manage to see that, for it hits them too hard. They NEED to see Lincoln as some combination of Moses and Plato, with messianic overtones; they need to see the Union as righteous in all things.
@5: I am a Roman Catholic and have mixed blood ancestry, part of which inspires me to continue wearing that old Claddagh ring after all these years. However, I also have mixed feeling about "Irish Catholic" Americans, both in history and in contemporary society--look at their poster-boy family. But I should be fair: to a large extent, as has been pointed out, they were victims of WASP brutalism in the same way the Vendéen French were the victims of Jacobin wrath. Still, that's the past, and right now, as I said to my friend on the phone, "We need an Inquisition in the Archdiocese of Boston."
I'm too negative. You know, I actually have a t-shirt that reads, "I [heart] RIEN : I'm parisien]" (not making this up).
@9.2
The South is the one place in America where I have encountered more people of good manners, dignity, gentility and restraint than any other part of the country. Granted there are many, many exceptions, but it is much rarer to find that in other parts of the country. Where I live in the Midwest (Milwaukee) the only places you find something similar are tiny pockets in old ethnic neighborhoods (old Polish, for instance) where the people still have a recollection of manners from the old country.
Dr. Wilson (or any reader of this): I am teaching American history to my 9th grade niece. My understanding of slavery in the United States has been tainted (that's far too mild a word!) by my Northern Puritanical public school education. Are there some references you could point me to that would help me teach at least two people (my niece and myself) a truer version of the issue? (I did teach her correctly about the South Carolina perspective on the tariff issue, and am doing my best in other areas. The slavery issue is the thorny one for me, and since we are nearing the War Between the States in a month I need some help. I understand that Northerners used slavery as the propaganda to fire up support for the war, and that the real issue was more related to states' rights.)
Any help or direction will be greatly appreciated.
I also note that modern historians are foolish enough to entertain the 'slave power' conspiracy theory.
@5 Now recently some are claiming Pius IX didnt make the crown of thorns, but Varina Davis. Dr Wilson, is there any truth to this?
But I heard this from a Catholic who was trying to prove that Pius IX didnt 'really' at least moderately support the CSA.
I share another posters uneasiness about the Irish Catholics; not for them as persons, but I think because of them (in part) the Catholic Church in America promotes itself almost as a
'counter-American' identity. They act as if the older English and French Catholics from Maryland and Louisiana never existed.
I'll gladly take to a horse, but it seems we'll need to occupy *cough* I mean free China first, then India, South America, and finally Europe.
Once the world is conquered, we can free the world from cars.
We can then ban public comments questioning the Global Warming mythology to ensure hateful right wing radicals don't stir up the wild masses.
Tongue in Cheek...
My favourite inconvenient detail is how the North reopened total war against the South.
That said, I'm doubtful how influential the remnant North is today. I acknowledge some immigrants, but I don't see these waves of new immigrants as connected to those who unjustly invaded the South in 1861.
I fear this anti-Yankee approach is missing the mark. We're Southerners, and we're distinct; but today we face a new enemy. Cromwell is dead. Lincoln is dead. Today is not 1865.*
Today it's old America, including a distinct South, fighting for survival - fighting blind and distracted against a sort of Rainbow coalition whose casus foederis is anti-white. I'm simply not being ideologically racial here either - the South is clearly Christian and ought to remain distinct.
Today it appears the South is demonized because it's a part of the anti-white, march of progress mythology. Whites owned blacks, and the South is made into that symbol of slavery. The ideological nation "North" freed blacks during the Civil Rights movement, but this wasn't the nation-state North according to mythology. Likewise, the founders of America dreamed of ideological nationalism according to myth. It was only with the Civil Rights movement that this yearning was finally realised, as the tale goes.
The South is demonised too because it's part of true America. Southerners aren't ideological - we're a remnant America that refuses to entirely join with the new cancer. We're a part of flyover country in that regard.
=
My point: the division today isn't North v. South but America v. anti-America. This can be so without dissolving the South, and it is so even if we allow ourselves to be distracted and divided and thusly defeated without our throwing so much as a punch.
* I say that respectfully, meaning I don't think the mark is missed by much but the slight miss is significant.
Which groups pushed for the 1965 Immigration Act btw? The core of America today is Midwesterners and Southerners - two very different groups themselves made up of patches of very different groups.
In SC my folks have a history of fighting the upcountry for power..., but the South united regardless against an invading enemy. Today we either focus our energies on the true enemies or we Americans fade away.
And likewise the Celts in the UK need to cease being manipulated by the Marxists there. Nationalism is loving one's people not hating the English.
Good people, you raise many interesting questions and make many good points that require almost a book to answer.
#18 Mr Wihowski. I appreciate your efforts and understand your problem. I think it is necessary to establish context.
Throughout human history, until the fairly recent invention of labour-saving machinery, the world's work was organised through some system of bonded labour. The Bible is full of it. St. Paul counseled that servants and masters should treat each other properly and told a runaway to go back to his master. Most of our European ancestors experienced centuries of serfdom. Slavery existed in nearly all the colonies of the New World including the North, the Caribbean and Central America. It came into existence during the early preilous days when the first settlements in the New World were made and there was desperate need for labour. Of course, it would not have worked if it had not already been widespread in Africa and if Africans had not been willing to sell each other.
It had been phased out in the Northern States only a few years before The War.
Do we really believe that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were monsters? Visit Mount Vernon and Monticello or any of the plantations around Charleston. Were these such bad places to live and work? Study the accounts of life in the New York, Boston, and London slums contemporary to the Old South just before The War.
It is a fact that the African-American population proliferated in the South, had a high birth-rate, good diet and housing, good health, and reasonable labour for the times. The African-Americans emerged from slavery, for the most part, with work skills and habits, family stability, and Christian faith that actually deteriorated after emancipation. This was because Christian Southern masters had continually improved the conditions. Slavery was evolving and would have gradually and peacefully disappeared without war. If it had not been for the abolitionists, according to Daniel Webster. Most of the slaves in the South lived in groups of one or two families who lived and worked with the white family who "owned" them.
The Southerners lived with a condition, not a theory. Northerners declaimed against slavery but no one ever offered a practical method of ending it without immense social disruption.
Southerners simply could not allow outsiders---who were self-interested and hypocritical and did not have to live with the consequences of their morality---to control their every day lives. Lincoln in effect said that slavery was bad but he did not know what to do about it---except preventing black people, slave or free, from living in his own State and in the West.
How were the slaves if free to make a living. How were they to fit into American society when no white Americans believed they were equal citizens? A belief that was as strong or stronger in the North than in the South, even though the numbers of black people were insignificant compared to the South where they were 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in every State.
I think it involves understanding that the past is complicated and not to be understood too quickly. We ought to study history for understanding, not to make summary moral judgments that people long gone were somehow not as good and smart as us.
Best wishes, CW
Response to some of the other discussion.
I agree that conservative Catholics and Southerners are the only conservative forces in the U.S. today.
I have heard often that Southerners have to join with other "old Americans" to save the day. Who are these putative "old Americans"?
Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, the Bushes, Dick Cheney? Show me who they are and show me that they don't hate and desire to exploit the South just as much as the Leftists. I am waiting.
How can anyone possibly believe that the Irish Catholics have been a conservative force in the U.S.?
Through American history, at least until the late 19th century, Southerners showed more tolerance for Catholics and Jews than any other part of American society. See how well our good will has been reciprocated.
Metaphorically it is Thermopylae. The forces arrayed against the truth tellers of Southern/American history are both political parties with their surrogates, the NAACP, SPLC, Claremont Institute, American Enterprise Institute, The Tea Party, etc. The Universities, public schools, mass media,entertainment and cinema industries,Collegiate and Professional sports Associations and alas the Military machine.
I had an unfortunate conversation with Tea Party zealot who attended the Tax day protests regarding a person who brought the Confederate Battle Flag to a gathering in Texas. This person was escorted out of the event by police at the request of the organizers. I questioned the wisdom of bringing the flag to the event where the media was prowling for anything they could misconstrue, but I also pointed out the hypocrisy of the organizers and the lack of spine in the face of PC pressure. I was told they, the Tea Party, did not want any such symbols at their gathering that can be taken as racist and extreme. We defenders of Dixie were by in large ignorant,stupid, racists and we should either should shut up or stay away as to lessen their chances of getting rid of Obama and advancing Conservatism.
@ 25.
Thank you very much for your reply. I guess I needed it to confirm what I have already gleaned over the years from reading Chronicles, the Chronicles blogs, and other sources. That reading and some common-sense thinking about the issue (as you allude to) have given me a large amount of the perspective you presented. I just needed an authoritative voice (and some pointers) to give my thoughts the confirmation that they were on the right track.
I have visited Mount Vernon, and it was clear that the Uncle Tom's Cabin scenario was not present there. I had hoped it was not an aberration from the norm I was taught in public school.
God bless you for taking the time to reply.
Many or most of the Irish immigrants were what Dr. Wilson once called "the shanty Irish" by which I presume he meant poor, uneducated, less cultivated and perhaps more ambitious as a result of their desperate poverty. The French have always tended to be the most civilized -- just as the Tale of Two cities "was the best and worst of times." What American Catholics tend to ignore is that our culture, American culture, is Protestant in origin. Our best literature, poetry, music, etc. is a British thing. Failure to see and admire this fact only results in a loss of understanding, proportion, delight and unjustified resentment for quite an extraordinary thing. On the other hand what Protestants fail to recognize is that Catholics created Englishness. Bede and Augustine, no less than Shakespeare and most of our greatest leaders before Henry, were born and bred from Catholic soil . The feud is a familiar feud involving all the old human vices of murder,sex, character assasination, calumny and all the rest of the deadly sins. For those with experience, that is to say anyone who has raised a family, this observation should be all that needs saying. Yet, it never seems to satisfy the proud and arrogant hearts of our times who tend to possess more sap than root when it comes to understanding our ancient heritage. And for this type, only prayer and fasting can help dispel the blindness.
@27
Thats surprising. I noticed in the coverage of some of the Tea Party protests, mainly in Texas and Georgia, folks were flying Alamo '1824' flags, 3 percent flags, 'Come and Take It' flags, and even the somewhat obscure Tennessee and South Carolina secession flags.
But yet I admit I saw no battle flags, no blood stained banners or any highly recognizable Confederate flag, even in the South.
Further thought on the Tea Party protests; I went to the first early (and largest) protest in Louisville KY with an Orphan Brigade flag and had no trouble.
Most people would not know the Orphan Brigade flag or the thirty odd other historically recognized CSA flags if you draped around their shoulders.
#32 Brian,
What I can't understand is why there were so many flags with White Crosses on them, or why they used Latin phrases like Deo Vindice, Sic Semper Tyrannis, or why the old cowboy, Gus McCrae, down there at Lonesome Dove, Texas, thought it was important to know a little Latin even if you couldn't pronounce it very well. These were sure enough wierd people!!!
#32 Robert
Are you serious?
No, but I thought that would be obvious. I guess in these times one must not presume an audience for the tongue in cheek type post. Another example of why it is not good for man to live forever, else it would have been good for him to remain alone.
Robert --I leaned heavily toward it was jest, but one never knows until you become familiar with each ones style. Thanks for the poke none the less.
#30. Thanks for the info. I have heard some reports of Confederate flags being forcibly removed from Tea Party events and of one in Virginia which played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Clearly a lot of these people have the fatal American failing of wanting to be respectable, which insures their ineffectiveness---except as dupes of the Republican machine.
Your welcome Dr Wilson, but as others said, I think my Orphan Brigade flag and some of the state secession flags are just that obscure enough that only the historically minded know what the hell they are. That was the first time Id ever seen the Tennessee secession flag done as a reproduction, Ive never seen it for sale online (its just a Stars and Bars with the Tennessee seal where the stars are supposed to be - quite close to Georgia's current flag).
One of my favorite state secession flags is Alabama - I'd hope all over that if someone made a repro of it.
Question for others that have attended Tea Party events: have you seen Confederate flag carrying folks removed? If this is uniform across the country, it really makes me lose my respect for the people organizing the events; I thought anti-political correctness was one component of the Tea Parties, but maybe not. Id have a heard time believing that people living in Mississippi, South Carolina or any of the other few 'unreconstructed' southern states would have a problem with the flags.
Mr Wihowski@18 I would suggest the following books: Emancipating Slaves enslaving Free Men by Jeffery Hummel,Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel,North against South by Ludwell Johnson,When in the Course of Human Events by Charles Adams.
The hatred of the Irish is due to two things: the English always hate most that which they plunder and wish to exterminate culturally (this applies to Welsh and Scots as well), and hating any British Isles people who remained Catholic is necessary to defend the concept of Modern British, which is rooted in the Protestant rebellion. The British Catholic is an affront to the products of the two English Reformations, and when his ethnicity is other than Anglo-Norman, the hatred will be deep and wide.
How descendants of Irish Catholics like the Kennedys came to sound, act, and think exactly like antebellum Boston Brahmin Unitarians and Universalists and Phildelphia Quakers and Yankee Episcopalians from Maine to Chicago ought to be obvious: assimilation to Yankee culture. Only when Catholic Bishops end their blind assimilation to inherently liberal Yankee culture and then rein in their sheep can that problem be corrected.
I suggest that everyone who wonders about the intense hatred for the Confederate Battle Flag by people who had no ancestors taking part in the War Between the States (for example, Jews of eastern European origins) need to recall that the Confederate Battle Flag is the Saint Andrew's Cross, and the Saint Andrew's Cross has a long history in Eastern Europe as a Christian symbol. It was prominent in Tsarist Russia.
Anybody who wishes to war against Christian civilization, and the Left does, will want any Saint Andrew's Cross flag demonized.
Daniel Maxwell @38 - Is this the Alabama flag you are looking for?:
http://www.crwflags.com/page0660alabamasecession.html
Jake @41 "assimilation to Yankee culture..."
I have been enjoying your posts very much and do agree with your observations mentioned above. The only thing I would add is that anyone who has experienced both the earthy reality and warmth of Southern culture contrasted with the cool, narrow, artificial conceit of yankee culture, has no excuses. It is one thing to sympathize with the poor, alienated, soul of yankee-man who has nothing to compare his dreadful existence to but the dwindling effects of his self-asserting superiority; and quite another thing to embrace it, imitate it or participate in it as a worthy substitute for a culture where grown men still ride, shoot and speak the truth.
Generations seem to come and go more quickly in post-modernity. A mere ten years ago, when we members of the Louisiana Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans marched in the annual Natchitoches (City of Steel Magnolias, itself another topic) Christmas Parade, marching about eighty strong along with cannons and a float, the crowd would roar from the start to the finish of the parade. In the past few years, the crowd has remained silent, just wincing a bit when the rifles fire. We do not detect animosity; we sense ambivalence, likely rooted in historical ignorance. (Public schooling is indeed "working.")
About ten years ago, the man who was then the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi, a town which gets a lot of its capital from tourism, primarily from the numerous antebellum homes on that side of the river, had the Battle Flag taken down from the flag promenade near the tourist center. I wrote him a letter in which I pointed out that his town made its money off houses financed by cotton raised, harvested and baled by slaves; yet, he would not deign to allow the Battle Flag to fly. I also made the point that "those people" to whom he was yielding would see and saw his attempt to placate them as a sign of weakness. They would not rest with the Battle Flag, I told him. Eventually, literally or metaphorically, they would demand that the houses be "burned." They would do what Grant would not do. Indignant, he wrote a letter of response in which he had been, he wanted me to know, a member of Kappa Alpha, as if being or having been a member thereof mitigated his cowardly quest for "respectability."
Mr. David Wihowski @ 18...
Another book to consider:
Complicity...How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery. Authors: Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank. 2005 / Ballantine Books, New York.
Sorry, I couldn't find the ISBN number. You're own your own there.
Mr. David Wihowski @ 18. While I haven't read everything, I have found nothing better than R. L. Dabney's "A Defense of Virginia and the South". As a theologian and aid to Stonewall Jackson, he had first hand knowledge of the subject.
Mr. Peters writes: "I also made the point that “those people” to whom he was yielding would see and saw his attempt to placate them as a sign of weakness. They would not rest with the Battle Flag, I told him."
They will never rest because they are seeking something that can not be found among men --- God like perfection in their neighbors while large beams blur the vision from their own eyes. It is like watching Mr. Dershowitz or Chris Mathews morph into televised, hysterical, stages of rage at "angry white males."
@ 46 & 18 The ISBN of Complicity…How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery is 0345467833.
I think that a lot of it has to do with public school indoctrination.
I am greatly simplifying here:
First, public schools were imposed on the conquered South, and thus Southern children were taught to be ashamed of themselves and their ancestors and to be loyal to the 'Union' (Empire); then, when this was seen to be effective, it was expanded over the whole country, inculcating Northern children with nationalism and with self-righteousness and meddling holier-than-thou-ness towards Southerners.
It's all about brainwashing, and the teachers themselves, being victims of it from childhood, generally dont know any better either.
One wonders how different our whole continent would be now if government 'schools' had never existed, and how different would be the character of the people, North and South.
Allen Wilson, You are correct about the brainwashing of the teachers. They are indoctrinated through the teacher certification programs. Private schools also hire these indoctrinated teachers, so they are frequently no better that the government schools.