Alabama
“I know further, sir, that we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race … I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”
– John C. Calhoun
“The weak in mind or body require guidance, support and protection; they must obey and work for those who provide for them – they have a “natural right” to guardians, committees, teachers or masters.”
– George Fitzhugh
Connie Chastain is a nice Southern lady of some notoriety in what can best be described as the “Southern Heritage Preservation movement.”
I’ve been a silent observer of the “Southern movement” for the better part of ten years now. Like the “White Nationalist movement,” which is divided into “mainstreamers” and “vanguardists,” there are different factions in the umbrella “Southern movement” who are divided over tactics and strategy.
The two most important factions are “Southern Nationalists” who advocate the restoration of the Confederate States of America (these are your “League of the South” types) and “Southern Heritage Preservation Advocates” (these are your “Sons of Confederate Veterans” types) who identify as proud Southerners and who are fighting back in the War Against the South.
“The War Against the South” is a concept which that doesn’t require much in the way of explanation here. Everyone here knows what is meant by the “War Against the South”: Ole Miss ditching the Colonel Reb mascot, the fights over the Confederate battle flag in Georgia, the Texas DMV refusing to approve the SCV license plate, the 10 year long NAACP boycott of South Carolina, the renaming of public buildings which are deemed “offensive”, high schools banning the display of the Confederate flag, Hollywood movies like Django Unchained, etc.
It will suffice to say that the usual suspects (i.e., African-Americans, Jews, DWLs) hate the Confederate flag, hate the Confederacy, hate the South, and they hate Southern Whites. They are waging a culture war against Southern heritage which in their eyes is racist, bigoted, conservative, religious, and “reactionary” and ought to be eradicated for that reason.
The “War Against the South” is really just one identifiable front in the wider culture war. The same people who are waging tikkun olam against Dixie are also highly engaged in the “War on Christmas” and the “War Against Christianity” and the “War Against Western Civilization” and the “War Against the White Race.” It would be genuinely surprising if they weren’t constantly found denigrating the South.
Generally speaking, it is your stereotypical revolutionary Jew (Kevin Levin), insufferable moralizing Yankee fanatic (Brooks D. Simpson), and Zip Coon (Ta-Nehisi Coates). This is the same coalition that put on the show called the “Civil Rights Movement” for American television audiences in the mid-twentieth century and who remain the core constituencies of the “progressive movement.”
Once you understand these people are motivated by ethnic animus and political ideology, you can see it is a useless waste of time to attempt to reason with them. There can only be a winner and a loser in such a struggle. The enemy has always existed and the failure to identify him as the enemy is the first step toward eventual defeat.
The Southern Heritage Preservation movement has suffered one defeat after another this year: the Texas DMV rejecting the SCV license plate, the Reidsville monument being relocated to a new location, Caddo Parish voting to remove the Confederate flag, and most recently Lexington essentially banning the Confederate flag on city property. These are all recent manifestations of the “War Against the South” which were protested yesterday on Lee-Jackson Day.
In light of these defeats, Connie Chastain has posed the question: “Obviously, our efforts to defend the physical symbols of our heritage haven’t been very effective. What will it take to reverse this grinding away at our legacy?”
Let’s take a real stab at answering the “Chastain Challenge.”
Southern Heritage: Defined
What is Southern heritage? What is unique about the South? Why should Southern heritage be defended? What is the best strategy for defending Southern heritage?
Until these critical questions are better addressed, the Southern Heritage Preservation movement will continue to lose ground in the “War Against the South,” and those of us who sympathize, but who are not actively involved in the Southern movement (we have bigger fish to fry, the project of civilization itself is under assault) will continue to watch the defeats unfold here on the sidelines.
Here’s a short list of the most important defining characteristics of Southern civilization:
(1) Slavery – The “domestic institution” of African servitude (can’t recite the phrase without cracking a smile) existed in the Southern states in some discernible form or another (there is some dispute over exactly when indentured servitude evolved into chattel slavery) from 1619 until 1865.
The Southern states were “slave societies” like their counterparts in the Caribbean and Latin America. Unlike the Northern states, where slavery existed and was tolerated, African servitude was the foundation of the Southern social and economic system.
(2) Racial Feudalism – The Southern states were caste based societies like Rome or Sparta which were admired in Dixie as models of republican virtue. “Liberty” was meaningful in the South because it was a marker of the master caste which separated Whites from African-Americans.
(3) Classical Republicanism – When Southerners rallied to defend their “liberties,” they were thinking in terms of classical republican political theory, not modern liberal political theory.
In classical republicanism, the common good of the polity is superior to the rights of the individual. The social order rests upon the moral virtue, the honor, the traditions, and cultural institutions of citizens, not upon abstract speculative philosophical paradigms like John Locke’s “state of nature” or John Rawls’ “original position”:
“One might ask how such a tyrannical society could have produced some of the greatest champions of republicanism, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison. The answer is that Tidewater’s gentry embraced classical republicanism, meaning a republic modeled after those of ancient Greece and Rome. They emulated the learned, slaveholding elite of ancient Athens, basing their enlightened political philosophy around the ancient Latin concept of libertas, or liberty.
This was a fundamentally different notion from the Germanic concept of Freiheit, or freedom, which informed the political thought of Yankeedom and the Midlands. Understanding the distinction is essential to comprehending the fundamental disagreements that still plague relations between Tidewater, the Deep South, and New Spain on the one hand and Yankeedom and Midlands on the other.”
– Colin Woodward, American Nations, p.54
(4) Agrarianism – The term is defined in I’ll Take My Stand and reflects generations of Southern resistance to central state expansion, industrialization, and the expansion of cities that characterizes Yankeeland:
“An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige -a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.”
(5) Culture of Honor – James Henry Hammond’s provides an excellent definition of the Southern honor code:
“Honor is that principle of nature which teaches us to respect ourselves, in order that we may gain the respect of others. No man desires the respect of one class of Society exclusively and therefore the law of honor will influence our conduct toward persons of every quality.”
(6) White Supremacy – White Southerners believed that African-Americans were a biologically inferior race. They believed that African-Americans lacked the racial capacity to participate in civilization as their social, civic, and political equals.
(7) Herrenvolk Democracy – In the Antebellum South, democracy meant that the White men of every state and community would make the important political decisions among themselves without consulting their dependents. Dixie was a White Man’s Country.
(8) States’ Rights – Southerners believed that the states were sovereign entities that created the Union and that the federal government had been delegated a limited number of enumerated powers. Those powers not enumerated in the Constitution (including the right of secession) had been reserved to the states or the people under the Tenth Amendment.
(9) Segregation – In the wake of the Plessy decision in 1896, segregation emerged as the political expression of white supremacy in every Southern state. Southerners conceded the abolition of slavery and the extension of “civil rights” to African-Americans (things like the right to marry, own land, own firearms, etc.), but continued to abhor and oppose political and social equality.
(10) Conservatism – Southerners have always considered the Southern way of life to be “conservative” as opposed to “liberal.” This is another way of saying that Southerners have greater respect for authority, tradition, and established forms than Yankees whose minds are more readily attracted to various “-isms” and abstract notions.
Southern Heritage: Defended
Why should Southern heritage be defended? Why is Southern heritage relevant in the 21st century?
There is a simple answer: the South was right, the North was wrong, and American civilization is literally being destroyed because the North won the argument. The triumph of the North over the South meant the triumph of anti-racism over race realism, integration over segregation, guilt culture over honor culture, racial equality over white supremacy, abolition over slavery, liberalism over conservatism, urbanization over agrarianism, consolidation over states’ rights, etc.
As a result, the federal government is out of control, every important decision is now made in Washington, the Money Power on Wall Street is bankrupting the country, White people have been stripped of their freedom and dignity, African-Americans have been deified by DWLs, countless small towns, cities, counties, and major metropolitan areas have been destroyed the Black Undertow, and now everyone in the North and the South has pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and live under Black Run Amerika.
It didn’t have to be this way.
A strong education in Southern heritage (by that I mean the real thing) is the most powerful antidote in America to what “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman labeled “the virus of equality.” Traditional Southerners didn’t believe in the concept of “equality” or “diversity” and their social system reflected their own belief in “hierarchy” and “inequality” at every level.
Southern Heritage: Defenseless
There are some people in the Southern Heritage Preservation movement who believe in defending the South on the basis of multiculturalism, anti-racism, “Heritage Not Hate” and by pouring through archives to search for “Black Confederates” for they can stake a claim to the “moral high ground” which is synonymous with blackness in Black Run Amerika.
In the name of defending Southern heritage, they concede to the enemy that liberalism is correct in principle, that the traditional Southern view of race was morally illegitimate, and that White Southerners should embrace the values of BRA, but they reserve the right to fly the Confederate flag, take pride in Southern heritage, and participate in Civil War reenactments.
It is theoretically incoherent:
(1) It is based on a willful misrepresentation of Southern heritage which was unquestionably based on “racism” and “white supremacy.”
(2) It offers nothing much of interest to disaffected young people who might be inspired to take an interest in their Southern heritage in response to the conditions of their own lives.
(3) It cedes legitimacy to the moral and political views of the opposition who can offer the real thing and who are perpetually on the offensive as a result of this sort of thinking.
Napoleon and Wellington could look at the terrain of this debate and tell you there is no other possible outcome. Southern heritage can only be defended on the basis of Southern principles.
Southern Heritage: Secession of Southern Baptists
In this spirit, OD will tack in a new direction and defend the honor of the South like the Real Sons of Confederate Veterans would have responded to the challenge, and their way of responding will prove to have greater public appeal in the long run.
Osama bin Laden was right when he said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” In our own historical experience, the Southern Baptist Convention grew to become the largest and most powerful Protestant denomination in America after it seceded from the Northern Baptists. It became more admired and more popular for severing the diseased branch and taking a more forthright stand in defense of the South.
To the South, we will offer historical vindication and the restoration of honor after enduring this long terrible nightmare. To the North, we will offer a positive sense of racial identity, their pride and their dignity and their money back, control of their own communities, the truth about the Black Undertow, and their most valuable ally against the liberal fanatics who are wrecking their own states.
I believe it was the great New Yorker Horatio Seymour who once said, “a white man’s government is the most popular rallying cry we have.” How many takers would it have today?
Note: The concepts of “revolutionary Jew,” “insufferable moralizing Yankee fanatic,” and “Zip Coon” are illustrated in the three videos below.