Why I Support The Confederate Battle Flag

By Hunter Wallace

The SJWs who are reading this blog are already certain that they have the answer:

“It is because you’re a raaaacist!!! It’s because you “haet” black people!!! It’s because you support slavery!!!”

I can’t help what simpleminded people think, but hear me out. I don’t believe I have ever expounded on this subject before. This seems like a good occasion to do so. It is the July the 4th weekend and the Confederate Battle Flag is under siege.

The truth of the matter is that I support the Confederate Battle Flag for a number of reasons: immediately, the War Between the States was the defining moment in Southern history, 1 out of every 4 Southern White men died in that war, 1 out of every 3 Southern families lost a loved one in that war, and one of my own ancestors who fought the damnyankee was captured at the Battle of Chickamauga and spent the rest of the war as a POW at Camp Douglas in Chicago.

I’ve already said that what happened in Charleston was tragic, but the War Between the States still looms over Southern history like the Grand Canyon whereas Dylann Roof’s actions in Charleston might be compared to a mere gully. If we didn’t live in a country of historical illiterates, no one would be saying that Roof’s actions are of greater significance than the heroism of the Confederate soldiers who fought and died for the Army of Northern Virginia or the Army of Tennessee.

We know why the Confederate soldier fought too: it was because he had no choice in the matter. Even before the Confederate government passed laws to conscript White men into its armies, Southern White men were expected to fight to defend hearth and home from a hostile Yankee invader. It was considered dishonorable not to take up arms in defense of the homeland and anyone who refused to do so was publicly shamed and humiliated. In spite of Hollywood movies, the Union soldier fought to “preserve the Union,” not to “fight racism” or “abolish slavery.” Union soldiers were also conscripted and were motivated by a sense of honor and patriotism.

In the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of White men weren’t shooting each other for the cause of “social justice.” They were moved by all the things which typically move men in all ages to take up arms: honor, duty, patriotism, loyalty to comrades, a sense of wrong, an intense attachment to their “rights,” defense of home and family, lack of other options, fear, material gain, and a passionate hatred of the enemy. The shared motivations and sacrifices of both sides and the mutual respect that was earned on the battlefield is the reason why the North and South were able to reconcile after the questions of slavery and secession were settled and strong passions had ebbed with time.

There are also deeper, more philosophical reasons why I support the Confederacy, and not just the Confederate Battle Flag, which is primarily a war emblem. The Confederacy had its own states’ rights philosophy of government which is far more amendable to my tastes than the Union cause. Robert Barnwell Rhett, a leading fire eater who has been named “the father of secession,” raged against the “consolidation” of the states by the central government in Washington. In his postwar memoir, Rhett was still nursing his constitutional grievances long after the abolition of slavery. The same is true of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens who both insisted that slavery was “incidental” to the Confederate cause and that the war had come over deeper questions of state sovereignty and the nature of the constitutional compact.

If Davis and Stephens were right and slavery was “incidental” to the conflict, then the abolition of slavery never settled the fundamental question that was contested in the War Between the States: is the United States a voluntary compact of sovereign states, or is it a consolidated nation in which the federal government is sovereign? Can we pretend that this is still not an open question when one unelected federal judge is able to unilaterally redefine the nature of marriage for 319 million people? Slavery has been a moot issue for 150 years, but other issues have become a source of sectional conflict.

This brings us to an even deeper, even more philosophical level of why I support the Confederacy, and not just the Confederate Battle Flag: it was a conservative counter-revolution against Americanism. The Southern Nationalists of the 1850s were determined to create a better, more perfect union, one without the negative and alien influence of the Northeast that had marred the US Constitution. This worldview was articulated by a number of poets and political theorists who wrote for journals like The Southern Literary Messenger and DeBow’s Review.

Here’s one example of their work, the “Southern Cross” by St. George Tucker:

“Oh, say can you see, through the gloom and the storm
More bright for the darkness, that pure constellation?
Like the symbol of love and redemption in its form,
As it points to the haven of hope for the nation.
How radiant each star! As they beacon afar,
Giving promise of peace, or assurance in war;
‘Tis the Cross of the South, which shall ever remain
To light us to Freedom and Glory again.

How peaceful and blest was America’s soil,
‘Till betrayed by the guile of the Puritan demon,
Which lurks under Virtue, and springs from its coil,
To fasten its fangs in the life-blood of freemen.

Then loudly appeal to each heart that can feel,
And crush the foul viper ‘neath Liberty’s heel;
And the Cross of the South shall forever remain
To light us to Freedom and Glory again

‘Tis the emblem of peace, ’tis the day star of hope;
Like the sacred Labarum, which guided the Roman,
From the shores of the Gulf to the Delaware’s slope,
‘Tis the trust of the free and the terror of foemen –

Fling its folds to the air, while we boldly declare,
The rights we demand, or deeds that we dare;
And the Cross of the South shall forever remain
To light us to Freedom and Glory again. …”

Here’s another example, Frank A. Alfriend’s “A Southern Republic and a Northern Democracy”:

“It is no disparagement of the wisdom and patriotism of our forefathers, for us who have survived the wreck of the government of their creation, to ascribe its destruction to certain radical errors of principle, which escaping their penetration are revealed in the calamities which afflict posterity. It is no ungrateful denial of their merited fame, to avail ourselves of the lights which experience has given us, while reading the philosophy of the failure of the Union, in the events which marked its career, and culminated in its downfall. …

We advance no new theory in the interpretation of the philosophy of this revolution, when we ascribe the necessity of separation to the irreconcilable antithesis and utter incompatibility of the civilization of the two sections. That Cavalier element predominating in Southern civilization, and giving tone to Southern society, and character to Southern politics, had its representatives in the early days of the Union in those who opposed the surrender of the liberties of the States to a necessary inimical, centralized power. That Puritan element which underlies the fabric of Northern civilization, clearly manifested its antagonism to the other, by seeking in the very incipiency of the government, to deprive the States of all their power, and to establish with an irresponsible supremacy, a monster consolidated empire, which like that of Augustus, should have the name of Republic, but the character of an unmitigated despotism. …

It will not be denied that the two Confederacies, as they now confront the world, represent, approximately at least, essentially different establishments – the one a Democracy, with a redeeming feature of regulated liberty, the other, in its social character, eminently Patrician, and utterly opposed to a system thoroughly popular.”

Here’s another taste of the “metapolitics” of the Confederacy, William Falconer’s “The True Question: A Contest for the Supremacy of Race, as Between the Saxon Puritan of the North, and the Norman of the South”:

“The hour of that hybrid thing, a democratic republic, for the government of two different races, has passed away forever, and we must now direct our attention to those ethnological facts, from out of which the next government is to flow. …

The peculiar form of government, under which we have for many years been living – call it by what name we may, whether a democracy or a republic – has been well calculated to demoralize, to some extent, the native, high character, of the South, and to vitiate its progress in statesmanship. There has been too much individual freedom, license rather, conferred upon the masses, through the agency of which fact, the lighter and less worthy material of society has floated to the surface. Men of actual merit, who are generally less adapted to popular approbation, have been compelled to come with their opinions and claims before the same volatile tribunal, with the worthless and flippant demagogue; and they, too, as far as was possible for them to do so, have been compelled to resort to the same vitiated means of success.

Our late form of popular government was doubtless, at the time of its adoption, essential to our progress as a people. In time, however, that very progress developed its organic errors and its longer in adaptation to our wants and welfare. It had conferred such privileges upon the masses, as to cause it to be difficult, now that it is gone, to effect suitable changes – under a continued presence of peace. …

In the new system which is to be organized after all the slave states shall come together, and the present tempest somewhat subsided, all sources of public corruption are to be cut off, as far as is possible; and prominently among the subjects for consideration will be those of universal suffrage and the naturalization laws. In either of which lie concealed great sources of trouble to our national peace, dignity, and strength.”

Here is one of the most explicit statements of ethnic and cultural division in America, J. Quitman Moore’s “Southern Civilization, or, the Norman in America”:

“But, when the eye was turned from the contemplation of these social phenomena to a survey of the political institutions of the country, it required no remarkable strength of observation to discover that there were two distinct nationalities existing on the soil of Great Britain; and of the two, the Norman was the ruler.

The Teutonic and the Latin – the Northern and the Southern – types of civilization, with their diverse social systems, their incompatibility of ideas, opinions, and institutions, and their ineradicable national prejudices, were brought into the presence of each other, under the exigencies of a compulsory political union; and so long as the dominant race maintained the principles and institutions that were the native outgrowth of its civilization, its ascendancy was complete.

Aristocracy, based on the feudal relation, is the natural expression of the political thought of the Norman – a social condition, resting on the principle of subordination, and recognizing the family as the primary basis of social union. Democracy, founded on the idea of an unlimited individualism, and without any reference to the conservative organism of institutions, is the fundamental conception of the political philosophy of the Teuton or Saxon.

The English constitution is the result of a compromise between these two hostile systems, with the Norman element always in the ascendant, save during the brief reign of Cromwell.

But the Roundhead, at once a religious fanatic and a political agitator and reformer, could conceive of no government but the rule of the Saints, and form no other idea of the principles of civil liberty than what the levelling philosophy of the covenant taught. A bigot in faith and an idealist in speculation, his sentiments were violent and his convictions impracticable. A visionary from principle and a revolutionist from interest, his prejudices allowed no compromise, while his passions fed equally the flame of his cupidity and ambition. Austere in his morals and inflexible in his principles, he set up his own conduct as the standard of right, and sought to dictate the opinions and control the convictions of others. Rude in his manners and morose in his disposition, he practiced the profoundest dissimulation, while attaining credit for sincerity, and concealed his real character and designs under the cloak of hypocrisy. . . .

Opposite under the banner of the king, stood the Cavalier – the builder, the social architect, the institutionalist, the conservator – the advocate of rational liberty and the supporter of authority, as against the licentiousness and morbid impulse of unregulated passion and unenlightened sentiment. No idealist, enthusiast or speculative system-builder, upheaving ancient landmarks and overthrowing venerable monuments; but a realist, a practical and enlightened utilitarian, bowing to the authority of experience and acknowledging the supremacy of ideas, forms and institutions that had received the hallowing sanction of time . An institutor by genius and a ruler by race, his pride was at once the sword of his most eminent virtues and greatest weaknesses, while honor was the touchstone of his character. Chivalrous in sentiment and magnanimous in deed, glory was his ambition, and loyalty the inspirer of his every thought, impulse and action. Elevated in his ideas and tolerant in his views, his selfishness was vicarious and his very faults wore the semblance of virtue. Unyielding in his principles, but compromising in his opinions, his conduct was governed more by sentiment than reflection, and more by association than either. Courtly in his manners and splendid in his tastes, a knightly generosity he practiced even toward his foes, and never lost his faculties in volumptuousness. Without being an abject advocate of passive obedience or a supporter of arbitrary power, he yet took ground against the revolutionary party, not as an enemy to liberal institutions or a well-regulated liberty: but, discovering in the doctrines and principles of the revolution a greater danger to the social and political system than from the alleged existing abuses, he preferred yielding his loyalty rather to institutions than abstractions, and felt it a duty to attempt to quench the lights of the incendiary philosophy, whose torch had been applied to the noblest monuments of civil wisdom yet erected by the genius of man …”

Union sympathizers want to scream “slavery, slavery, slavery” in order to shout down their opponents and obscure two fundamental truths about the Confederacy: the first being that the abolition of slavery didn’t settle the real issue, which was the nature of the Union that brought about secession; the second being that the Confederacy was a conservative revolt against Americanism, and that the real object of the Confederate war effort was the ultimate defeat the North’s system of liberal democracy and all the misguided abstract Enlightenment nonsense that had inspired it.

Might we have been better off in the long run as an independent nation with our own government? What if our armies had triumphed in 1865 and we had defeated American democracy which is “founded on the idea of unlimited individualism” and which had “demoralized” the “high character” and statesmanship of the South?” What if we had replaced the Enlightenment-inspired system, and its unqualified embrace of the progressive creed of Modernity, with a more traditional, European-style of civilization that looked to Antiquity and the Middle Ages for inspiration?

Aristocracy, the “natural political expression of the political thought of the Norman,” rests on “the principle of subordination.” This is a full throated defense of a hierarchical social order which goes far beyond slavery and racial issues and completely rejects any conception of “equal rights” or “social justice.” Moore is referring here to the classical metaphysical concept of a Great Chain of Being which subordinates mankind to God, wives to husbands, children to their fathers, the individual to the family unit, etc. This understanding of the universe used to be taken for granted in European Christendom and leaves no room for any mythical “social contract” as the basis of social order.

In our own times, the Confederate Battle Flag is becoming a symbol of rebellion against political correctness. In the past, it is better understood as a symbol of a rebellion and worldview which left no space for political correctness to germinate. For both of these reasons, I support the Confederate Battle Flag.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

17 Comments

  1. “It is because you’re a raaaacist!!! It’s because you “haet” black people!!! It’s because you support slavery!!!” These are the same things the Northerners said before, during, and after the Civil War. The Northerners need to be reminded that we have heard this whine for centuries from them. Really it’s nothing new, and we need to tell them that…they may have thrown in the word racist, a word made up by a Jewish communist socialist named Bronstein a/k/a Trotskii. But, we have been called worse stuff before. When it comes down to it, it’s all name calling. Remember the old rhyme, “sticks and stones will break my bones, but, names will never hurt me”.

  2. >If we didn’t live in a country of historical illiterates, no one would be saying that Roof’s actions are of greater significance than the heroism of the Confederate soldiers who fought and died for the Army of Northern Virginia or the Army of Tennessee.

    Now would be an ideal time for Southerners to revisit Confederate history in the words of their ancestors. Read “Co. Aytch” if you haven’t already, Hunter; the memoir covers the battle of Chickamauga amongst many others in the Western campaign. Sam Watkins was a private in the Army of Tennessee and your forefather may be mentioned. From the book:

    “…the half has not been told, but it will give you a faint idea of the hard battles and privations and hardships of the soldiers in that stormy epoch–who died, grandly, gloriously, nobly; dyeing the soil of old mother earth, and enriching the same with their crimson life’s blood, while doing what? Only trying to protect their homes and families, their property, their constitution and their laws, that had been guaranteed to them as a heritage forever by their forefathers. They died for the faith that each state was a separate sovereign government, as laid down by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of our fathers.”

    Taken from Sam Watkins’ memoir “Co. Aytch”. Notice that slavery was nowhere mentioned as a motive for fighting by this Confederate.

  3. I’ve noticed that most the people online (50-70%) criticizing the flag aren’t even from the South or the United States of America.

    This woman started a remove Confederate flag petition and she if from California. Lol, the SPLC is tweeting it, trying tp muster up a measly 10,000 signers, and this petition has been open for a week.
    https://www.change.org/p/nikki-haley-in-light-of-the-charleston-massacre-immediately-take-down-the-confederate-flag-that-flies-over-the-south-carolina-state-capitol?source_location=trending_petitions_home_page&algorithm=curated_trending

    Meanwhile, the petition against Wal-Mart, Amazon, Viacom, and Ebay for their anti-Confederate flag hate already has over 100,000 signers.
    https://www.change.org/p/viacom-warner-brothers-walmart-ebay-stop-banning-dukes-of-hazzard?recruiter=111524680&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=share_facebook_responsive&utm_term=des-lg-action_alert-custom_msg

  4. Support slavery. NO way. Can barely get by and certainly can not afford to feed and clothe slaves.

  5. One might want to read North Over South. The way American history is taught is that there was only one nationalism and for a brief period of time a mutant form of nationalism arose in the South but was defeated by the original authentic nationalism and now everything is as it was and always will be. In reality there was a Southern form of nationalism and a Northern form of nationalism competing even before there was U.S.

    I think the South should expand its vision and embrace Red States nationalism as the Midwest are fertile grounds for a future Ethno-nation (In other words Red States Secession) It is no so much North verses South now as it is blue verses red. Even when we reach minority status in 2050, if not before, vast sections of the Midwest and Great Plans (What liberals call fly over country) wills still contain a majority conservative white base and hence a nucleus for a future white nation.

    Was it no Barry Goldwater who once said the U.S. would be better off if we could just sawed off the eastern seaboard and let it fall into the ocean? One used to here the term “Eastern Establishment” which encompassed Ivy League liberal whites and Jews as the ruling elite but it appears the term in no longer in vogue.

    I suppose you did notice that the C.S.A. Constitution had a process in which Federal judges could be impeached on the state level? Alas, it also had a free trade provision which prohibited tariffs on foreign nations which in this day and age, had the Confederacy survived, would have been suicidal. There is a silver lining in all this. At least now we know what political toxins killed America and that the enforcement of the Constitution was especially weak as there seems to be no limits on tyranny or the Supreme Court. Its always better to build a nation on a firm ethnic foundation, and specify that in its constitution, than build one on intangible egalitarian Enlightenment philosophy, as was the United States. Remember that the science of genetics and heredity had not been discovered in the time of our Founding Fathers. What reigned supreme at the time was the Blank State theory which was a forerunner of the modern socialist egalitarian environmentalist theory.

  6. I support the Confederate Battle Flag, as a Copperhead woman, because the CBF is the true Flag of Freedom. The CBF embodies the intent of the Founders of this Nation, and is wholly in keeping with the articles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

    The Marx-loving psychopath Lincoln shredded the Constitution, AND Human Rights, when he and his Banker Vermin sent conscripted (legally enslaved) Irish Famine Refugees to attack righteous American Citizens. The lunatic suspended habeas corpus (which rendered his Presidency illegitimate), threw Northern dissenters into jail, and DIDN’T REVOKE THE RIGHTS OF YANKEE SLAVE-OWNERS TO RELEASE THEIR SLAVES!!!

    So STUFF your “waaaaycism” and “haetred” of truth and historical fact into whatever capacious orifice on your person applies, SJW’s – and travel to Afreaka to end Negro slavery, there. The Dark Continent has enjoyed slavery for ever, and slavery is thriving and expanding there. Go to Afreaka, and foment an Abolition movement THERE, Brave SJW’s. Go. Do it. END Negro slavery where Negro slavery is current, and flourishing.

    GO!

  7. The Midwest, please, north of I-80 is Puritan country, literally settled by the loons of the Burnt Over District of New York and proud of it. My relatives in Wisconsin speak to god on a first name basis and as we speak are probably bad mouthing the South as they prepare to go to a gay ass wedding all the while thinking they are the glint in god’s eye.

  8. You are too charitable to the US soldiers. They were hirelings, New England fanatics and just plain brutish SOB’s that waged war on a people that had never done a thing to them.

  9. I remember seeing that scene (and the Confederate/St. Andrew’s Cross) for the first time, when I watched GWTW in 1976, on one of the first cable TV stations. As a stupid Yankee, I didn’t know diddly, but, by the time of that movie’s ending, I was a confirmed Southern advocate, if for no other reason than that the South (our people) suffered so greatly from this war, and Lincoln’s actions in freeing the slaves, have ruined this country, ever since.

    I would question the narratives of Puritan vs. Cavalier, and even more especially, “Teuton vs. Norman.” The Norsemen/Normans were ALSO Teutons (thus the overwhelming image of the fair haired southern boy/belle with blue eyes), so we are still brothers, racially speaking. Also, the Normans destroyed the indigenous Orthodox Church in Britain during the era of ‘1066 and all that’ and thus aided the emerging post-Schism Papacy in believing its own propaganda.

    http://geoffboxell.tripod.com/1066euro.htm

    I think the older paradigm of the ‘modern (Papist) Norman’ and the ‘older (Orthodox) Saxon’ is the more apropos. But that (of course) makes the Romanists out to be the bad guys, something most westerners (even Protestants) don’t want to have to think about…. (even though, ultimately [“Who am I to judge?”- Franky the Pope] they were.)

  10. I think you are wrong – with the writers quoted above – in stating a difference between Norman and Saxon feudalism. Both were Teutonic, based on service to lords, and the Saxons certainly had slaves. Also, remember that Cromwell and the Roundheads were rebels against the dictatorship of Charles I and his disregard of institutions: and upon Cromwell’s death, the Cavaliers resumed power with Charles II, and had their own “Reconstruction”. The Old South is probably better compared to Czarist Russia in the days of serfdom.

  11. I’m a midwesterner of northern descent. I had a relative from New Jersey fight for the north and was killed in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. I believe he was 21 or so. He was a prolific writer as most people were in those days and wrote home frequently. The letters survived and were passed down in our family. I will tell you he was very passionate about why he was fighting, but I will also tell you that in dozens of letters he never mentioned slavery even once and his only mention of blacks was that his unit came upon some on the road and they “gave them a hard time.” Not sure what that mean’t.

    Until recent years, I’ve always felt that I would have fought for the north had I been alive then. Now I think the opposite.

  12. I saw a article on the “Southern Avenger” who was a former defender of the flag, but now see’s all the bad in it.

    Like slavery and lynchings.

    General Lee, who owned slaves and had firsthand knowledge of the institution of slavery in the U.S said that blacks had it better as slaves, than they did back in Africa as freemen.

    Trying to portray American slavery as evil is not debatable, because all slavery is evil. But some slavery is less evil compared with others. Black slaves brought from Africa were not pushed down the ladder, but were pushed up. The majority of Africans that became slaves in the American colonies had it better than their own brothers and sisters back in Africa who weren’t slaves.

    And the truth is that a black slave had more value than hired white help or indentured servants, and were well looked after, never having to worry about shelter or food.

    Yes, slavery was a evil, but we’re talking about 150 years ago here. We’re not talking about yesterday when this happened, though, blacks would like to portray the memory of slavery as though it happened yesterday. We’re talking about an era when slavery was acceptable to everyone and everywhere in the world it was practiced. The South being the most humane place to be a slave. A black slave had a higher standard of living and longer life expectancy than a peasant or serf in Europe. Blacks also owned slaves and introduced slavery into the British American colonies. The first slave owners and traders in the U.S were black. Their black brethren made a ton of money off of selling their kin to whites.

    On top of that, African-Americans, the descendants of those slaves have the highest standard of living of any black population in the world. Was slavery that bad and did it really keep blacks down?

    African-Americans could be living like those in Haiti today if they did not live around whites. The black Haitians slaughtered the white population, and have been free of slavery, segregation, and racism for 200 years and yet their the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. So slavery, racism, or segregation was obviously not the problem. In fact, in America’s case slavery must have been beneficial for blacks if their standard of living as a slave was even higher than a peasant in Europe, and higher than if they were free in Africa.

    Also, I’m tired of hearing about the flag being associated with lynchings. How many lynchings were there in the U.S pver the past 200 years?

    Only around 4,000, with the majority happening around the Reconstruction era when there was a total breakdown of society and governance. Secondly, 1/3rd of all lynchings were against white people. So, the Southern Avenger saying blacks had their grandfathers lynched is exaggerating the issue, because if there were less than 4,000 blacks lynchings out of millions of blacks, the likelihood of a black with an ancestor who was lynched is practically zero. And lastly, the vast majority of lynchings happened against people who committed a crime, such as rape or murder.

    So, this “Southern Avenger” guy is not looking at the entire debate and shows that even some of us that hold our kind of beliefs, can become brainwashed if not presented with the right historical context and narrative. No white person today should have to say sorry to a black person for what a small minority did over 150 years ago, especially when the vast majority of whites didn’t own slaves.

    It is estimated that less than 18 million Americans have at least one ancestor somewhere in their family tree that owned slaves. There are 200 million whites, so that is not even 9% of the white population that blacks could go complain to.

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