In the wake of the Charleston shootings, there has been a new chorus of calls for the obliteration of symbols of the historic South.
For balance, here is an essay, by William Cawthon of the Abbeville Institute, about the crushing of Southern identity by the hegemonic ideology of the Protestant North over the past half-century.
If one were looking for a succinct theoretical model by which to interpret all of U.S. and Western history since the founding of the Puritan settlements of the seventeenth century, an excellent candidate would be “Massachusetts conquered the world”.
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That link was unexpectedly thorough and deep. It’s odd that the more the “Massachusetts types” succeed in their cultural cleansing of all regions of America, especially mine, the more this resulting entity resembles the most ruined parts of socialized Western Europe today, and even more bewilderingly, to the last decade of the Soviet dominated Eastern Bloc countries of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
I still believe that in time, these TNR type winners will drown in their own filth which will begin to turn the country, not just here, in a more conservative direction. This notion of “equality for all” is a pipe dream that is only enforceable by a dictator. Equality can take many forms and meanings in the hands of an authoritarian.
We shall see.
When I first returned following an extended series of overseas assignments it took me some time to ask my Dad, “What has happened?”
Usually blunt, succinct, that day’s reply I’ve ever since reckoned to be unusually gruff, somehow sad, “Bill Clinton” was all he said.
The nineties led to me participating in building what I now know to be a museum of sorts. Comfortable accommodations for the regional natives certainly – yet what the Massachusetts set notice that the former set usually pays no mind to, fresh oysters and “not catfish” flown in every day to feed the latter. (The former opening the menu notice the prices and say, “We’d like to order sweet teas all around” – leave and go on down to Denny’s to get what they’d intended in the first place.)
Both sets inevitably make sure to set aside enough time (and as applicable, budget) to either or “hoot ‘n holler” or “gawk ‘n tut” at the Dixie Stampede. The horses featured in the show no doubt enjoying that though saddled, at least there’s air-conditioning.
__________
On another note. Anybody notice that in our recent common tragedy, there wasn’t an ostentatious Al Sharpton Display?
Will Southerners go down in history as one of the lost peoples of the earth?
Yes.
Equality on the playing field? For sure.
Equality in outcome? Not so much. Because diversity.
Equality of worldview? No. Because the Left is vile, remorseless, and stupid.
Maybe he dropped dead?
Off topic, but I simply can’t contain my anger at all the low information Americans. From Thomas Sowell:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/10/seriously-democrats-you-re-done-in-dixie.html
Nope.
The explanation for it is actually, pretty easy.
Have the President say it. Get Don Lemon (CNN) to hold up a sign.
Sorry, JK. I don’t catch your drift. I don’t know who Don Lemon is, and I don’t give a f*ck what the President says.
I’m figuring TBH to your timezone you’ve got it, pretty much figured out by now what I said? In the blogways comment I mean to say.
If you haven’t by now – caught my drift TBH – I can,
Gomer Pyle-Style call you and
“Surprise Surprise & Gollee Sargeant Carter.”
Malcolm, Thanks for that link, which more eloquently describes the issues involved in the oh-so-righteous “remove the Confederate flag!” battle. History takes certain turns and historians spend centuries trying to understand the sequence of events, but in the past, as in today, the absence of a broader understanding of all the smaller events of those bygone days leaves us with a overly simplified “Power Point” view, rather than a rich, deep appreciation of a people and their culture. The sins of that peculiar institution cloud any nuanced historical perspective.
I fear we live in a time where very few of our elected leaders, of either main political party, possess what should be the baseline metric of a “leader” – a classical liberal education or even the slightest understanding of general US history. Our elected leaders’ views, on weighty matters of state, seem to be formed and espoused based more on polling data than on the actual merits or on the views of their constituencies. It’s a mob rule mentality based on dubious polling, manipulated by very effective mass media campaigns waged by far-left political propaganda operations.
We live in a country obsessed with popularity and fame, dictated by pop culture, leaving the few who dare to dissent to talk amongst themselves in little corners of the internet, where the deep analysis and work of researching comes from amateur bloggers, not the mainstream media. Assuredly the elites control the portals to all means of mass communication consumed by the, well, umm, masses, leaving us with the likes of Sean Penn, Ben Affleck, or Angelina Jolie to elucidate the weighty issues of the day.
The founding fathers deferred the slavery issue in a trade-off to gain agreement for The Constitution, but most of them realized the slavery issue would be a battle for a later date. They also strengthened the federalism provisions to protect and promote states rights, which the Civil War dismantled to a great degree and this article you referenced masterfully explains that quite eloquently.
Needless to say, the symbols of the historic South are hardly being obliterated. There are statues of Confederate soldiers throughout the South, as well as streets, parks, and schools named after them. What has been obliterated is any commemoration of the millions who were enslaved, tortured, or died as a result of what the Confederacy stood for, either during the period of slavery or in the lynchings which followed. They don’t have streets and schools named after them.
Of course the Confederate flag should not fly above a state capitol, for the same reason the Nazi flag should not fly in Berlin. They are both symbols of human bondage, genocide, and the oppression of hated minorities.
Of course Amazon and eBay should not sell Confederate memorabilia, for the same reason that they should not sell swastikas in Germany, or why you can’t load up on Darky toothpaste at the local CVS.
The piece by William Cawthon has to be the most tendentious and tortured piece of writing I have ever read.
The author is apparently unaware that the Civil War was started a few miles from the church where Dylann Roof murdered nine people, when rebel soldiers fired on a US fort; that the purpose of this treasonous uprising was to perpetuate the institution of human enslavement; that Confederate soldiers caused massive death and destruction when their armies attacked Northern states; that the relative prosperity of the South was largely due to — wait for it — the availability of slave labor; or that the Constitution established a strong federal sovereign to replaced the failed, state-centric Articles of Confederation.
He regards the South as a Northern colony and the US government controlled by Northerners, despite the fact that five of the last nine Presidents are from the South; he regards the federal intervention which forced Southern states to integrate schools and lunch counters to be an unwarranted invasion of states’ rights; he apparently believes that enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment is outside the proper role of the federal government; and he considers the rejection of the Southern “values” of racial discrimination and white supremacy to political correctness gone amok.
It’s safe to say that most Americans regard Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King as true American heroes: the best which America has to offer. Others venerate Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Orville Faubus. If there is any silver lining in last week’s horrific massacre, it is that the country is uniting with remarkable speed — led by such unlikely proponents as Nikki Haley and Lindsay Graham — to firmly reject the nation’s most prominent symbol of racial oppression and human bondage. It’s a shame you are not joining us.
Peter, your comments have devolved lately to little more than entirely predictable liberal groupthink and propaganda, and are increasingly boring and tedious — full of straw-men, haughty moral preening, ad hominem and tu quoque fallacies, tendentious oversimplifications of complex issues, fuzzy and one-sided history, and outright bullshit. (Do you now imagine that I am pro-slavery, or for that matter, that a pro-slavery sentiment still animates the South?) I would hate for our intractably incompatible political views to interfere with our long and happy friendship, but swatting away these responses is becoming an unpleasant chore. Say something thoughtful or original, for God’s sake, or stick to golf.
The reason that Cawthon “is apparently unaware that the Civil War was started a few miles from the church where Dylann Roof murdered nine people” — not that such a fact should be of of any interest whatsoever, except as a nifty emotional button to push — is that the piece was written before the murders happened.
I can understand why state and local governments, which are there to serve all, might wish not to display a potentially polarizing symbol from, say, the South Carolina capitol (one that was raised there, originally, by Democrats). They are welcome to do as they see fit — although I’m confident that removing this flag as a hysterical reaction to Dylann Roof’s evil act is not going to change anything at all, other than to let a lot of people signal to each other their moral rectitude. It’s just another one of those pop-culture occasions where suddenly you get a chance to be on the “right side of history” and let everybody know it, while those who still hold what were perfectly acceptable opinions five minutes ago are suddenly sinners and outcasts. It’s that turn-on-a-dime mass behavior, like a school of fish, that gives me the willies — that and the willingness, nay, eagerness, to bully out of existence any viewpoint that runs counter to the latest swerve in mass opinion. What’s next up for “rejection”? The Cross? Or will you be satisfied, for now, just to ban The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down?
Kevin Kim, writing at his own excellent blog, shares your opinion of the Cawthon piece. I wrote a reply to him there — including some comments on the simplistic history-as-written-by-the-victors view of the beginning of the Civil War that you, utterly unsurprisingly, express in your comment — and so, rather than repeat myself here, I’ll send you over to his place.
I am a Yankee, born and bred, but I have lived a goodly portion of my adult life in the Deep South and also in both Carolinas at military installations. Your view that Southern values consist of racial discrimination and white supremacy demonstrate a sad, pervasive stereotype. The Confederate flag flying is a STATE matter, not the business of the federal government. Businesses reacting out of fear of a PC backlash, rushing to conform to the latest PC mass hysteria, speaks neither to freedom or any higher values – it speaks to a climate of fear: “let’s not offend anyone or we’ll be targeted for a costly smear campaign or litigation”.
The irony of the Civil War and all the subsequent federal actions to enforce various measures of state compliance have weakened the very constitutional safeguards to protect states’ rights, necessary to get the original colonies to even form our Republic.
We can all agree that slavery was a blight on America’s history, but the entire history of the South should not be obliterated to atone for it and the author of that article points out that what in today’s world would be atrocities to be referred to The Hague, were employed by one group Americans against another and just like any other civil war, the wounds are slow to heal and the memories long. In Georgia, the memory of Sherman’s march to the sea still lingers. Scoff if you like, but this long memory that you disregard as :
“has to be the most tendentious and tortured piece of writing”
Coming from some other defeated group in foreign cesspools, liberals would be rushing to champion a group that suffered the war atrocities like those perpetrated against the South. The survivors of the South are supposed to forget their war dead. And oh, US military installations named after Confederate war heroes are on the target list, so it’s not just the Confederate flag under attack, because with leftist revisionist history, there’s always more to follow to totalitarian control. Hitler was a Socialist too, but the Left recast him as a far, right-wing zealot too. Such is life in the American reeducation program…
Btw, that nutcase who shot those nine people, well, he held a bizarre mix of virulently racist views, had a drug problem and was on some other drug. He is hardly emblematic of white Southerners any more than that Malik Shabazz’s, vile, anti-white racism represents all black Americans, although one might conclude Shabazz does have an organized group to segregate America and this shooter in Charleston, described as a loner, most assuredly did not. Shabazz is also reinventing himself with a deceptive new name for his group to mainstream his vile racism: National President of Black Lawyers for Justice, where he can mask his Islamist and his New Black Panther background, to feed on the black grievance climate in America. But oh, that’s fine – let’s initiate a national crisis over the Confederate flag…… HYPOCRITES, one and all!
Lifted from Bill V’s post of the 23rd
Gasthaus Blut und Boden
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420142/america-one-nation-indivisible