RSS
No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to what is termed broadly the “American conservative movement” would be complete without an examination of events that have transpired over the past fifty years and the pivotal role of the powerful intellectual current known as Neoconservatism.
From the 1950s into the 1980s Southerners who defended the traditions of the South, and even more so, of the Confederacy, were welcomed as allies and confreres by their Northern and Western counterparts. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and Dr. Russell Kirk’s Modern Age, perhaps the two leading conservative journals of the period, welcomed Southerners into the “movement” and onto the pages of those organs of conservative thought. Kirk dedicated an entire issue of Modern Age to the South and its traditions, and explicitly supported its historic defense of the originalist constitutionalism of the Framers. And throughout the critical period that saw the enactment of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Buckley’s magazine defended the “Southern position,” arguing forcefully on constitutional grounds that the proposed legislation would undercut not just the guaranteed rights of the states but the protected rights of citizens.
Southern authors like Mel Bradford, Richard Weaver, Clyde Wilson and James J. Kilpatrick lent their intelligence, skill as writers, and arguments to a defense of the South. Yet by the late 1980s, that “Southern voice” had pretty much been exiled—expelled—from major establishment conservative journals. Indeed, friendly writers from outside the South, but who were identified with what became known as the Old Right, that is, the non-Neoconservative “right,” were also soon purged from the mastheads of the conservative “mainstream” organs of opinion: noted authors such as Joe Sobran (from National Review), Sam Francis (from The Washington Times), Paul Gottfried (from Modern Age) and others were soon shown the door.
What had happened? How had the movement that began with such promise in the 1950s, essentially with the publication of Kirk’s seminal volume, The Conservative Mind (1953), descended into internecine purges, excommunications, and the sometimes brutal triumph of those—the Neoconservatives—who only a few years earlier had militated in the cadres of the Marxist Left?
To address this question we need to examine the history of the non-Stalinist Left in the United States after World War II. And we need to indicate and pinpoint significant differences between those—the so-called Neocons—who made the pilgrimage from the Left into the conservative movement, and those more traditional conservatives, whose basic beliefs and philosophy were at odds with the newcomers.
In this traversal I utilize the insights of a long list of writers and historians, including the late Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk and Mel Bradford, and more recently, Paul Gottfried and Gary Dorrien—plus my own experiences in witnessing what I term “the great brain robbery of the American conservative movement.” That is, what can only be described as a subversion and, ultimately, radical transformation of an older American “conservatism” and pattern of thinking by those who, for lack of better words, must be called “leftist refugees” from the more globalist Trotskyite form of Marxism.
Shocked and horrified by the recrudescence of Stalinist anti-semitism in the post-World War II period and disillusioned by the abject economic failures of Stalinism and Communism during the 1960s and 1970s, these “pilgrims away from the Communist Left”—largely but by no means completely Jewish in origin—moved to the Right and a forthright anti-Communism. Notable among their number were such personages as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, both of whom had sons who figure prominently amongst the current Neocon intellectual establishment.
At first welcomed by an older generation of conservatives, and invited to write for conservative publications and participate in a panoply of conservative activities, they soon began to occupy positions of leadership and importance—and most significantly, to transform and modify historic views associated with conservatism to mirror their own vision. For, in fact, even though shell-shocked by the effects of Soviet Communism, yet they brought with them in their pilgrimage an overarching framework and an essential world view that owed much to their previous militancy on the extreme left. And they brought, equally, their relentless zeal.
Often well-connected financially, with deep pockets and the “correct” friends in high places, within a few years the “Neocons” had pretty much captured and taken control of most of the major “conservative” organs of opinion, journals, think tanks, and, significantly, exercised tremendous influence politically in the Republican Party (and to some degree within the Democratic Party, at least during the presidency of Bill Clinton).
This transformation—this virtual takeover—within conservative ranks, so to speak, did not go unopposed. Indeed, no less than the “father” of the conservative intellectual movement of the 1950s, Russell Kirk, denounced publicly the Neocons in the 1980s. Singling out the intellectual genealogy of major Neocon writers, Kirk boldly declared (December 15, 1988): “Not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.”
Essentially, the Neoconservatives were “unpatriotic” in the sense that they placed their zealously globalist values of equality and liberal democracy ahead of their allegiance to their country, or, rather, converted their allegiance to their country into a kind of “world faith” which trumpeted disconnected “ideas” and airy “propositions” over the concrete history of the American experience, itself. America was the “exceptional nation,” unlike all others, with a supreme duty to go round the world and impose those ideas and that vision on other, unenlightened or recalcitrant nations. To use the words of author Allan Bloom (in his The Closing of the American Mind): “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” We Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.” (Quoted in Paul Gottfried, War and Democracy, 2012, p. 110)
Although he won few friends among the newly transformed conservative establishment, Russell Kirk’s demurrer and the opposition of luminaries like internationally-recognized historian Paul Gottfried and author-turned-politician Patrick Buchanan starkly demonstrated the differences between the Old Right and the increasingly dominant Neocons.
In these so-called “conservative wars” Southern conservatism, when not sidelined by the Neocon ascendancy, found itself fighting side-by-side with the dwindling contingent on the Old Right. And that was logical, for the Old Right had—during the previous decades—treated the South and Confederacy with sympathy, if not support, while the Neoconservatives embraced a Neo-Abolitionism on race, liberal democracy, and, above all, equality that owed more to the nostrums of historic Marxism than to the historic conservatism that Kirk championed.
The late Mel Bradford, arguably the finest historian and philosopher produced by the South since Richard Weaver, also warned, very presciently in the pages of the Modern Age quarterly (in the Winter issue, 1976) of the incompatibility of the Neocon vision with the inherited traditions and republican constitutionalism of the Founders and Framers. In his long essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” which was just one installment in a longstanding debate he had with Dr. Harry Jaffa of the Claremont Institute, Bradford laid bare the abundant intentions of those who came together to form an American nation, while giving the lie to the Neocon narrative that the republic was founded on universalized notions—those “ideas”—of equality and liberal democracy. Those notions, he pointed out perceptively, were a hangover from their days and immersion in the globalist universalism that owed its origin to Marx and Trotsky, and to the Rationalist “philosophes” of the 18th century, rather than to the legacy of kinship and blood, an attachment to community and to the land, and a central religious core that annealed this tradition and continued to make it viable.
What Bradford revealed in his researches, ultimately distilled in his superb volume, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the American Constitution (Athens, GA, 1993) and later confirmed in the massive research of Colgate University historian Barry Alan Shain (in his The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congresses, 2014) was that our old republic was not founded on abstractions about “equality” or “democracy,” or some fanatical zeal to “impose our democracy and equality” on the rest of the world, or that we were “the model for the rest of the world,” to paraphrase Allan Bloom.
North Carolinian Richard Weaver aptly described the civilization that came to be created in America, most particularly and significantly in the Old South, even a century before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as one based on a “communal individualism.” By that he meant that those transferred communities from Europe brought with them a communal conformity which offered certain enumerated liberties to each of its members, or at least to the heads of households of families within those communities. There was a degree of autarky that existed; but in many respects those little communities brought with them inherited mores and beliefs that they had held in the old country, and those beliefs were based essentially in ties of blood and attachments to the soil, to the land.
As historian Richard Beale Davis has demonstrated conclusively in his exhaustive history, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 (Knoxville, 1970; 3 vols.), it was in the South where a distinctive communitarian individualism developed which distinguished it almost from the beginning from other regions of America. From the earliest landings at Jamestown and the settlements in South Carolina and Georgia, the Southern colonies developed differently from those of New England. Although by no means in conflict with its inherited British heritage, as were the Puritan settlements and traditions to the north, the South did over the years very gradually modify its rich Anglo-Celtic patrimony, adjusting to distance, circumstance, climate, the presence of Indians, and the mixture of additional folk from other European countries, with their customs and traditions. The result was quantifiably conservative and localist.
Professor Davis equally lays to rest the interpretation of Southern history and character that attributes everything to the presence of slavery. As Professor Bradford, commenting on Davis, makes precise:
The South thought and acted in its own way before the “peculiar institution” was much developed within its boundaries. Colonial Southerners did not agonize in a fever of conscience over the injustice of the condition of those Negroes who were in bondage among them. Contrary to popular misconception, intense moral outrage at slavery was almost unheard of anywhere in the European colonies in the New World until the late eighteenth century, and was decidedly uncommon then. The South embraced slavery in its colonial nonage because Negro slavery seemed to fit the region’s needs—and because the region, through the combination of its intellectual inheritance brought over from the England of the Renaissance with the special conditions of this hemisphere, had reached certain practical conclusions. (Bradford, “Where We Were Born and Raised: The Southern Conservative Tradition,” National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, April 1985, reprinted in The Reactionary Imperative, p. 118)
Commenting on the recent tendency to attach an overriding importance to slavery in the earlier development of Southern culture and character, Davis adds that “…it is difficult to see that in the slave colonies any consistent rationale if indeed any at all developed in defense of the peculiar institution, simply because there was not sufficiently powerful attack upon it to warrant or require a defense.” (Davis, p. 1630) The development of a natural and blood-and-soil conservatism of the South predates the furor over slavery.
Let me give a personal, and I think representative example: my father’s family is of Scottish origin. Actually, after leaving ancestral homes in Counties Argyll and Ayrshire, then passing about fifty years in County Antrim in Ulster, they made the voyage to Philadelphia, arriving in 1716-1717, and settled initially in what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (as deeds show). Their object was cheap and good land on which to raise their families; they were already able to practice their faith in County Antrim, just as they were able to do in Lancaster. And the same “liberties” they had in the old country they also had in Pennsylvania.
Seeking newer and fresh lands, whole families picked up in the later 1730s and made the trip southward along the Great Wagon Road to Augusta County, Virginia, and then, by the 1740s to Rowan County, North Carolina. And what is truly fascinating is that from Scotland (in the early 1600s) to Ulster, to Pennsylvania, to Rowan County, North Carolina, it is the very same families in community, the very same surnames and forenames that one finds in the deed and estate records. Robert W. Ramsey, in his path breaking study, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 (Chapel Hill, 1964), platted the land grants of those pioneers in Rowan County, and over 90% of the family names are the same as those we find in Ulster a century earlier and in the parish registry books of Scotland before that.
And perhaps more striking is that this pattern continued on for another century and more; collateral members of my father’s family made the trek to California in 1848-1849, enticed by promises of gold and new, unploughed lands. There is a community still known as “Catheys Valley” (near Yosemite Park) where they settled, and as late as the 1950s, the same old surnames in the telephone directory still predominated.
But not only do we find the geographical movement of entire families and communities, in the existent correspondence that we do have there is, almost without exception, no word about traveling west or crossing the ocean to seek “freedom” or “equality” or to “create a new nation founded on [globalist and egalitarian] principles.”
Our ancestors were not seeking to establish a “Shining City on a Hill” like the New England Puritans and their descendants, or “create a new people,” but rather to preserve and enhance the old. When those settlers wrote about their experiences, if at all, it was about their respective families and communities having a better life, about cheaper and virgin farm lands, and about conserving the inheritance and traditions they took with them. In other words, the 18th century philosophy of Rationalism, and the ideas of “equality” and “democracy” that we are too inclined to attribute to them, don’t really appear on nearly any level.
And this, at base, practical and communal individualism is reflected in the deliberations preceding the Declaration and then, even more so, by the Framers in 1787—as both Bradford and Shain have convincingly shown. The documentary evidence in every form confirms that. The “right to equality” enshrined in the Declaration is an “equality” viewed from the Colonies across the Atlantic to the English Parliament, equality as to the “rights of Englishmen,” not to social or economic revolution in the former colonies.
Those deliberations in Philadelphia were the product of a community of states, each with their own peculiarities, their own communities of families, with traditions inherited from Christian Europe (largely from the British Isles), and the desire to both preserve that inheritance while co-existing and collaborating with other communities and states in the creation of the American republic, where those traditions and that inheritance would be protected and respected, and could prosper as its families and communities prospered.
And in large part that result was the product of great Southerners, Virginians and Carolinians. It was a result that functioned well for eighty years. The legacy of Northern victory in 1865 was the overthrow of the original republic created by those men, which, in effect, paved the way for the present-day success of the Neoconservatives and the triumph of what the late Sam Francis called the managerial state…and what we now call the Deep State.
Given this history and this context, both the War Between the States and subsequent American history after that conflict, and with the modern displacement by the Neocons of the traditional (and Southern) conservatives and their opposition to the growth in government and to the destruction of those bonds and traditions that characterized the country for centuries, the results we observe around us do not augur well for the future. While the hard core cultural and political Marxist Left continues its rampage through our remaining inherited institutions, those self-erected Neocon defenders accept at least implicitly, many of the same philosophical premises, the intellectual framework of argument, and the long range objectives of their supposed opponents.
Ironically, although they may appear at times in major disagreement, both the hard core multicultural Left and the Neocon “Right” share a commitment to the globalist belief in American “exceptionalism.” In explaining this exceptionalism, they use the same language—about “equality” and “democracy” and “human rights” and “freedom,” its uniqueness to the United States, and the desirability to export its benefits. But, then, the proponents of the dominant Left and of the establishment Neocon Right will appear variously on Fox or on MSNBC, or in the pages of National Review or of The Weekly Standard, to furiously deny the meaning given by their opponents…but all the while using the same linguistic template and positing goals—in civil rights, foreign policy, etc.—which seem remarkably similar, but over which they argue incessantly about the “means.”
Thus, in their zealous defense of the “civil rights” legislation of the 1960s and their advocacy of what they term “moderate feminism” and “equal rights for women” (now extended to same sex marriage), the Neocons mirror the ongoing revolution from the Left and accept generally its overarching premises, even while declaring their fealty to historic American traditions and historic Western Christianity.
It is a defense—if we can call it that—that leads to continuous surrender, if not betrayal, to the Revolution and the subsequent acceptance by those defenders of the latest conquest and advance by the Left, and their subsequent attempt to justify and rationalize to the rest of us why the most recent aberration—same sex marriage, or “gender fluidity”—is actually conservative. Or, that it is critically necessary to send American boys to die in faraway jungles or deserts to “establish democracy,” that is, prevent one group of bloodthirsty fanatical Muslims from killing off another group of bloodthirsty fanatical Muslims—this latter group, of course, willing to do our bidding economically and politically. And all in the name of spreading—mostly we should say imposing—global “equality” and “freedom” and the “fruits of American exceptionalism.”
Neither the leftist Marxist multiculturalists nor the Neoconservatives reflect the genuine beliefs or inheritance left to us by those who came to these shores centuries ago. Both reject the historic conservatism of the South, which embodied that inheritance and the vision of the Founders.
They offer, instead, the spectacle of factions fighting over the increasingly putrid spoils of a once great nation which becomes increasingly weaker and more infected as they assume the roles similar to that of gaming Centurions at the Crucifixion.
The election of Trump threw them—both the cultural Left but also the establishment Neoconservatives—off stride, at least temporarily. And the history of the past year and a half has been a continuous sequence of their efforts to either displace the new administration (by the hard Left and some Never Trumpers) or surround the president and convert him, or at a minimum neuter his “blood and soil,” America First inclinations (by many of the establishment Neocon and their GOP minions).
Who wins this battle, who wins this war, will determine the future of this nation and whether the dominant Deep State narrative, shared by both the establishment Left AND the establishment conservatives, will complete its triumph.
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
You are overrating the intellectual basis of the typical conservative.
The term ‘cuckservative’ came into being because the NRO-type cuckservatives love to cave into leftism (particularly feminism). They exist only to make the speed of leftist advances appear less drastic than they actually are.
Old America died with Kennedy and cannot be revived with Trump. The Great Trek of the Mind desired by the author will be accomplished by a future generation after unimaginable vicissitude. For now, it’s over.
The Narrative of the Civil War must be…
The South was fighting both for and against slavery.
They were fight for social slavery that kept blacks in bondage. That was clearly unjust, especially given the founding principles of America.
But…
They were also fighting against biological slavery that would result from black emancipation.
Once blacks were freed and given equal rights as whites, the long-term result could not be racial equality and harmony. It could only lead to white people becoming biologically enslaved to stronger, tougher, more aggressive, more muscular, and most dangerous blacks.
Loss of manhood and cuckery are form of slavery. White manhood cannot survive integration with harder-muscled, meaner-tempered, and bigger-donged Negroes.
Eventually, white men turn into ‘white boy’ cucks, and white women go with Negroes and white wombs are colonized to produce the likes of Colin Kaepernick whose anti-white virulence is less about Racial Injustice than sheer contempt for wussy-ass whitey. After all, his mother rejected men of her own race and had a kid with a tough Negro. Even though his black father rejected him and a nice white family raised him, he associated whiteness with wussy weakness and associated blackness with power and manhood. Blackness = studly power. Whiteness = cucky weakness that raises a child of a black guy who humped a white ho and took off.
D.W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION was a great prophetic work. What he warned eventually came to be. Blacks have reverted to jungle savagery. Their music is rap, their dance is ‘twerking’, and their culture is thuggery. And Pop Culture is now mostly about Jungle Fever. And not only in the US but in Canada and EU.
When white people brought over a stronger and meaner race to be slaves in the US, they got caught in a Moral Trap. Social Slavery controlled blacks and kept their savagery in check, but it was unjust and sometimes cruel.
But freeing the slaves could mean disaster for the white race as too many blacks are built like Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, and Jim Brown. And too many black women are stupid loud-ass biatches.
Abe Lincoln understood this, which is why he said, “We gotta free them and then ship them to Africa. Otherwise, they will kick our butts and do our daughters.”
It is time for truth. The South was in a bind. They did fight to preserve ugly social slavery. But they were trying to prevent horrid biological slavery of white race being physically and sexually dominated by tougher and nastier Negroes.
Very decent article as far as your take on the South goes. …and since my family has been first in Virginia and then in NC for 390 years I feel qualified to say so.
However this….
Is entirely wrong. Trump is not a blood and soil American. Or America First by any means.
He is the complete opposite. It appears he has fooled you.
The ignorance of a demonstrable misreading of American history in this statement is profound…
… and that ignorance is only reinforced by…
…among too many other misapprehensions of reality in the article to detail in a comment. The Revolution had been betrayed almost immediately, before the turn of the 19th century, certainly:
https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/04/30/beware-the-perception/
Mr Boyd, I’m qualified to belong to the Sons of the Confederacy myself; not that joining would qualify to pontificate or confer some understanding of what really went on short of deep study of AMERICA’S history .. as opposed to some Catholic study of Spain (singing to the choir, as it must be.)
A very good and interesting piece.
This is why as far as I am concerned neocons, and therefore the modern “establishment right” which was largely built by them, are best regarded as leftists, because in practice they adhere to and have enabled most of the core leftist doctrines that have underlain the general triumph of the left we have seen over the past few decades in the US sphere, in social radicalism, in mass immigration, and in global interventionism (both utilising direct military means, and utilising propaganda and economic subversion) to impose a universalist vision upon all the nations of the Earth.
I see no good reason, just because they have won for the moment in these areas, to now accept that they are no longer “left” but some kind of new moderate, “centre” position that we must accept as the basis for all future politics. No, they are leftists and our society is of the left in these areas, and anybody of a moderate centre or conservative disposition should be looking to roll back those positions to the more normal ones that prevailed previously, in these areas where our culture has been so dramatically warped away from the human norm, such as it is, into imposing outright lies as received dogmas (women are the same as men (except where they are better), there is no such thing as race, homosexual behaviour is morally and practically equivalent to normal sexual activity, etc).
That’s a generous interpretation, accepting their own self-description of their motives. Being a more cynical and bitter type, I prefer to ascribe it to personal opportunism. These people were largely leftists in their youth, often of the Trotskyite variety, and not to be respected. They recognised, imo, early on (nobody is denying their intelligence, just their moral fibre and the uses to which they put that intellect) that they, either personally or their sections of the leftist movement, would not achieve the status and the power to run other people’s lives that they craved within the left, and they saw opportunities on the right to achieve it by ditching the concerns of the old left relating to socialist solidarity with the indigenous working classes, which was what they junked in order to secure the support of wealth and big business.
Of course, I am relatively moderate in my cynicism here. A truly cynical person would think that they thought it all out and came with the intention of achieving what in fact transpired – subverting the political right so that they could ensure the triumph of the left (excluding the aforementioned concerns of the old left relating to socialist solidarity with the indigenous working classes).
Human motivations being what they are, doubtless all these interpretations are true in varying degrees.
You are apparently missing his points and in so doing conflating the average self-identified ‘conservative’ of today with the much smaller group that fits very clearly with the intellectual and cultural traditions that produced people such as Russell Kirk, Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Weaver, Mel Bradford, etc.
How certain can we be that Trump is not what you call a ‘blood and soil’ American? After all, we has been surrounded and battled from the day it looked like he had an outside shot to win.
Neocons also are ‘blood and soil’ conservatives. But it is Jewish blood and Israeli soil that animate them as much as the love money and wielding raw power: of wearing the boot stamping on human faces forever.
Speaking of brain-robbery, it’s always sad to see people completely fudge their ancestors actual background in order to spin theories about “Southern Exceptionalism.”
Argyll and Ayrshire, eh? I bet I can guess their faith (why do you omit it?), and no, their faith and liberties were not always taken for granted in Britain.
From the Ulster Scots Society of America:
“During the reigns of Charles II (1660-85) and James II (1685-88) the Ulster Presbyterians and other dissenters were persecuted for their faith. That persecution reached its peak in 1684 when many Presbyterian churches were forcibly closed. (In that same year an Ulster emigrant organised the first Presbyterian church in America.) William Of Orange, a Dutch Prince, was invited by the British ruling class to become their King in response to the ever despotic actions of James II (particularly his intolerance toward freedom of religion). During the Williamite War these men of Ulster displayed great heroism and loyalty for the Williamite cause. They played a crucial role in defeating the forces of James II. Following the defeat of James II, the Presbyterians were treated more favourably. William III recognised his indebtedness to them. The death of William in 1702 brought this improved position to an end. Queen Anne detested dissenters and during her reign [1702-1714] Ulster Presbyterians were harassed and persecuted. In search of a better life, they looked towards America.”
Does conflict with the Stuarts and the Anglican Church count as being “in conflict with… inherited British heritage”?
Literally the very first line of the original “City on a Hill” sermon endorses inequality as divinely sanctioned:
“Blood-and-soil conservatism” existed in all the thirteen colonies. It endured in the South because the South was largely shielded from the effects of industrialization and immigration.
An easy, although gradual, solution to almost all political, economic, and cultural problems is so glaringly obvious, that it can’t be seen. I’m not going to tell you what it is.
Just kidding!..
Here it is…
Use technology to access personalities traits of powerful and influencial people for traits of psychopathy, sociopathy narcissism, cowardice, etc. Cell phone apps using retinal scans, facial expression changes, eye movements, heart rate changes, etc…and comparing these to non-mentally/emotionally dysfunctional norms, would be cheap, effective, and readily available to all us serfs. Then would all we peasants would be able to choose righteous and good controllers, instead of having murderous / corrupt / evil people deceptively imposing their sick genocidal motivations upon us. This one easy technological step should solve almost all our human problems.
Of course the sick monsters among us would push hard to prevent this.
It’s coming rapidly though. They and we down deep know this.
So it’s a good time to be alive and be seeing this gradual unfolding of our greatest age of enlightenment!
Interesting article, Mr. Cathey, and I’ll have to catch up on some of your previous ones. I have not read anything near as much as you have on the subject, so I have not thought of the neo-con movement as going back so far.
In my mind I can remember the rise of the Neocons on US politics by the early 1990’s, say just after the first gulf war. What I believe went on in these people’s minds is as follows:
The lefties that were always calling for the US to unilaterally disarm or “let’s hope the Russians love their children too” because they still believe Communism was just “done wrong” received a big blow when Reagan and millions of American soldiers/airmen/sailors/engineers won the Cold War. They had to change their strategy even though their stupidity in not understanding freedom and believing in the Commie/Socialist bull still remained. They had to keep the latter under cover.
Because America was now unarguably # 1 in military in the world, and people had seen the new weapons technology during the gulf war, the neocons emerged to support and promote US military might. Now, they could use it for cultural repression, as in Bosnia, support of Israel’s needs all around the Middle East, and anything that came up in their little heads.
See, during the Cold War, the military playing field was not wide open to America, and these kinds of little wars all over could not be generated just anywhere, as the Soviets or Chinese would defend anything within their sphere, not necessarily to oppose Israel’s wants, but to just oppose America’s.
The Neocons have been having a field day for almost 3 decades now, but it all ends when the money runs out. There’s no way out of that one.
As a Leftist: please stop trying to put the Neocons in our corner. We, whether of the sane or insane kinds, always hated those assholes, and just about all of us were against butchering Iraqis “for democracy” or “against WMDs” (which we knew didn’t exist). They’re Zionists, no more. The current Trump Derangement Syndrome just means more Democrats are ceasing to be Leftist for Zionism.
That’s exactly where they belong, for the reasons outlined above.
Sure, but most of “you” (I mean the political left in general, not you personally) suddenly went AWOL when it was your sainted Obama bombing foreigners for bad reasons, as “you” had been mostly silent when Clinton was doing it. So the obvious conclusion is that the huge left-wing opposition to the Iraq war was more about the fact it was a Republican President who was doing it than that it was a war of choice waged for the interests of foreigners and of particular elites. (And just to re-emphasize what I’ve said before here in this context, right-wing opponents of wars tend to be just as selective on a partisan basis.)
A large proportion of the neocons are indeed Zionists (as the author above concedes), but Zionist neocons are nevertheless a subset of neocons proper, in the original sense (see above). Though as time has moved on and the original issues defining neocons have become less prominent, the term has shifted to mean just the Zionist ones, so your usage more closely reflects the modern one.
The current Trump Derangement Syndrome just means more Democrats are ceasing to be Leftist for Zionism.
Thank you, Mr. Cathey, for this article.
In reading the comments, I am reminded of Robert Penn Warren’s “The Legacy of the Civil War.” There are still Northerners, out in the world, and here in these comments, from whom it would be necessary to pry their Treasury of Virtue from their cold, dead hands. They will not give it up. On the other side are the Southerners who hold fast to their own Great Alibi, and their Moonlight and Magnolia myths of life in the Antebellum South. What Warren failed to point out is that both constructions were developed by the elite, and not by the common man. A path forward had to be developed which allowed both sides to consecrate their dead, and move on with the business of America. Because that was the overarching direction of the elite from that point forward.
I’m a former member of the SCV myself. I don’t seem to have time for it anymore, though in truth I just don’t make time for it. Every line of my family that I have explored (most of them by now) served the Confederacy, and I’ve no reason to believe that any line I haven’t explored did not, as they were all in the South prior to the 1st American Revolution.
I took an interest in the Southern War for Independence at a very young age, and have studied it for most of my life. I’ve read from both sides of the conflict, as well as from neutral authors from other countries (England, Prussia, Switzerland).
At this time, after 40+ years of study, I maintain it was a contest between the Planter elite of the South vs. the industrial and commercial elite of the North and Midwest. A good deal of propaganda was used on both sides to stir the common man to fight the war for the elite, but patriotism was the overwhelming reason soldiers fought on both sides. They just had different views on what that patriotism entailed. For the Northern soldiers, they believed that secession would lead to the destruction of the Union. For the Southern soldiers, they believed they carried on the Revolutionary ideals of their fathers and grandfathers who had fought the British for freedom.
Slavery was the Achille’s Heel of the Confederacy, and so it was slavery that was attacked, and it was slavery that, in the end, damned them to defeat. Yet slavery wasn’t all they were fighting for, and more than slavery was ended with the victory of the Union forces.
There was no longer any opposition to the use of public funds for improvements that benefitted private enterprise. The Treasury and the Army were set free to act on the behalf of the controlling commercial interests of the Northern elite. Whatever one may think of them for it, the Southern elite, with their previous way of wealth accumulation having been destroyed, joined the Northern elite in this enterprise. A few left the country entirely, going to Brazil, Egypt, and Mexico.
Every ill we conservatives worry over today were conceived (in the sense of the process of birth) with the loss of the CSA to the USA. Previously the one guiding principle of the young nation was “Government by Consent of the Governed,” but a war was just waged for the opposite of that, and as slavery was used as a reason for the war, a new national creed had to be substituted. Thomas Jefferson’s boast that “All men are created equal,” was elevated, and now meant, not that a Lord shouldn’t lead because of who were his parents, but that merit meant more than birth, and for white men only, to the definition of it we live with today, though it was not universally enforced for more than a century, in every part of the country, it was used as a propaganda tool.
The idea of One Rule for All, with the Supreme Court deciding what the rules are, are a vestige of the loss of the CSA, as true Federalism was one of the ideals for which it fought. Now we are one nation, one people, with no differences between South Carolina and California, ruled by the same set of laws, so that when California decides men can be women, and these new women should use whichever restroom they please, South Carolina is forced to go along with them, as an example.
Of course the worst thing is that it can truly be said that the American Empire was born in the ashes of the defeat of the CSA, and that all our meddling around the world, where we have over 1000 military bases in (last count) 123 different countries, were made possible by the defeat of the CSA.
Too few American nationalists, on both sides, are able to take an objective view of the events back then. For the Northerners, a minority of whom can now even trace a single ancestor to the war, it’s still that Treasury of Virtue they hold dear; “We freed the slaves, and saved the Union.” Slavery aside, as I could go on for hours on that subject; how was the Union saved? It wasn’t. It was destroyed, and replaced. Before the war, it was a voluntary Union of free sovereign states in a Federal Republic. After the war, it was a forced union of minor seats of power controlled entirely from Washington, D.C.
To the Southerners, who, like me, can trace many ancestors back to the Grey, we still hold onto the memory of our ancestors, and a time when we had far more freedom than we do today. My direct male ancestor who joined the 1st SC Cavalry, and fought many pitched battles in Virginia and the Carolinas, owned 350 acres of land, no slaves, paid dearly little in taxes, answered to far fewer laws, and also answered to few men at all. He had freedoms I can only dream of today. I don’t personally need a Great Alibi, and I saw through the Moonlight and Magnolia myths long ago. The planters were a small minority of Southerners. Northerners fail to realize that when they attack the South, Southerners take it personally, because you ARE talking about our families. Blood and soil still mean something down here, perhaps more than anywhere else in this country.
All that, however, is past, and will forever stay the past. Rather than holding on to the grudges and fights of our great-great-grandfathers, we should view the whole era with a skeptical eye, and produce from it a new interpretation, based not on the views of the elites, but those of the common men from both sides who fought for entirely different reasons than those for which their “betters” sent them forth.
We must find a way to quit bickering about the war based on 21st Century ideals, and forge a new Union among Legacy Americans. If we don’t, all we do is hand our enemies a convenient fracture point to divide us.
Cuck Cathay knows the actual history and ignores it. A massive tidal wave of evicted ostjuden gutter people washed up on American shores between 1880 and 1921, when Harding and even the Congressional whores couldn’t take any more of the jooie troublemakers and capped off immigration. By that time it was too late…..the jooie virus had become firmly entrenched in the American body politic. The great industrialist and peacenik, Henry Ford, took on the vile bloodthirsty jooies in the early 1900s in an attempt to prevent WWI….and was completely smeared and crushed. The great aviator and peacenik, Charles Lindbergh, took on the vile bloodthirsty jooies in an attempt to prevent WWII….and was quickly smeared and squashed. In short, the conniving bloodthirsty jooies were entrenched in the American power structure long before the appearance of the so-called “neocons”……they got their central bank in 1913 and all their vile profitable wars thereafter.
The rise of the Neocons began when Walter Mondale ran for President on the Democrat’s ticket. He ran on a peace platform, which the Neocons opposed.
Brian Lamb interviewed the Godfather of Neoconservatism, Irving Krystal, after the publication of Krystal’s book, “Neoconservatism; the Autobiography of an Idea.” The interview is well worth the time it takes to watch it, as you’ll not read much of this anywhere today.
Video Link
On a different note, Mr. Cathey, it’s our families followed similar paths. I trace mine back to Dumfries in Scotland, then to Clogher, Tyrone, in Ireland, then to Bedford County in Virginia, then to Pickens County in South Carolina. We have been in Pickens County, SC, for 230 years now. If I defer to my mother’s family, I am a 12th generation South Carolinian.
How many different names are you going to use to post this stuff?
Nobody fears being dominated by blacks. The people propping up blacks are a problem, but not the blacks themselves. Without massive help, blacks would be right back in the same situation they were in 100 years ago, and in no time at all.
If blacks were the revolutionary threat you claim they are, the borders wouldn’t be open.
The fight to determine ‘America’s future’ won’t result in return to the good old Scotch-Irish days of yore but the descendants could remain relevant by sharing their secret sauce of cultural superiority with public at large… Rob Roy would be okay with it!
Phyllis Schlafly : Good.
Pat Buchanan : A Nationalist-Leftist. His economic views are left-wing.
The others : Not well-known enough to matter.
I’ve always liked Dr. Cathey’s writings. I’ve read a little Mel Bradford on the strength of his recommendation, which I also appreciated. I am very thankful that he is, like me, a Traditional Catholic.
But this article didn’t sit well with me after he began to describe his family’s migrations. The thought of his ancestors (or anyone’s ancestors, for that matter) trespassing across two continents in search of greener pastures doesn’t exactly fill me with a sense of national pride. I would not support the idea of migrating for economic opportunism any more than I would that of the universalist ideology that Cathey roundly and rightly denounces.
I think that, barring a truly desperate situation, there is no right to emigrate at all and everybody should stay in the lands where fate has placed them. This is the only traditionalist position possible. Migrating for “better opportunities” is lowly and ignoble, and not at all the actions of a conservative. While Dr. Cathey may be conservative now, his ancestors certainly weren’t conservative then.
There is something that always rings false and hollow whenever a traditionalist attempts to justify his status as an American. We are not Americans, we are displaced Europeans. A true traditionalist will have to accept this uncomfortable fact whatever it may entail, and then he will have to work hard to undo the many generations of sins committed by his unworthy ancestors.
Mr. Cathey’s long and circumspect essay is a prime example of why conservatism has become so thoroughly cucked and will continue to lose and lose again. He dances around the events of the last 60 years and never once refers to the common cause of all the calamities that have befallen the USA and the West.
May I suggest a refresher course on Occam’s Razor?
What really launched neo-conservatism on the long ramp into world power was a belated recognition that the anti-colonial rhetoric that was so de rigeur in the 1960s was moving from formerly “safe” issues like the French colonial war in Algeria or the Portuguese attempt to hold onto Angola to the settler state of Israel and its brutal dispossession of the Palestinians. Many leftists were making the cardinal mistake that what was appropriate for the Goy goose was sauce for the Yid gander. Silly Goyim. Nationalism is for Yids. And no one else.
Neo-conservatism is all about Israel, for Israel, and nothing else but Israel. Until true conservatives attack that tree at the root, you can safely assume that National Review will be doing a passionate defense of trans-gender bathroom right as something Thomas Jefferson would have supported a few years hence.
Cathey’s article is about the southern British heritage going back to 1607, specifically the Scots who arrived after they were not able to overthrow the official church of Ireland in Ulster.
It’s about the southerners who ame to America 300 350 years ago and pretty much stayed in the same place all those centuries. That’s something to be very proud of.
It’s not about the detrimental effects of the goyim hating communists who beginning in 1880 moved their entire shetls to the big cities of the north and then on to S California.
I think you are right that we are displaced Europeans. So many Americans are ; Irish German Italian Polish Scots Jewish Norwegian Mexican and whatever even if their ancestors have been in this country 200 years.
Even the southerners seem more interested in their British heritage than anything else.
My opinion about conservatives is they are not pro White. They never objected to affirmative action. They endlessly blather about IQ and school test scores but ignore the real horror of school interrogation the behavior of black children
Conservatives are still dedicated to the 19th and early 20th century petit bourgeois myth that if they go to college and get a good degree and score well on tests and get their oracle certificate or whatever capitalism will reward them with a good secure job.
Conservatives are not pro White. Because they are not pro White the anti White liberals are destroying Whites with affirmative action, Black on White crime and non White immigrants from Drs to dishwashers
One of Richard Nixon’s many anti White programs was the Philadelphia plan. It eliminated the construction and other unions. I’ve read many back issues of NR and other conservative publications written about the Philadelphia plan.
The conservatives loved the Philadelphia plan. First it destroyed the prosperous construction workers who made more than teachers and secretaries. Second it reduced a huge number of workers to the status of illegal immigrants standing in a parking lot begging for a day’s work.
Conservatives are just too tied up with race to the bottom big fish eat the little fish capitalism to be good for Whites.
Then there is abortion. It’s a Hispanic and black method of birth control. We can’t do anything about affirmative action and non White immigration.
But at least we should not lobby for more non Whites entitled to affirmative action jobs or who will grow up to be criminals and welfare beneficiaries being born.
There is no pro White movement in this country. Conservatives are not pro White. Southerners claim to be pro White but it’s basically confederate heritage, anti abortion 2 nd amendment and the Bible.
Not even close.
Neocons are all about power not blood or soil….they are about creative destruction.
Southern conservatism was the opposite …it was about preserving
W are the last hold out for old conservatism…that is why you see “The South’ attacked by everyone—-the Jewish elites, the globalist, the neo liberals and neo conservatives alike. We are a threat to them.
Love the music although it’s more real Irish than Scots Irish. Listen carefully to The Bonnie Blue Flag. It’s really an Irish jig
The revolution was betrayed in 1791 when the elites were faced with paying the 13 billion in 1770s French money the founders borrowed from France to pay for the revolution *
How to pay this debt?????
Auctions of confiscated Tory or alleged Tory property? Never, Tory property belonged to whoever could grab it.
Property tax, income tax, sales tax, luxury tax like the English window and carriage tax?
Horrors no Those taxes would have a disparate impact on the coastal elites. They owned a lot of property. They had the high incomes. The bought more stuff and more expensive stuff.
Where or where would the money come from???
Out in the frontier, fighting off the Indians, are these mostly Scot lowlife trash. They grow a lot of corn tobacco and other things but there are no roads to get high volune cash crops to market.
The Scots made use of the corn and clean water to make whiskey which is easier to transport through the wilderness.
Hamilton the usurer figured out a way to make the frontiers men pay if the French loan, a tax in their whisky. It was the first federal tax.
Washington, the Democrat Jefferson Madison and the rest of the wealthy agreed. It was great for them, no taxes on the wealthiest.
So Washington led more troops than he ever led against either the English or the French and Indians 6 years after the end of the revolution Washington attacked the very frontiersmen who fought against the English
The whiskey rebels were defeated many were hanged. And so the American tradition of the working middle class paid all the taxes while the elites paid minimum tax began
* bit of historical trivia The French government borrowed a lot of the 13 billion from the primo money lenders of Europe the Fuggers and the Grand Duke of Hesse and his consortium of Frankfurt bankers which included Mayer Rothschild.
I know how sensitive southerners are and I apologize in toy find my comment offensive.
First liberals no longer attack White southerners for slavery. They attack all Whites for slavery including people of German Italian Scandinavian Greek Polish whatever whose ancestors arrived well after the civil war and whose native lands had no connection to America and slavery.
I mean, look at the Wisconsin and Minnesota Germans and Scandinavians caterwauling about how they are guilty of slavery.
The liberals started blaming all Whites, even Whites whose grandparents arrived in the 1940s for slavery and segregation and every problem blacks have had since 1619.
The other thing, and forgive if I offend is that only southerners care about the civil war any more. That’s the truth.
It’s no longer about whippings and auctions and Sally Hemings and Eliza 200 years ago. It’s the colllective guilt of all Whites, even Russians and other E Europeans who got off the plane yesterday for all the problems and troubles blacks have today.
When I was a kid I read some of my parents American history books I forget the authors. The opinion before about 1975 was that the civil war was an economic conquest of the south by northern industrialists
They wanted the tobacco cotton sugar rice corn pecans coal, iron other minerals and the vast timber resources wood turpentine, resin varnish etc. they also wanted a vast cheap desperate labor force of Whites and freed blacks.
And the White southerners just took it. The desperate low paid immigrant work force in the north at least tried to organize labor unions.
Everybody knows about the coal miners poverty But the conditions for the timber workers were a thousand times worse Timber workers usually owed a lot more to the company store than they earned.
But the White southerners ignored the fact that their kids had pellegra and other malnutrition diseases, worked in textile mills at age 10, and were universally despised by other southerners as trash, crackers rednecks lint heads mill trash etc
Instead they concentrated on the confederate heritage and never figured out that the southern upper classes collaborated with the northern banks and industrialists to exploit White workers worse than they ever exploited the black slaves.
The CBC is the most beautiful flag in the world but the southern elites used it to distract the lint heads from their exploitation
A lot of liberals are so ignorant about the civil war they think the evil republicans were the confederate s and the the union and Lincoln were Democrats. Seriously and I mean SJW grad students.
Unless the Russians are Jews of course.
The “ south “ is not attacked much any more.
It’s Whites in general. And most of the emphasis nowadays is present day problems of blacks, problems for which all Whites are responsible.
Apology accepted, but it wasn’t needed. I wasn’t truly offended, because I’ve spent more than a little time around Northerners, and I’ve heard much, much worse. Conversely, if you’ve spent much time around Southerners, especially the coarser sort of redneck, you will have heard some hard language about Damn Yankees, too. Probably some jokes about U-Hauls and hemorrhoids.
I can’t disagree with what you’ve written. I can enlighten you to some degree, but I won’t argue your points. The Moonlight and Magnolia myths helped poor Southerners explain their situation, I guess. Some, or many, imagine their ancestors lived on plantations, and the men sipped Mint Juleps on the veranda whilst the women took their daily naps. This lifestyle only existed for a select few; a very small minority of Southern households. Their great-grandfathers fought with Marse Robert in the legendary Army of Northern Virginia, and this was a source of pride, even to a man whose arm was mangled in a carding machine accident at the mill.
Try to imagine for moment, if you will, what it might be like if the 13 Colonies lost the Revolution, and we were today something more along the lines of Canada and Australia. Would the descendants of those who fought forget them? Would we still hold Washington in our hearts as a hero, or spurn him as a traitor? This last would be the official line, and the official history taught in schools. Would it be enough for him to be merely a traitor, or would he need to be something evil, too? Maybe they would say the colonies rebelled to keep their slaves in chains, because, remember, the British offered them freedom, and quite a few took it, too. The North won, and so it’s easier to forget. The South bled, and lost, and to Southerners, it’s much closer.
Most of the cotton mills in the South were owned by Northerners. The Milliken family now of Spartanburg, SC, is an example. One reason they moved to the South is because of the union fever in the North, but the main reason was to reduce shipping costs for the cotton they bought. They built the plants near the cotton.
I could try to explain to you why unions didn’t go over in the South, but I have a hard time finding an explanation that suits my modern values enough to properly explain it to myself. Southerners in that era, and even true Southerners today, find something wrong in it. The particular culture that developed in the South was more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon. There was, and is, a tendency to defer to one’s chieftain. Or the lines of social status remained largely unchanged from previous British rules of society, and the Great Enlightenment didn’t reach far down into the ranks of Southerners. Or something.
At one time there were Whigs, and everybody was a Whig. Then they all became Democrats. South Carolina, like most Southern states, was a single party state. In many elections there was no opposition party candidate. Winning the nomination to the Democratic ticket was as much as being elected. Most Southern voters were free white men with some property, and they continued to elect members of the same families to office, election after election after election.
As hard as it is to understand, especially in hindsight, after all that’s happened since, it was a choice, and they chose to have no unions. It wasn’t laying down and taking it. The South rarely lays down and takes anything. When white Southerners get their gander up, it takes Federal troops to calm things down.
And it could be that, upon surveying the situation, they didn’t think the unions had a chance of winning, and shrugged, and went back to work. I wish I’d even had these thoughts in my mind while some of those who lived through it were still alive, and could have asked them about it.
The history book you wrote about is one I’ve never run across. That opinion is definitely a minority opinion, and not one I’ve encountered before. Northern commerce depended on Southern raw materials. There was once a saying in the shipyards of the North and the cotton fields of the South; “Southern cotton makes Northern sails.” As for products other than cotton and sugar cane, the vast fields of the Midwest out produced the South by a significant factor. Rice, in its heyday, made men richer than cotton and cane together. The Rice Lords were as rich as European aristocracy.
The chief economic differences came from two sources. One was the often talked about tariffs, disproportionately paid by Southern merchants and planters, and disproportionately benefitting Northern commerce and manufacturing. It was also the chief source of federal revenue. You probably know much about this.
What’s talked about less now, and was talked about as much as, if not more than tariffs, was the vicious division over the General Welfare clause of the Constitution, and how far it could be taken. The Hamiltonian Northerners introduced bills which would use Federal funds to improve harbors, and build canals, which would benefit Northern industry. The Jeffersonian Democrats of the South were against such uses of tariff dollars, most of which they contributed, mainly if not solely because none of the improvements were planned for the Southern states, and they didn’t stand a chance to profit from them.
The name they gave it was Mercantilism. Henry Clay, a son of Kentucky, was its chief proponent and spokesman. Lincoln was an admirer of Clay, and a believer. The government which survived him was Mercantilist to the core, and had its heyday in the age of the Robber Barons. It was, at first, widely accepted among the elite, North and South. The Southern elites soon soured on it as they saw they would be left out, as it stood, and discovered, for the first time, they no longer had the political power to bend things toward their collective wills.
Some claim this was what led to the strict loyalty of Southerners to the slave state. It was certainly the force behind the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, as writings from the time attest. The South, i.e. slave states, those whose principal participation in the economy was as a large scale producer of agricultural goods, believed that if they did not hold parity in Congress, the taxes they paid would be used to increase the riches of Northerners, and Northerners only, at the expense of Southerners.
They could, of course, have abolished slavery, and followed the Midwest model of agricultural production. One man who attempted to get rich in tobacco farming, but had trouble competing against the planters, wrote a book proving that slavery would expire soon of its own weight now that the New England model of labor was spreading over the country. It was a cost/benefit analysis using government data to prove that keeping slaves was unprofitable. The cost of a slave was a lifetime burden. Children didn’t start working until they were 12, and were kept up in their old age, and in sickness, and through injuries. In the wage labor system, one only paid for the worker while he was productive, period. His youth, his old age, his sickness and infirmity, well those were not the problems of the wage employer. He published his book immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and so his points were forever moot.
Their propaganda at the time, preserved today in the form of saved written speeches which were given at militia meetings, held monthly throughout the South, as well as newspapers which recorded the speeches of the Fire Eaters. They make the Northerners the “other,” and the loyal (to them) Southerners as the heirs of the Great Revolution, beholden to stand fast for the cause, the same cause for which their ancestors had fought the British. The Northerners sought to swallow them whole, and take away their property (not just slaves) and strip them of their rights as free men.
I admit I haven’t read much of the pre-war propoganda of the North, only that which was published during the war. Harper’s did have some fine articles on prewar discusions, including the speeches of Daniel Webster, both the one in which he laid claim to pride in men named Laurens, Pinkney, Sumter, and Marion, in reply to Senator Hayne.
These are interesting tidbits of history, a common history, and should be viewed that way by both sides; indeed all sides now need to foget about past wars and the hatred of our ancestors. I believe there’s a little too much on the line right now for white people to be refighting this war, or any war, for that matter. In the end it was a brother war, and a terrible disaster for us. Too many good men died.
The South is not attacked much anymore? Where do you live? Southern monuments are still being removed. The schools, streets, and other places named in the honor of Southern heroes are being changed all the time. The South IS being attacked, because it is the easy starting place to dismantle the whole thing. First destroy Southern heroes, because slavery, then the Founding Fathers, many of whom were the same sort of people, and all the rest of it falls after that.
“What did these old white supremacists know about equal rights? We don’t need this 2nd Amendment! People don’t need guns. Free speech is hate speech!”
This is why ALL white people should stand behind protecting Confederate memorials. The USA is our last hope. Every other white country is cucked. If we save this country, we might eventually save the others.
Old america died when lincoln was elected
While I am no fan of the hypocritical egalitarian pretense of the neoconservatives, I cannot see what is the point in seeing anything legitimate about the practice of slavery.
Much harm has resulted from this peculiar institution, and anyone who thought that such a system was anything but rotten had to be doing a great deal of lying.
I am appalled what the neoconservatives have done and continue to do to the United States. But slavery was an abomination that should not be defended under any terms.
It was an earlier manifestation of the rich getting rich off the labor of others and the rest of us having to pay the butcher’s bill in the end.
That’s in the south. Whites in general, even if they got off the plane from Europe are attacked.
We are all responsible for the legacy of slavery. Even descendants of Henry Beecher and his sister are evil beneficiaries of White privilege. Liberals no longer blame southerners They blame all Whites.
White southerners care. It’s ADL and other Jews pulling down the statues.
The rest of the country just doesn’t care one way or the other. I’ve noticed that it’s mostky southern black politicians backed by Jewish media and attorneys that are pulling down the statues
No one else cares or notices
I am in favor of protecting the confederate monuments and I live Virgil Caine I’m a good old rebel the Bonnie blue flag and the music.
But really only southerners are interested
What else needs to thrown into this miss beyond the kitchen sink to make it work with some level of efficacy.
The heritage of the colonies was British. There’s no question. It dot matter where you came from. Once you obtained permission from London to settle in the colonies, you adopted the British — well the British everything and they had adopted from others and claimed as their own.
Changing the words of “America” doesn’t change either the rhythm or where its from. And despite the bizarre litany of discourse that relegates skin color to purely cultural construct. It’s recorded in history, that black Brits were as loyal to the state as white Brits, most assuredly when they were accorded the same citizenship.
Amazingly enough, whites love brandishing Crispus Attucks among the Boston rabal rousers in High school. But loath to mention a and of ignorant, low IQ slaves who manged to commandeer a ship and despite being wholly stupid and devoid any real human skills and so many love to assail on this, steer that ship to the US – dumb luck no doubt.
As a conservative, I have to acknowledge that blacks were people, they were human beings. And despite the many twists and turns of 18th Century rhetoric to claim otherwise, a brief look through the period makes a strong case that even then slavery was an issue in dispute. It was in dispute among the French, the British, the Italians less so — but an issue of controversy nonetheless. For this author to make a claim that it was not an issue among the colonies contradicts the record, the most notable in my view is the near collapse of the continental congress over slavery. Since the south was ever threatening to secede over the question — I think it is safe to say, it was controversy in the south as well as the north — because the issue of succession was one of debate in the south.
The ever present fear among the states that blacks would revolt, run away, and engage in any number of acts to assert their freedom undermines any suggestion of a pleasant nobility among slave society participants. There were Nat Turners before there was a Nat Turner. Hence the reasons for providing very limited education, prohibitions against the use of their native tongue, assuming that among the myriad societies from which blacks were derived they even spoke the same language they did not. Their cultures were as diverse as those of Europe or the Middle East, including language. But they were human.
And that is what spells doom for this article are three books (I have not yet ordered):
The Southern Debate Over Slavery volumes 1 and 2
and
Debate Over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in the Antebellum America
I think it undermines the premise of that slavery was essentially a nonissue in the south among southerners.
When the Declaration of Independence signers made the choice to condone slavery the in effect sunk the entire foundation for which the declaration was written — the fact both North and South East and west participated in condoning and perhaps worse, engaged in massive discriminatory practices afterwards and are still reluctant to either admit or grapple with its consequences explains the careless address of the matter today – especially taking the surface actions about statues.
If truth is the first casualty then an entire polity predicated on culture to whiteness when its clear that a person subject to culture regardless of color will adopt that culture as his or her won, re,mains a casualty.
Checked Wikipedia the historians were Charles beard jackson turner and Samuel Eliot Morrison All concluded what you did; that the war of northern aggression was more about money than the constitution
I remember about the rice fortunes.
The conquest to turn the south into a financial economic colony makes sense to me.
I’ve read a lot of Calhoun. He was very intelligent and a great writer. BUT his family were one of the biggest profiteers from the slave economy. His writings on the constitution and justification for secession are excellent from a legal and constitutional point of view.
But if he personally hadn’t benefitted from slavery so much would he have been such a fire eater? I don’t think so.
My ancestor was one of the founders of Frankfurt Kentucky. Others settled up and down the river from St Louis to below New Orleans.
I’m not against the confederate heritage even though much of it is a myth.
Did you read or see the movie Cold Mountain? The hero Inman was a real person. But he didn’t make it home. He was killed by a militia patrol that hunted down deserters draft dodgers and men they thought were draft dodgers Inman was wounded and got a medical discharge. The patrol shot him.
Lovely
I wish all Whites would band together and get rid of affirmative action end all immigration, deport illegals and return to the concept of a living wage
But we won’t. We’ll squabble about abortion which isn’t a White thing anyway. Tell the truth, the only so called conservative organization I respect is the NRA. Every other conservative cause has lost.
Except for cheap labor big fish eat the little fish capitalism of course
It would have happened. The northern industrialists and bankers wanted the southern resources and cheap labor of the freed blacks and dispossessed Whites.
Yes, so the cost of benefits packages for slaves, such as health care and retirement made the whole enterprise uneconomic. The long-term solution was obviously to offshore the jobs, put everyone on zero-hours contracts, and have slave-drivers work for Uber.
However by 1865 slavery had already been abolished in the British Empire and its possessions a generation earlier, following France which abolished slavery in 1794 shortly after the French Revolution (except apparently in Haiti, where the slaves themselves abolished it in 1814) , and in fact that US was one of the LAST nations on earth to abolish slavery, in spite of numerous nations having banned the slave trade and abolished slavery in their own territories prior to 1865.
Spain was one of the laggards, too, though nowhere near the level of tardiness of Mauritania, which abolished slavery in 1981, probably the only country that has ever had abolition of slavery in the TV age and actually passed another law in 2007 to give the antislavery laws teeth and set penalties for the practice of slavery of up to ten years in prison. Ouch!
Facts which Mr. West chooses to ignore:
blacks also owned slaves in the US south
Africans had massive slavery, it was black Africans who sold black African slaves to the slave traders
Slavery of black Africans would have never happened without black Africans selling their black African slaves first
African chiefs urged to apologise for slave trade
Nigerian civil rights group says tribal leaders’ ancestors sold people to slavers and should say sorry
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/18/africans-apologise-slave-trade
“African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologise it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today.”
Black researcher, Dr. Tony Martin, let’s us know who the prime sellers & owners of slaves really were, Jews.
Dr. Tony Martin – The Jewish Role in the African Slave Trade
Video Link
How is Phyllis Schafly good? She lost every cause she embraced. Useless loser.
Buchanan an economic leftist? Not in the European and American sense.
You’re an Indian and not familiar with the concept of a living wage or the common good.
Interesting, Rebel, and I’m sure the original is more than these 10 minutes*. I just heard the end before writing, where Kristol talks about his “alcove # 1” at NYC City University in which he distinguishes Trotskyists and Socialists as all “non-Communist left wing people”. This guy’s politics are pretty warped to the left. He would never have wanted to associate with a real conservative.
This stuff does seem to go back a ways, but I think still that these people found their wings at the end of the Cold War, when we should have had that peace dividend. Where’s my dividend check, bitches?!
* BTW, it’s totally off this subject, but C-SPAN book-TV, maybe not this same show, is the one that had a mellow interview with Mark Steyn (maybe a semi-neocon, but decent guy). He let Steyn talk for 99% of the 3 hours.
Not enough people talk about the Jewish role in the slave trade. Farrakhan talks about it a little. Maybe the Alt Right should speak on this topic more.
Most folks in the South didn’t own slaves. Most whites were poor as dirt and probably had bigger things to worry about than slavery, like feeding their family. Most people today in the South get along just fine with most blacks, if the (((Media))), lowlife politicians, racebaiters didn’t constantly stir the pot, we could live a lot better!
White people didn’t own slaves, rich people owned slaves.
You can read Farrakhans research books free online:
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One
http://www.legalucc.com/free_study_material/The-Secret-Relationship-Between-Blacks-and-Jews.pdf
Highlights and Key Points The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One
http://noirg.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/TSR.HighlightsKeyPoints1.pdf
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews conclusively proved that Jews were in fact at the very center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as merchants, financiers, shippers, and insurers and among the leading international marketers of the products of African slave labor. This information was compiled from texts written by prominent Jewish scholars and historians.
What drugs have you been taking? You think Charlottesville was about anything but the South and Southerners?
You are correct that now all whites are damned as almost only Southerners were damned in the past, but that is because the culture war against the South was won and, as all but the most stupid Southerners predicted (and as the most astute whites from elsewhere also predicted), that culture war exploded to take on all whites.
The reason that happened as it did is that as Boyd Cathey knows – and here makes rather explicit – the Left understood, at least by intuition, that once the whites from elsewhere could be persuaded to go along with demonizing the most conservative large group, the most conservative region and its people and culture, in the nation, then there would be no way to protect themselves when the Left turned on them.
The logic works in reverse: unless Southern culture (the real thing that no longer exists save in small pockets) is revived and made central to American conservatism, then American conservatism will be no better than a bad joke.
You are a no-talent wigger who wants to mooch off of successful whites like me. White Trashionalists are just socialists, at the end of the day.
Get off my lawn, faggot!
Agreed. I’ve said much the same in comments to earlier articles. I ask once again, if tariffs were the issue why were northern farm states outside of. New England not affected?
A while back on taki’s webzine, poster drain 52 questioned why more flack wasn’t directed toward those who brought blacks over here by force as slaves, rather than just against the blacks themselves. That observation was not well received.
Apparently Sherman’s march through the South never ended. And Atlanta is not only still burning, but has engulfed the country, and beyond.
It is interesting that the Virginia Declaration of Rights 1776 has a more rational approach to the ‘rights’.
Section 1. That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
There is a difference from the ‘famous’:
“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Men are created free, not equal.
I read the book and saw the movie. Both are great. The Petersburg scene is one of the best battle scenes of the war ever shot. There were two SC infantry regiments and one SC battery of artillery directly over the explosion. There are two graves in Pickens County, SC, I’m aware of that are dedicated to men who were killed in the explosion. Their bodies are still in Petersburg, somewhere in or around the crater. I confirmed their names on the plague in the chapel at Petersburg.
I did not know the character Inman was based on a real person, or did not recall it. Frazier had to note in the book, somewhere, and I’m sure I read it and forgot it. I doubt he was killed by accident, or because he was thought to be a deserter, though it’s possible. It’s far more likely that he was from the wrong family. Warfare was used as a convenient pretext in the mountains and back country to settle old scores, both in the Civil War and the American Revolution.
Calhoun is an oft misunderstood man. He has been called the Father of Secession, but he was, in reality, an ardent Unionist. Nullification, or the theory of Concurrent Majority, was his attempt to avoid secession.
He says, when he explains to Lamb what is a Neoconservative, that they are NOT really conservatives.
I’m pretty sure Brazil was the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to end slavery. Just as everywhere but the USA and Haiti, they did so peacefully.
Good for you for pointing out this truth.
Even tangential justifications for evil remain, at the end of the day, justifications for evil.
Did you ever read anything about how the northern industrialists just cheated and stole the mineral rights of the coal under their land from W Virginians?
Calhoun’s best work I read was arguments against the annexation of Mexico in 1848. There was a lot of thinking that we should annex it. When we conquered and occupied Mexico City a delegation of movers and shakers offered General Scott to stay and be President of Mexico. He turned it down.
I think you’re right.
You live in your uncle’s garden shed with access to the bathroom. You spend your days waiting for a text or email from on call your job giving you a days work.
I in the other hand ……
Are American Indians displaced Siberians? Ought they to work hard to undo the many generations of sins committed by their unworthy ancestors?
If yes, is there any people on earth who is not a displaced something else and who ought not to work hard to undo the many generations of sins committed by unworthy ancestors?
Just wondering.
P.S. Don’t answer if it will distract too much from the think-pieces you recently proposed.
I hates this Yankee nation and everything they do I hate that striped banner and fit it all I could
We killed 300,000 wish we killed 3 million more.
“the political left in general, not you personally) suddenly went AWOL when it was your sainted Obama bombing foreigners”
No one on the real left supported Obama or Clinton/s (both). Sainted Obama – is very funny. Hopefully he will begin the journey to sainthood – ie DIE – soon…say, tomorrow.
The only left – the “psuedo-left” that supported Obama was the usual “identity” rabble: sometimes known by their other names – “useful idiots” & “sock puppets”.
Sorry, the think-pieces will have to wait until I can work them into another thread. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time this week.
But I believe the answer to you question is no. The Native Americans are genuine Americans, and it is certainly not the case that everybody is a displaced somebody-else.
However, when we are talking about the White people who settled North America, we are talking about people whose entire cultural and ethnic identity comes most emphatically from Europe. I don’t think there is any reasonable way to deny this. The choice before us then is, shall we abjure our European heritage and become Native Americans, or shall we retain a European identity and structure a society according to all that entails?
So far the American way has been to choose a mushy middle grand where we say that we are European expats who believe in “freedom,” which in practice means capitulating to any group who wishes to set up shop here. In essence we have fallen between two stools; this is no identity at all.
I remain firm in my conviction that the only hope for an actual European-American state that is not a mere incidental monstrosity consists in establishing a Catholic monarchy. Yes, I know how implausible this sounds at the present time, but it really is the only way.
But some blood never belonged on our soil. Thus the importation of enslavables is the biggest single betrayal of kin by an English-speaking people.
West Virginians had the right idea: There’s something sick about white folks who want Africans around. And who wants those sick white folks around?
Had Lincoln had any brains, he’d have invited to stay only those counties that were over 95% white, and sloughed off the rest as terminally cancerous.
You’re on the wrong side of the Channel with this. Our people left Europe in Cerdic’s day.
A simple reverse image search turns up the nature of the upcoming nation of “Hindu nationalist” India. One thing that struck me was this:
http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Karnataka,-Hindu-protesters-incite-the-massacre-of-Christians-10102.html
A little snippet from the above: “Christians in the Southern Karnataka state “must immediately abandon Indian territory, or return to the mother religion which is Hinduism”. If they do not “they will be killed by all good Indians, who by doing so will show their virility and their love of the country”.”
And here we see them coming by the busloads and embracing “Tolerance” and “inclusion”. I would like to believe that quite some of them could be Christians or those Hindus who themselves abhor what’s happening in their name back home.
But when I see throngs of losers cheering for their PM, (in)famous for riding a popularity wave on the back of a slaughter and rape fest on minorities in his home state, I wonder what India really stands for, morally and ethically!
Granted we are NOT in the position to dictate morality or ethics to anyone out there (after what the ZUS government has done in OUR name the world over, especially in the mid east) but at least our government has been hijacked from quite some time now.
But theirs it seems it still quite representative of the local sentiments. And if those “sentiments” are really like what appears to be, then what we have is a bunch of first class hypocrites here! Thomm for instance
And in fact their PM is quite a populist and they say India is returning to it’s natural state now that it has a “hindu nationalist” as it’s PM. And he gels quite well this bibi too!! Mazel Tov!!
It sounds to me as if Mr. Cathey is expounding his own version of Southern exceptionalism in the course of crtiticizing the American one. Both positions are erroneous.
Nitpicking, but one could probably count on one hand the number of civil war soldiers, on either side, whose fathers had fought in the American revolution, other than maybe a few elderly officers, like Robert E Lee. There were undoubtedly far more soldiers with great-grandfathers who were AmRev vets than fathers who were. There were probably more soldiers with great-great-grandfathers who were AmRev vets than fathers who were.
It’s also absurd to talk about your ancestors having far more freedom than you have today when you neglect to mention that you have infinitely more freedom than the slaves of your ancestors and/or their neighbors. As a northerner with no southern ancestors, I do think the war was nowhere near worth the price, but no serious person will take your complaints about lack of freedom today seriously if you neglect to mention the millions of people who had literally no freedom then.
I would have said British rather than European. Americans speak English, not French or German, and a book like “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America” https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultural/dp/0195069056 shows the traces of British regionalism still present in the US today.
It’s true that going shopping together and being multicultural isn’t any identity.
Would this implausible Catholic monarch have real power or just be a British style figurehead? If they had real power this would go entirely against the spirit America’s founders and the Constitution. An alternative might be a clear definition of “America First”, something along the lines of Trump’s election arguments, that all US citizens would need to give allegiance to.
According to comments on another thread, China for example, has considerable ethnic variation but all are required to have a first loyalty to China and be “China First”.
Trump is the biggest judas goat ever elected to the Presidency of the U.S. He has backtracked on nearly every issue he ran on and has proved himself to be just another lackey of the globalist elite 0.001% doing their dirty work. How anyone familiar with trump’s sordid and criminal private and business life could ever have believed he was a true blue conservative and patriotic loyalist who would actually reverse the lefist/corporate criminal conspiracies to flood the U.S. with Third World proles and ship our industrial base to the Third World for slave labor is beyond me. I opposed Trump from day one as the charlatan, con man, liar, thief and traitor he really is. His fake pretend conservatism and worthless character has done grave harm to real Conservatism that may take years to recover from. Trump’s election is simply another manifestation of America’s long descent from a democratic republic to a kleptocracy/oligarchy of, by and for the super rich and big banks and big business.
I think you are being a bit unfair. He was making the point that they did not come here for idealistic notions of liberty and equality. When the actual fact of very real persecution exists then you do absolutely have the right to seek to escape persecution. To be fair, his people did not flee to another country but stayed within England by coming here prior to the Revolutionary war, this was English territory under English Rule.
What probably hurt the confederacy more than the institution of slavery was the institution of immigration in the north. The criminal Lincoln had Irish immigrants forced into the army as a condition of immigration. The war was not going well and he needed fresh bodies to throw recklessly at the southern resistance. Many of these Irish had no quarrel with the southerners and in fact felt sorry for helping to destroy the south. The destruction of the confederacy was the destruction of the republic and you are correct all evils of today follow from that defeat. One can only wonder what it would be like if Lee had taken Washington when he had the chance.
So this strikes me as kind of an odd comment. We should be happy we have more freedom today than actual slaves did in the past? Gosh, I won’t mind then what new form of wacky overreach by our government now so long as I am still freer than a slave in old Dixie. Please whip me harder master for my collective guilt.