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Book Review of The Honorable Cause: A Free South (2023)
Padraig Martin, editor
From a faraway European perspective, it may sound odd to reminisce about the tragic history of the post-bellum South. College books in the US and EU still portray the South in an anecdotal, quasi–Wild West manner, the North being depicted as the eternal beacon of humanity and progress and the South as a territory of always lurking ugly White racists. The process of demonization of the South is well described by one of the contributors to the book, Jude Ruffin, who notes how the Empire subjected the South “to every form of degradation, from the mocking of our speech to the lampooning of our national character.”
The Honorable Cause: A Free South, is a collection of essays written by people active in the cause of Southern nationalism. It is valuable not only because of its throwing additional light on the rich Southern cultural heritage, but also because the contributing authors provide the blueprint for a better understanding of today’s racially polarized America in decline. These essays also serve well for a better understanding of the meaning of White identities, both in Europe and the U.S. An average Irishman, a Catalan or a Breton, who has never set foot in the US, let alone having any idea about the history of Southern culture, will better grasp the message of the present essays than an American resident scholar residing on the East or West Coast.
The book consists of twelve essays by contemporary Southern authors, each of them taking his own stand on the Southern heritage with the underlying message: the South is not the lost cause. It can live and it can survive despite the onslaught of liberal political debauchery and the leftist cancel culture.
When reading the book, what comes to mind is the manifesto, I’ll take my stand written by several Southern academics almost a hundred years ago in which they describe the efforts of the plutocratic North to despoil and brainwash the South. Does that sound familiar today? A hundred years later, the process of brainwashing the so-called “reconstructed South” was applied again by Northern world-improvers and their Soviet partners in Germany and Europe, in what was euphemistically called “reeducation.”
For this reason alone, this book represents a timely sequel to the prose of early Southern Agrarians. It should be read twice, not just by aspiring White nationalists in America, but also by the larger academic community in Europe and America. The beauty of each of those twelve essays, albeit also their difficulty, is that each essay could easily expand into a separate book. What transpires from this book, however, is that the Southern cause stands not just for a specific geographic location or a limited time span of history. Being a Southern Nationalist today, however awkward this expression sounds, means first and foremost having a different mindset and being proud of a unique brand of Western civilization. Metaphorically speaking, one can be a good Southerner even if not born in the South. To a large extent, citizens of European ancestry, wherever on earth they now reside, are subject to a predicament similar to that faced by Southern Nationalists. We all face similar fake news, we are all subjected to a similar Great Racial Replacement project, and we are all undergoing a similar process of extinction at the hand of the Global Liberal Reconstructor. Fortunately, the number of Southerners with a strong sense of their identity as White Southerners and with a sense of their interests as White Southerners is growing.
America’s South, or what remains of it, appears in many aspects more European than Europe itself, a continent which has turned by now into its own cadaverous parody. In fact, many Southerners, even simple country folks from the Ozarks still display a sense of civic duty and decency, sincere compassion, unfaked smiles, and politeness that are long gone in Europe. The South still has its distinct taste and flavor, not just in its culinary achievements, but also in a way of communication, well noted in Dixie O’Hara’s essay, “Aprons of Resistance: The Role of Women in Southern Dissidence.” Home-grown black-eyed peas or roasted chicken are far more appetizing in a small restaurant in Alabama than at some generic Denny’s along US 101.
But the South is more than just Cajun cuisine or Dolly Parton’s songs. Although now isolated and vilified, Southern Nationalists represent a peculiar breed of people that cannot be found anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. The word “honor” for instance and its verbal derivatives, used and abused by many in Europe and the U.S., retains for them its original old Latin honestas significance. It denotes constant self-inspection and an inborn character endowment that can neither be sold nor bought. In her contribution, “Reconsidering Our Nation,” Anne Wilson Smith also adds an important insight on Southern character, namely “skepticism towards (all) authority.” Put more descriptively, many Southerners abide by unwritten rules that the interests of community, kinship bondage, as well as a sense of sacrifice for the common good that precedes the individual’s sense of self-interest.
Yes, the South had given birth to distinct people, and as James Edwards notes in his introductory essay, “There’s No Place Like Home,” “great men are never made except through great trials,” a feature that can less and less be detected in Europe today, even among many self-proclaimed White nationalists. In his contribution, Father O’Dabney seconds Edwards with his simple yet profound words that “greatness is born in humility.”
The Other and the Same
Many educated Europeans, especially modern high-culture White nationalists have rightfully and for decades been very critical of America’s mercantile mindset, fleeting human relationship, hyper-individualism and excessive Judeophile messianism in American foreign politics. This is not the case with Southern Nationalists. The American global Empire and Americanism (whatever the words ‘Americanism’ and ‘America’ mean in a so-called nation that has by now almost half of non-White non-European citizens) can find their sharpest critics precisely among Southerners, as exemplified by a well-researched Rick Dirtwater’s piece, “Americanism: Death of the South.”
Many critics of the South, especially in Europe, are mistaken when they assume that the whole of the South is run by contingents of Bible-thumping Christian Zionists. Unfortunately, lots of foreign outsiders have never made acquaintance with the Deep South. The irony of history is that early Southerners were far more successful in preserving many ancient European traits in their culture, such as chivalry and self-sacrifice than Europeans did. It is often overlooked, even by many conservatives and rightwing literati in France and Germany that the antebellum and postbellum South was at some point in its history the only speck in the Western hemisphere that was not plagued by the ideas of the 1792 French Jacobins and their egalitarian delirium. Nor was it infected by the European 1848 Liberal Revolution and its secular religion of economic progress. Moreover, the South was fully spared from the 1917 Bolshevik nightmare and its subhuman creature homo sovieticus. This has now changed for the worse, as noted by Michael Hill’s succinct comment: “Liberal Democracy has become the civic religion of America and the West.”
Indeed, what communist utopia could not accomplish in East Europe, Liberalism is now carrying out in a far more sophisticated manner, fully enforcing its destructive transgender and paleo-communist ukases in the “reconstructed” South. The D.C. Deep State doxing and demonizing of Southern thinkers and academics, as the contributor Harmonica (pseudonym) notes in her “Adversaries of the South: The Left’s Failed Elites,” makes the entire American-imposed educational system in the South look like a carbon copy of the former Soviet People’s Commissariat for Communications. In her contribution, Rebecca Dillingham illustrates this Sovietization process of the System brainwashing, noting that America
is an amorphous blob composed of polyglot territories cobbled together by secular fictions, utopian fantasies, consumerism, covetousness, degeneracy, and hubris .
Frankly, I’ve never seen a more succinct, absolutely accurate description of contemporary America.
Southern nationalism can also stand as a shorthand for White nationalism worldwide. Can they be used synonymously? Yes and no. Let us face it. White nationalists have for centuries shown that they are their own worst enemies. Neil Kumar, who is himself of mixed racial origin, raises a haunting yet critically important question regarding the future of Southern (and) White identity. He states a very unpleasant truth for many Whites world-wide. “Far from joining hands as racial kinsmen, the kingdoms and then the nation-states of Europe have engaged in perpetual warfare against each other.”
After all, the war between Southern Confederates and the Northern Unionists was a war of people sharing the same gene pool. The list of inter-White wars, from mythical Troy to the Thirty Years War, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II and the recent Balkans wars, shows time and again that Whites enjoy killing each other on a grand scale. Witness the ongoing war between two closely related European peoples in eastern Ukraine (here).
The book raises more questions that it can possibly provide quick answers to. The co-editor of the book. Padraig Martin, offers some interesting formulas as to how to proceed with Southern revival and building White identity. One must agree with him that we must first and foremost abide by the law of the land “and minimize communications that are “anti-others.” This “anti-others” attitude is a typical feature of many White nationalists who build their national awareness solely on the hatred and exclusion of the Other, such as English vs Irish, Serbs vs. Croats, Flemings vs. Walloons, North vs South in the U.S. It’s a long list. Such a form of “negative legitimacy” in the quest of identity has been over centuries self-destructive for all White peoples, serving only the interests of hostile global elites.
The book is a must read for every student dealing with the issue of identity in postmodernity. Does one become a Southerner by decree, by birth, or by his free will? Must one become in the future a levitating airborne and rootless White nationalist without his soil beneath his feet, like many Jews who have carried for centuries their identity in a suitcase? What happens when a mischling, i.e., a person of mixed race, a “half-breed,” for instance of combined Kurdish and German ancestry decides to look for his new identity in his new Middle Eastern or German homeland? One must agree with modern sociobiologists’ claim that cultures can be learned and unlearned, homelands can be exchanged and swapped, mother tongues can also be fully forgotten and replaced by some weird global Sovietspeak or the virtue-signaling Liberal Volapuk. One can also change citizenship and obtain half a dozen different passports. But the iron laws of heredity can’t be learned or changed. Man’s genes are given; they are transmitted through the bloodline stretching through countless generations. They are the inborn material of every man and every Southerner regardless whether he lives in Atlanta or in New York, or decides to relocate to somewhere in Europe. The future identities of Southerners and for all Whites worldwide will be based on their inborn racial identity, hopefully moving beyond parochial turf wars with a first-door White neighbor. With present storms of huge racial replacement, Southerners, along with White nationalists, must consider where in the South, or where else on earth they will establish their own sweet home.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
see : Matthew 13:39-43.
and KNOW the Kingdom is COMING….!
https://christiansfortruth.com/who-are-jews/
Oh, yet another pseudo-intellectual drivel from Nazi Croatia, with subtly injected mendacity about the Serbian people!
Today’s Nazi Croatia is the champion of exclusion and hatred as 95% ethnically cleansed – result of their mass murder and expulsion of others around them in the WW1 (Serbs), WW2 (Serbs, Jews, Romas/Gypsies, Italians) and the 90s (Serbs) – and that alone perfectly describes their hatred and exclusion based national awareness, along with fake history, fiction, and theft of somebody else’s language, alphabet, history, kings, scientists, territories, and everything else. Typical behavior of religious converts.
As Germans would say “God save us from plague, famine and Croats” [1][2] Yes, even they beloved Germans are not spared from Croatian national awareness!
[1] In 1638, a booklet “Mourning over Germany” was published in London, describing the horrors of Croats atrocities. They forced priests to pray in front of the altar while they slaughtered them, raped women in the church, took people’s eyes out, skinned people’s faces, cut their noses and ears and made a pendant out of them, etc.
Check out the page [2] and scroll down to see 12 scanned illustrations from that booklet showing what Catholic Croats have done. These deeds were the cause of the following saying from that era: “God save us from plague, famine and Croats”
[2] An article with illustrations of Croat’s atrocities (Mourning over Germany booklet, London 1638)
https://srbski-weebly-com.translate.goog/1057107210951091107410721112-108510721089-1041108610781077-1082109110751077-10751083107210761080-1080-106110881074107210901072hellip.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en-US&_x_tr_hl=en-US
Regards, Anon001 – Comments Archive @ The Unz Review
https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Anon001
The South died it’s last when Eisenhower sent in armed troops to force Americans to accept sub-human Negroes in taxpayer-funded schools.
The IQ requirement to graduate high school had been dropping since the war was over, this accelerated it badly. To the point where a “college graduate” today hasn’t acquired the academic rigor or mastery in language a 1945 high school graduate had. The South shared this, but it was hurt the worst.
Black politicians and quota-hires debased the idea of merit for its own sake, and they’re practically immune to removal. There is no “South” as was once understood re The Southern Agrarians (theater of its own via manifesto; inorganic).
Good manners and thoughtfulness are far more evident on The Great Plains and in areas where post-LBJ “immigration” hasn’t ruined older ways. (Get off your duff and see for yourself. Take an extended drive across the country and back again. Stay out of the bubble erected by plastic cards).
Southerners are — or can be — like-able. Humor in a situation they’re forte. In music also. But there’s not much about the South where a value-added economy would flourish. A few who are rich & connected and the vast majority wage slaves without hope of advancement isn’t a viable civilizational alternative.
Military service excels . . . but it was to become double & triple-dippers in the Federal & State systems to achieve some modicum of independence where actual skill sufficed in tbe North (manufacturing). Other niches — LE/EMT, healthcare, public power, oil & gas, marine — are subsidized hide-outs, but require some skill level commensurate. Barriers to entry with limited slots.
Otherwise it’s retailing and distribution of goods to populations heavily dependent on transfer payments (welfare, social security, retirement accounts). The South can’t pay its way out of a wet paper bag past bulk commodity & timber.
We may extol personal virtues (if found), but we can’t overlook the destruction via feminism and family law where education for its own sake was never strong.
There’s stark difference in driving through Alabama versus Wisconsin in the appearance of city neighborhoods (smaller cities or towns) and rural properties. Climate (or race) ain’t enough of an explanation.
Cavalier versus Roundhead still a better explanation of any idea of southern uniqueness. Geography still the trump card over the settled populations using Civil War boundaries.
The rot has left no area untouched. Would “southern”mores” be beneficial? So, too, would Puritan. The latter the more so as technological invention and innovation is historically more strongly associated.
Subversion wasn’t limited to any one American expression of ethos. All were subsumed. Maybe the South will be more quickly energized by collapse than others, but we’d want some historical ideas by which to make the comparisons against areas richer (by far) in better farmland, mineral resources, and educated populace not saddled by a high percentage of low-IQ, violent minorities before a form of clarity could be established.
Maybe the editor and contributors are to be praised for holding aloft a flag of salvation.
Maybe.
The drive to push a newer narrative (blinders) is the likeliest reason of making a claim on that which was not ever firmly established in the first place.
If these be English verities, then Liverpool is not excepted. Nor Calgary and Auckland. Perth, and the new York.
Too narrow a pressing to extract too weak a tincture.
.
Only in the context of the war. Otherwise, it’s robber-barons-all-the-time. Well, except for their immigration policy, also popular with today’s radical element.
Nothing is ever made of the potbelly reconciliation, in which each side agreed to allow the other to honor its ancestors without criticism:
Gettysburg, 1938.
I know, I know, “Pics, or it didn’t happen!”
Today, the argument is between descendants of those who “lost” the war and descendants of those who missed it altogether– spending those years in trans-Danubian shtetls, Dublin almshouses, and the like. “Yankees”, if any still exist, checked out years ago.
Sub-humans who accounted for as much as half their states’ inflated representation in Congress. As well as state legislatures, which is one of the reasons the western counties of Virginia checked out of the Commonwealth, and other mountain men as far south as Alabama and Georgia sided with the Blue. Lots of Tennessee boys in Nashville’s National Cemetery, where Rebs were excluded.
This threw the 1800 election, as well as a few others, and hastened the Indian Removal Act– i.e., replacing red men with black. So much for “republican form of government”!
“Many critics of the South, especially in Europe, are mistaken when they assume that the whole of the South is run by contingents of Bible-thumping Christian Zionists.”
Their assumption is justified. It is a stereotype that is supported by polling, voting behavior, and anecdotal evidence.
“Bible-thumping” presumably means holding Christian fundamentalist beliefs. “Christian Zionism” means unconditional support for Israel: zealously advocacy for the Jewish enslavement of Gentiles. Both of these ideologies have a stranglehold over my people. I was reared to hold both of those belief systems. Although most Christian Southerners in the South have neither seriously read the “Word of God” nor attended church weekly, many of them identify as Evangelical. Evangelical identity often clusters with unconditional support for the Jewish State. The churches in the South preach this Jewish poison. Those that make their opposition to “Bible-thumping Christian Zionists” known will be marginalized by most conservative Southerners. I have made my position known to some and have endured the burden of ostracism.
Most rightwing political figures in the South zealously advocate for the Jewish power in the U.S. and in Israel. I need point to none other than Brian Kemp who has supported anti-BDS legislation and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of Anti-semitism in the hate crimes statute that Republicans passed in response to Ahmaud Arbery’s killing.
What about the 40% of southerners who voted against secession? What about the hundreds of thousands of white southerners persecuted or exiled by the nationalist regime in Richmond? What about the growing unrest among the 50% of white southerners who lived in poverty because they could not compete against an unpaid labor force? What about the de facto police state that controlled them nearly as much as it did the sleves? What about a certain predatory global empire that would most benefit from encouraging the world’s only republic to commit suicide? What about the transition from commercial capitalism to industrial capitalism – was it coincidence that 1860 was the first year the value of US manufactured goods exceeded the value of its agricultural products?
We are too used to viewing the north-south conflict through the self-serving propaganda of both sides, and that further clouded by the hyper-emotional issue of race, rather than objectively as part of a much larger picture.
This support for Jews is not what Europeans pick up on, or pretend to pick up on in American political power relations.
Europeans think that American Whites would gas the Jews and lynch the niggers if given a chance. Instead in reality American whites are tax slaves for Jews and victims of black violences. Most Europeans don’t pick up on this reality.
You believe the “South” couldn’t survive on its own because of limited resources?
We’ll find out shortly.
Imagine the “north” without access to Southern ports…Oil, natural gas…
Too narrow a pressing to extract too weak a tincture.
Talk about mixing metaphors…
From a faraway European perspective, it may sound odd to reminisce about the tragic history of the post-bellum South.
Imagine the entire USA without the bankrupting aggressive wars and occupations that southerners have supported and perpetrated disproportionately more than any other region of the USA.
Those wars and occupations have “required” more federal spending, borrowing, and inflationary money-printing than the selective (pro-african pro-sloth anti-white anti-worker anti-small-business) pathetic US “welfare state” ever has.
Your preferred region has consistently volunteered at the highest rates to murder men, women, children, and elderly people — often unarmed and in their homes, schools, places of worship, and marketplaces — 6,000-plus miles from our borders who are not attacking us or imminently going to attack us. Then they brag about it. Are you proud of that?
If you honestly recognize that the US regime’s uniformed murderers have long hailed from your glorious home region of the USA, how could the region be something to be proud of, morally? Murdering people in a non-defensive nonretaliatory war isn’t like a difference of opinion on the proper speed limit, whether to legalize pot, whether to let fags marry each other, etc. It’s a big damn deal — to God — and he’s presumably unimpressed by claims of “patriotism” and made-up rationales for the murders.
To HELL, literally, with murderers of all stripes. Including the hundreds of thousands of “patriotic” “brave” southerners who enthusiastically committed and enabled the murders, and called for more.
Maybe southerners have a new testament that praises the murder of innocent people who look and think and live differently but pose no threat to the murderer’s safety and liberty at home. I haven’t seen that version of the new testament.
Fuck the southern “martial culture” and the sanctimonious hatred of northerners. Your “southern boys in uniform” are nothing more than murderers who should be tried and executed. Just like “northern boys in uniform” who committed the same atrocities and aggression.
PS “The South” is plurality and soon to be majority Hispanic in many, many places. We’ll see whether your ill-educated, ignorant, deeply indebted, linguistically balkanized, horrifically obese and unhealthy, meth-ridden, low-skilled, low-trust Northern Mexico — I mean “Texas” and “the South” — fares well as the US declines and perhaps collapses.
It’s odd from right here in the “united” states, too.
Your judaic controlled, homosexual, degenerate, tranny, african centric government starts wars around the world and you blame White Southerners for it. Sure thing, ace. Whatever you say.
The math is definitely not in your favor, jose, but go for it.
Collapse, cleansing, partitioning and reclamation of whatever parts we decide we want to keep.
I blame everyone whom you just mentioned AND Southern scumbag mass murderers. Southerners brag about doing the most to inflict the cruelty and death and suffering thousands of miles away from us. Those southerners deserve our condemnation and resentment as well. It’s not an either-or choice.
Are the southern white boys so fucking stupid that they didn’t know about the US military’s long history of wars that aren’t even remotely defensive, retaliatory or preemptive?
Are southerners allowed to VOLUNTEER to invade countries not attacking us and not imminently about to attack us and then say “only jews are to blame, not us”? Aren’t southern “men” obligated to take responsibility for their own actions? You’re making excuses for murder and torture by deflecting to “your jew african government.”
We don’t need them or you murdering child-killers. Some of us would like a country where we are strong as to deter attack, retaliate crushingly if attacked, and otherwise not wander the world looking for a place for them brave ol’ southern boys to murder and torture and poison.
Fuck you for defending murderers and torturers and trying to shame people who call you on it. What a great “Christian.”
I’m not Hispanic, you dimwit. And my preferred immigration policy would let in maybe 5-10% of the hordes flooding in now, including zero from Africa. Even then, I’d limit most newcomers to permanent residence, never citizenship.
And you’re still an apologist for murderers.
“The math” of US demographics is as disgusting and troubling to me as it is to you. I just don’t defend murderers and torturers who volunteer to go far abroad, in aggressive wars, looking for victims — even if they’re white.
I’m proud of my heritage and of the many good white people in this country, and our traditional culture. But murderers are not “my people.” They are, apparently, yours.
Got it, Jorge?
What a lot of wandering drivel. Here is the fact that matters most: what we have come to know as the ‘Civil War’ set the entire nation for everything that is awful we see today. Did that happen just because that made ‘The Union’ sacred, which guaranteed that the Union then would be able to play despot against any state thereafter? Did the long-term evil fruits also come because the intellectual and moral forces behind the sacred Union were descendants of New England Puritans? Almost certainly.
Almost no Europeans pick up on such realities, because American propaganda paints a picture of America’s Elites loving peace and all innocent things while the non-Elites whites cause endless trouble for everybody else.
What has been common among Protestant Southerners since, say, the year 1910 and what was common among Protestant Southerners in the years 1830-1880 are far from identical. Over time Southerners got Anmwricanizioed, which means that they got somewhat Yankeeized, which means in ethnic terms they accepted and then began assimilating to WASP: what was expedited by the Wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestants of New England, New York, and eastern PA.
It is the same issue as the fact that what Northern Ireland’s Protestants have been most marked by since the founding of the Orange Order and then Randolph Churchill’s playing off the Orange Card is far different from what Protestants from the same Irish countries were in the 18th century when so many emigrated to what was becoming the US South. All petioles who accept imperial rule see their basic cultures altered. If you accept rule by Anglo-Zionist Empire, you emerge utterly polluted.