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"Come on, men – do you want to liveforever? "

Thread ID: 15467 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-10-29

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Brother Rat (Old VMI) [OP]

2004-10-29 00:04 | User Profile

Franklin Sanders' 10/22/2004 ad speech, Montgomery, Alabama at the League of the South's national meeting.

Franklin Sanders The Moneychanger P.O. Box 178 Westpoint, Tennessee 38486 (888) 218-9226; (931) 766-6066 [url]www.the-moneychanger.com[/url] e-mail: [email]moneychanger@compuserve.com[/email]

CORRECTING OUR COURSE

By Franklin Sanders

Many of you have seen the movie Cold Mountain , but you may not have recognised it as a perfect metaphor for the South’s situation today.

Cold Mountain would have been impossible without us. It is a Southerner writing about a peculiarly Southern experience, but we are shut out of the movie. The producer was a foreigner (from California or yankee-land), the director was an expatriate Italian living in London, the lead actors were from England, Australia, and Ireland, much of the music was played by Irishmen, and -- this was the ultimate insult -- it was filmed in Rumania.

As usual, Southerners create the ideas and the literature, but somebody else gets paid. Worse, they take what we are and turn it against us.

Cold Mountain is a political, cultural, social, and economic metaphor that says the League of the South hasn’t made much progress. The League is ten years old. The League has now spent ten years in our effort to "advance the cultural, social, economic, and political well-being and independence of the Southern people by all honourable means." On this milestone anniversary it is only proper to ask, "Have we made any progress toward that goal?"

The answer is, not nearly enough.

WHICH MODEL?

The League’s motto points out four areas where the South must progress toward independence: cultural, social, economic, and political. Yet the political model has crowded out all others. So -- what difference does that make? The political model is not sufficient . Southern politics can never be renewed apart from renewing Southern culture, society, and economics.

Why has the political model captured our thinking? Why do we assume that only the political model counts? Because our age believes the state is god. The state holds the ultimate answers to all questions. The state settles everything. And we believe in the state, which operates on the model of power .

Nothing could be further from traditional Southern principles .

What model must we follow then? Andrew Lytle, one of the Nashville agrarians and one of the greatest thinkers, writers, and critics the 20th century South produced, said "The opposite of love is not hate, but power ."

"The opposite of love is not hate, but power ."

If the model of our age is the model of power, then the model of the South’s renewal must be its opposite, the model of love. Have I gone soft in the head? Hearing me talk about "love," some of you may suspect that I’ve been taking liberal pills, but that’s not the case.

What do I mean by "love"? It is not limited to affection, but includes affection, the natural affection for our own home and place and people. But this love is far, far more. When asked, "What is the greatest commandment," Christ explained it this way: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

Love is our commitment to the Second Table of the Law, those commandments that teach us our duty to our neighbour. Love is the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Love is a commitment to treat each other a certain way, with justice and respect for the image of God in every man. Love is the opposite of Yankee modernism and materialism that views men as undifferentiated, interchangeable, atomistic parts in the industrial economy.

THE MODEL OF LOVE

The model of our renewal must be the model of love, not the model of politics and power. The model of power imposes an ideology. What glues the modern community together? It embraces those – and only those – who are committed to a set of abstracts, an ideology . For example, the rallying cry and ideology of the French revolution was, " Liberty , Fraternity, Equality" -- three abstracts. Today the ideology of the same revolutionary spirit identifies the United States as a "proposition nation" transcending all other allegiances.

What must glue together our community – the Southern nation? Love, not ideology. Love – our commitment not to abstract ideology but to each other , to real human beings with all our real flaws and real disagreements. We are committed to the South as we are committed to our families. We are loyal not to abstracts, but to realities, to a certain people and no other on the face of the earth, to a certain place and no other.

THE ESSENTIAL AND ONLY QUESTION

We in the League have not yet fully grasped that model ourselves, falling back instead on the political, ideological model. That happens whenever we expound a "list of ideas" we stand for to justify or defend the League. As important as those ideas may be, they are not the essential question.

Discussing such things with the occupiers of our country is a waste of time. Worse, it distracts us from the only important point. The question is not whether our ideas are right or wrong according to some foreign standard, the only question is, "When are you occupiers going to leave our country?" You have no part in our discussions of the future of our country and its institutions because you are not part of our country. The only question is, "When are you leaving?"

We all ought to remember the example of the great Episcopal Bishop of Alabama in 1865, Richard Hooker Wilmer. When the war began, the Episcopal Church in the South withdrew from the Episcopal Church in the United States to form her own national church. That national church adopted an appropriate version of the Book of Common Prayer. Where the old book contained prayers for the president of the United States , so that was changed to a prayers for the president of the Confederate States.

At the war’s end, circumstances had changed but the prayer book had not. The church had not yet been able to meet to change it. The yankee occupiers Commanded the Bishop to order the churches under his authority to use the prayer for the President of the United States . But Bishop Wilmer, unwilling to allow the civil government to dictate to the Church how she should worship God, refused.

He was summoned to Mobile . Once there, he was faced with a yankee colonel who threatened and cursed him violently for a very long time. Now Bishop Wilmer was a dignified, white-haired old man, but he patiently suffered the colonel’s vicious abuse. At last the yankee colonel ran out of steam, and he shouted at the Bishop, "How long are you going to keep doing this?"

Without a second’s hesitation, Bishop Wilmer shot back, "How long are you going to be here?"

What binds us together is not clinging to an ideology, but cleaving to each other as Southerners -- not politics, not ideology, but love. We must develop this love for our country, this devotion to her independence, as an obsession. We must lead our people deeper and deeper into that love.

MEASURING OURSELVES

How has the League done in the areas outside politics? What about culture, society, and economics? The South can never be renewed politically without renewing Southern culture, society, and economics as well.

CULTURE

Have we in the League developed and renewed a specifically Southern culture? The League of the South Institute has done a good job, a great job in fact. I have a bachelor’s degree and several years of graduate school both here and abroad, yet until I began attending the Institute’s summer programs, I was ignorant of Southern history and culture. They have furnished an education to many others besides me. But how many of us have participated? Have we taken it to our people in the South, or have we limited ourselves to preaching to the choir?

Our hedge schools made a tremendous start. The hedge school on Lincoln overturned twelve years’ public school indoctrination in four short hours. But what happened to the hedge schools? We have nearly let them die. Local sponsors haven’t stepped forward.

What about music? Literature? Movies? TV? Radio? Where are our own broadcasting stations? Newspapers? Magazines? Where have we started our own schools? Universities?

Less formally, what have we done to reclaim Southern manners? It’s obvious that we are faced with degeneration on every side, but we are doing nothing.

On the cultural front we’ve made almost no progress, and still our members don’t widely participate.

I’ll give you one example of something everyone can do, only one example among thousands. Sara Hill suggested to other members of our church that we have a "teacherless writing class." That’s a class where there’s no teacher, but everyone reads his own writing and the others all comment. There’s only one rule: you can’t makes excuses for your work like, "This isn’t finished yet", or "This isn’t really any good but". About 20 of us meet every week.

Does that class make any difference? Yes. We have all been amazed at the talent it has brought out, and that none of us had been expressing it before. After about three months of classes we’re all noticing that we are looking at the world much differently. We have begun to think more "poetically." We see not only events and people, but look for what stands behind them, what they represent. We are also learning to see the world through another’s eyes, and learning to love and respect each other much more deeply

And this is only one example from the thousands of possible cultural efforts. Throw an annual hoedown locally. Sponsor monthly dances -- with Southern dancing only, of course -- for high school and college ages. Sponsor a local poetry or music contest.

SOCIAL

If we follow the model of love, we must give birth to communities – not virtual communities, but real. They must be organic , growing out of a place, local . They must be founded on love of neighbour, and commitment to each other. They must become the way we live, overthrowing modernism by refusing to give in to it, refusing to be atomised, isolated, and alienated from our brothers.

Do you know how fundamentalist Moslems have gained such popularity all over the Islamic world? They have very successfully used the model of love to win over their people. They move into a community and build schools and hospitals, then offer their services at no charge . It becomes easy for the people to believe they have their best interests at heart.

But this is actually a Christian model. Remember ancient Rome , where people exposed their unwanted children on the hillsides? They put them in big jars, and left them on hillsides or under bridges, and Christian people took in these babies and raised them.

Roman courts became so corrupt that the people despaired of getting justice in them, so they resorted to the only place they knew justice prevailed: the church courts. Christians lived out what they claimed to believe, and won the hearts of the people. The model of love creates credibility and builds a reputation for trustworthiness.

We must create those parallel Southern institutions to replace corrupt anti- Southern ones. That will renew Southern society.

ECONOMIC

Although the outward form masks our true economic condition, most Southerners are little better than serfs. Through public education, industrial capitalism education has converted Southerners from freeholders -- self sufficient farmers and shop owners and small and large businessmen – to employees . That makes our economic task plain: we must reverse that and become freeholders again. More than that, we must help our neighbours become freeholders. No, we don’t have oceans of capital to lend them, but we can help them with our expertise – marketing and accounting and management – and with our encouragement.

We as the League have yet to help our Southern people reach personal independence by helping them free themselves from debt slavery. We must encourage them to build estates and think covenantally of the generations to come, rather than individually .

We as the League have yet to build up and patronise local economies and boycott the global economy that makes us serfs.

We have yet to establish the organisation and mindset needed to change the Southern Economy.

OTHER SHORTCOMINGS

We have yet to do all these things, and more. We have yet to cultivate a clear and positive vision of a free and independent South and to make that the one hinge of all political discussion. We have yet to make our people understand that we are not a region , not an accent , not a cuisine, not a way of life, but a nation.

We have yet to build support in the countryside, logically our most fertile recruiting area.

We have yet to build a youth movement in colleges and high schools.

We have yet to build our own schools and educational system.

We have yet to develop a clear image and goals for the League.

We have yet to cultivate an organisational structure at the grassroots.

In other words, we have yet to do the first things, the basic things, the unglamorous duties indispensable to the League’s success and to Southern independence.

We are still mired down in race , still struggling against false charges that we are "racists," still allowing our enemies to define us instead of defining ourselves.

We are still mired down in re acting to our enemies instead of taking the war to them . We are still on defense, instead of offense. For example, we think that we must fight every single heritage battle, but that only divides our forces to ineffectiveness. When this happens, our enemies are controlling us, we are not controlling them. We have to choose our battles for the greatest leverage of our forces.

We are still mired down in resurrecting the Old South, the Confederacy. As much as I love it, the Confederacy is dead and won’t be resurrected. Our duty as her children is to take her legacy, her principles and way of life, into the future and make sure they do not die.

Too many of us are content to sit back and wait for Michael and Sara Hill to start, and then to finish, everything. As good as they are – and they are very, very good – they will never be good enough to do everything.

We have not exercised our personal sovereignty to secede ourselves, with our families, from the American empire. A few months ago I spoke in Georgia and told them three things they could do themselves to exercise that sovereignty and secede: kick in your television sets, jerk your children out of public schools, and go home and have more children.

We are still wasting time on the Internet with virtual activism. We feel very bold and warlike when we swap strong words with other members of the choir, but that accomplishes nothing.

We still haven’t mastered recruiting, which will never be effectively done by e-mail, leafleting, or newspaper advertising, but always and only face to face. There is no substitute for face to face encounter.

We have still not yet shown that unquenchable commitment necessary to win our independence. Stop waiting for leadership and act yourself. We must raise up leaders from our own ranks.

WHAT IS NEEDED

About 15 years ago I noticed that every morning about 10:30 I was mad as a wet wasp and had a terrible headache. I realised it came from reading the newspapers. They reported so many stupid, evil things that I couldn’t do anything about that it gave me a headache from clenching my jaw. So I stopped reading newspapers.

Anyway, you can’t really tell what events are important until some time has passed for perspective. So I decided to start from the other end of history, where I could get plenty of perspective.

I’m up to 218 BC now, and have recently been reading Livy’s War against Hannibal . Everybody knows that Hannibal brought elephants and an army across the Alps into the Italian peninsula. Most people don’t know that this was the second of three wars between Rome and Carthage . In the first Hannibal ’s father Hasdrubal fought the Romans but lost.

The Second Punic War lasted 18 years. For all but the last year Hannibal had at least one army, and sometimes two or more, in Italy . Rome was not yet then an empire, but had alliances with the cities and peoples throughout the peninsula. In his first campaign Hannibal devastated the Romans and dozens of Roman allies defected to him. At the battle of Cannae alone his army slaughtered 50,000 Romans. In the first campaign Hannibal killed so many Roman knights that he sent back big baskets full of gold rings to pour out on the floor of the Carthaginian senate and prove his success. And remember, that not all Roman knights wore thumb rings. Only the best did.

Time after time the Romans suffered these disasters, lost whole armies and brilliant leaders, but they never gave up. The most amazing thing about that war was this: no matter how complete the catastrophe, how desolate the Romans’ hopes, men would still step forward and volunteer to lead them. Men still said, "I will go. I will lead." And out of those common men sprang up great soldiers, great leaders, and great generals.

That is the sign of a healthy, vigorous people. Whenever their need is greatest, from their common midst spring up great leaders, men like Davis, and Lee, and Jackson, and Forrest.

I came here today to shame you, and to work on your desire for glory. I came to shame you, by mentioning the names of Washington, Henry, Jefferson, Madison, Lee, Jackson, Davis, and Forrest. I came to ask you, When will you copy the deeds of your fathers, and show yourselves to be their true sons?

I came here to work on your desire for glory, by mentioning the names of Washington, Henry, Jefferson, Madison, Lee, Jackson, Davis, and Forrest. Like that Confederate general at Gettysburg who shouted to his men, "Come on, men – do you want to live forever? "

Do you want to live forever? Then rise up, Georgia . Rise up, South Carolina ! Rise up, Tennessee and Texas and Alabama and Florida and Oklahoma and Louisiana and Mississippi and Maryland and Arkansas and Missouri and Kentucky! Rise up! Rise up! Don’t just sit there staring at the tops of your shoes, Rise up, stand up, and say with me,

God save the South!

Montgomery , Alabama

October 22, a.d. 2004

Rev.3:2 Wake up! Save what is left. That which is about to die Daniel 3:17-18 ...BUT IF NOT... :thumbsup: