← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Brother Rat (Old VMI)
Thread ID: 16163 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-01-03
2005-01-03 05:11 | User Profile
Robert Sayler is right. No question. We either stand with him and the truth he presents or we die. By we, I mean White Christian Southerners.
He was one of the 6 featured speakers at the VA LOS State Kinism meeting, Lexington, VA, September 2004ad. His speech is excellent and lays the support for this recent article. All 6 Excellent speeches, including Harry Seabrook, Mike Tuggle, Dr Michael Hill, Franklin Sanders, and Tom Moore are included on a DVD, available for $29.00 including postage from:
Randy Jamison, VA LOS State Chairman Rt 1 Box 459 Bluefield, Va 24605 (276) 326-6728 [email]ssbelles@ntelos.net[/email]
For Kinism and the Leaven Community, Brother Rat
Rev.3:2 Wake up! Save what is left. That which is about to die Daniel 3:17-18 ...BUT IF NOT...
[url]http://www.dixienet.org/Salyer4.html[/url]
Reconstruction and Nationalism
by
Robert E. Salyer
22 December, 2004
Everyone knows that Reconstruction, in the 1860s and 1870s, recast the political, legal, and economic infrastructure of the South. And everyone knows, or should know, that the project of Reconstruction, given a hiatus for some eighty years, began again in the 1960s. That today there exists a program of systematic cultural subversion in the South is not news to any self-aware Southerner.
However, how aware Southerners are with respect to the recasting of the land's moral compass, accomplished by the forces of Reconstruction, is another question. How aware are Southerners, even Southern heritage activists, that an alien ideological canon, a new dogma of judgment, has found root in their own minds?
Alien ideology has injected the Enlightenment principles Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, into the South, and now Southerners use these as guideposts for moral and political evaluation. Particularly Equality-the need to accord equal dignity and equal consideration for every individual and every individual's preferences and perspectives-this has taken over the mind of a South that at one time knew better. If Southerners continue to reason in this way, by the lights of a foreign and apostate morality, their Cause will be lost. They will die out.
There are numerous examples of how this poisonous outlook permeates the country. For instance, Southerners endlessly attempt to convince those offended by symbols of the old Confederacy why they ought not be offended. Southerners feel it necessary to make everyone understand and feel the same way. As such, whenever accused of "hate," Southerners ceaselessly move to rebut this charge.
Southerners ought to take note that, because the South's enemies know their own minds and values and are self-confident in them, these enemies never feel it necessary to rebut the same charges made back at them. "You offend me. You hate me." Are not accusations that particularly raise the pique of Boston Brahmins when they emanate from below the Mason-Dixon line. That is because New England has all the self-confidence and self-possession necessary to deny equal dignity and concern to the perspectives of a classical but alien South.
Southerners imbued with the egalitarian perspective of right and wrong are complicit in a public policy in the United States that aims at a society hereinafter undifferentiated, held together only by amorphous civic feeling. It is this complicity, and nothing else, that renders the South of today prostrate.
Moral Reconstruction: Slavery
Probably the most glaring example of the current Southern predilection for Jacobin principles is one that should be familiar to anyone interested in the Southern Movement or Southern cultural defence. It is the continual claim made by many Southerners that The War had nothing to do with slavery. This claim is both untenable and destructive. The fact is that slavery had everything to do with The War. Anyone attempting to save the South by questioning Mr. Lincoln's commitment to abolitionism is living in a fantasy.
Beware the charge hypocrisy, lest it induce one to affirm the principles of one's enemy.
Take the words of Senator Robert Toombs:
"Mr. Lincoln's Republican Party all speak with one voiceââ¬Â¦ They declare their purpose to war against slavery until there shall not be a slave in America, and until the African is elevated to a social and political equality with the white man. Lincolnââ¬Â¦ in his own speeches declares the conflict irrepressible and enduring, until slavery is everywhere abolished."
Nowhere in Toombs' speech to the Georgia legislature does he castigate Lincoln for hypocrisy or deception on this matter. The Declaration of the Immediate Causes inducing Mississippi's ordinance of secession states directly, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." See also the countless other documents and statements by the various legislatures and parties involved.
Claiming that The War had nothing to do with slavery is akin to claiming that the Vietnam War had nothing to do with capitalism. True, the average Confederate soldier never fought to become a slave-owner, but it is equally true that the average GI in Vietnam did not fight to become an entrepreneur.
Southerners pointing to the US flag as the "real symbol of slavery" simply embarrass themselves. More importantly however, this untenable claim has the tangential effect of reinforcing the deadly notion that if the South's history were actually bound up with slavery, then the South's very existence--the Southern Cause--would be illegitimate and shameful. Of course, the notion itself is ridiculous on many levels. For one thing, it is a syllogism akin to denying the existence of Mexico out of a hatred for Cortes. It is the kind of paradigm that would deny the aspirations of Irish (Catholic) nationalists solely out of disapprobation for the Inquisition. Its logic fails.
More importantly however, between the morality of "pro-slavery" and that of Abolitionism, the Southern defence of slavery is the moral superior. The institution of slavery is not an evil. No one is entitled to reparations. No wrong has been committed.
It is not true that humans have a duty to treat with identical dignity and identical concern every other human being on the planet solely by virtue of being of the species Homo Sapiens. This is the claim of Equality, the claim of Abolitionism, the claim of all modern Human Rights Campaigns, and it is simply unfounded. And it is unfounded because it is not true, because it is immoral.
Humans are social animals, and societies are organic. They have design, form, and a kind of soul in the whole. Rights exist only in society, and society accords different roles, corresponding rights, and different ranks to different members of society. Having such and such number of chromosomes does not, in and of itself, entitle one to freedom or anything else. Thus, chattel slavery, whilst clearly obsolete today, was simply an ordering of persons received from an earlier time, and is nothing for which to be ashamed today.
Abolitionists are those who ought to be ashamed. Abolitionism's espousal of the egalitarian position is in effect, hatred of Mankind and of civilisation. This is so because society and civilisation built up through the millennia are synonymous with some kind of order. Civilisation, human life itself, require order. Order implies force, implies restrictions upon freedom, and it implies inequality. Only Nothingness is ordered equally.
Only when there are no more humans, will there be no more slaves. The same is true of wars.
The Nature of the Conflict: From Ideology to Religion to Extermination
Our war--The War--like all wars, was in reality "about" many things. Practically speaking The War was about one country conquering another country.
But fundamentally, The War--just like Vietnam--was a religious conflict; it was about the clash of two starkly different worldviews. The New England worldview, could not permit slavery or any other inherited social gradation. The Southern view could and did permit slavery.
The New England worldview, despite all its religious rhetoric, saw the world in essentially agnostic terms. While paradoxically believing in the power of ideas, the heirs of the Mayflower held that humans were ultimately in a disconnect from the universe around them. Humans had no real knowledge of Truth. Thus, human tradition, culture, and order were all, to a greater or lesser extent, in error--for they all necessarily implied knowledge and connection. Community, hierarchy, and organic governance (and today one would say, nationality, gender roles, etcââ¬Â¦) were all unjust sacrileges to be overthrown in continual human revolution, root and branch.
An agnostic universe. The freedom that blindness has over light.
The Southern worldview saw things very differently. It saw the world as every traditional society has ever seen it. Human beings were not disconnected "brains in the vat." Rather, nations and families were living organisms, as surely as were individual humans. The inheritance of family, of hierarchy, of loyalty, of roles identifying both person and duty, these were not convenient mirages; they were real, and they defined persons. Giving them Identity. This side held the orthodox Christian faith that allowed it to have confidence that its definitions were correct.
As stated, if the relevant issue today were historic Southern slavery versus historic New England abolitionism, then the right answer would be "pro-slavery." However, traditional chattel slavery does not exist today in the South, nor anywhere else in the Western world. Thus, this issue is really an irrelevancy. So why do the enemies of the South continually bring slavery up? It is a subterfuge.
The South's enemies wish to engender the cognitive dissonance that results from a love of the South on the one hand, and distaste for an obsolete and seemingly crude institution on the other. They desire for Southerners to wrap themselves around irrelevant disputes. They desire for Southerners to struggle to establish an egalitarian, universalist, and agnostic defence of the Southern Cause. They desire for the South never to respond to accusations with: "No, the issue is, 'WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO LEAVE?'"
Value neutrality--Equality--has no place in Southern moral judgment. It is self-destructive. What is Southern, and who are the Southerners, are necessary questions that the current penchant for egalitarianism obscures. In order to survive as a land and a people, the South must decide from moment to moment what she is and what she is not. As such, a neutral perspective in itself is a mortal wound. Nothing can survive with integrity by being neutral and detached with respect to its own existence. The community must represent itself as a community, or cease to be.
It is NOT the charge of Southerners to rebut allegations of being 1) pro-slavery (even as inane as this accusation is), 2) racist, 3) hateful, or even 4) undemocratic. Rather, it is the charge of Southerners to uphold the South, the Old Causeââ¬Â¦ HOWEVER this is interpreted, WHATEVER THIS MEANS.
Southern Nationalism: A Crusade
It is sometimes perplexing that Southerners shamed into nonexistence by the endless litany of slave ships, lynchings, and Jim Crow do not look more deeply into their own history, their own very human stories of Reconstruction. Its wellspring of horrific injustices and human tragedies is well-nigh bottomless. Betrayal, confiscation, poverty, rape, and murder, the tales of which are endless, ought to be brought to the written light as the oral tradition dries up.
Yet, for all that the physical Reconstruction of the 1860s and 70s did and continues to do, one must admit that it was not wholly a destructive force. It did create. It was a forge.
Reconstruction scorched the heart of the South, the hearts of Southerners, their very being, whether they know it or not, and made them who they are today. To extirpate the Southern civilisation, even the Southern people themselves, was the aim of Reconstruction. It failed, dramatically.
The War and Reconstruction forged a nation. Prior to The War the South existed cohesively; but its cohesion was loose enough that it could have easily relaxed and the ethnic and cultural cohesion of the land could have been replaced over time. Not so afterward. Carolinians and Virginians who before The War did not feel the strength of bonds felt them by 1865. Even Missourians and Kentuckians who had had mixed sympathies in 1860 knew full well who they were by 1877. Reconstruction is the South's potato famineââ¬Â¦ her imperial colonisationââ¬Â¦ her Holocaust. From it springs the South of today, lulled drunk at the moment, but nonetheless a nation on the march toward the undiscovered country of herself. Clearly, here the reference made is NOT to nationalism in the commonly referenced Modern, post-French Revolutionary definition. Not the abstract aggregate artificial man (Think of the frontispiece to the common version of Hobbes' Leviathan). Neither the product of the will, nor of republics. Rather, it is the nationalism of the place of birth, of kinship, and of relationships ante-contractarian.
If one begins from the Book of Genesis, one understands that Man is made in the image of God. A question that immediately follows then is, who or what is Man?
If, as stated, one of the essential attributes of Man is that he is a social animal, then one may state with some certainty that Man is both person and society. Other than Adam, what human is born out of the dust?
If human nature includes society, as much as it requires the corporeal form of the human individual, then human societies are themselves made in the image of God. Ergo, nations are made in the image of God, and therefore to attack nationalism per se would be sacrilegious.
Nations find their perfection in God. We may therefore go further and state that Christ is a more perfect Frenchman than Charlemagne, more perfectly a Spaniard than Isabella, and more perfectly Southern than Lee. Viewed from this perspective, one may say that a nation is like a holy icon, with the eyes of the iconic figure looking back at us.
This is a primary contrast from Americanism. Americanism is an ideology of the One, aiming to deconstruct all particularity. The all-seeing eye looks through distinction (therefore reality) and sees peoplehood as a distortion of the gnosis. Being French, Spanish, or Southern are all corruptions in this religion's estimation. Christ may move the soul toward perfection, but Americanism moves it toward destruction.
Moving from final causes to questions of efficient and material causes, the word "nation" stems from the Latin "natus," that is, "of birth." Blood and soil. History and inculturation. Moderns characterise these things as arbitrary. They say these things do not confer being. They say these things are not a justifiable basis for discrimination. But these things are no more arbitrary or unreal than being born in the first place is.
Creatio ex nihilo.
The South begins at birth. When a man matures into knowing who and what he is, he acts and does not argue. To do the right thing, men must begin to think and feel as their ancestors did, as Western Man does. Then the path will become clear. An excerpt from The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas, captures the feeling:
"In April 1933, municipal elections were held in those areas which had returned monarchists in 1931, and which had been as a result deprived of representation [by the republicans]ââ¬Â¦. In hundreds of pueblos, the great issue was religion, as much as the class war, even though the two matters were often combinedââ¬Â¦. Acting sometimes in anticipation of the government, local [republican] councils had often abolished certain [Catholic] processions during fiestasââ¬Â¦. Where processions had been allowed, young socialists had proudly said that they would throw those accompanying the floats or carriages, into the local riverââ¬Â¦. One priest in Andalusia had also been fined by a socialist magistrate for saying mass in his church whose roof had been destroyed by lightning: he had been charged with making a public display of religion. Another priest was fined as a monarchist for alluding to the Kingship of God in the festival of Christ the King. In one parish, the tolling of bells was taxed, in another the wearing of crucifixes forbiddenââ¬Â¦. "
Then, slowly, a counterrevolution began. Old Spain began to protect the images of the Virgin in processions with armed men, who also stood on the street corners where she might pass.
Embracing foreign ideologies and agnostic reasoning will only cause the South to see herself as her enemies see her, as a nonentity. If, on the other hand, Southerners will only concede that life and history are not arbitrary, that both individuals and nations have plots and themes woven into a fabric from moment to moment, and that Southern history can be told the same as the history of any other nation under the sun; then Southerners will find what has so recently gone missing: They will find their Identity.
The South holds forth a new day in the history of Western Man. A new philosophy of life is within our grasp if we will only recognise it. Speak the Truth; do not accept someone else's dialectic.
Discard the Reconstruction and embrace the Southern Nation. :thumbsup:
2005-01-03 05:15 | User Profile
Brother Rat (Old VMI),
A great article, you are most Right! All the problems we face today go back to "Reconstruction."
I hate fake PC Southern Nationalists! Also see: The Rainbow Confederacy? NOT! (Southern Independence) [url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13363[/url]