Sampson County and the Defense of Western Civilization

Sampson County is a large, mostly rural county in southeastern North Carolina. Like most non-metropolitan areas of the state, it tends to be conservative, in fact, a long-time bastion of the modern Republican Party in a sea of traditionally Democratic-voting counties.

But Sampson County illustrates what is occurring all over the Southland. And in microcosm in certain ways it symbolizes the retreat of Western Christian civilization in the face of the overpowering forces of revolution now assaulting our heritage and threatening to dismantle our inheritance.

To discuss what is happening in Sampson, we first must talk of the roots of our present upheavals. And that conversation inevitably leads back to education and what has transpired on our college campuses and in our classrooms during the past half century. It should be obvious for all to see, but only in recent years have many “conservatives” really begun to examine the pitiful state of higher education in actual detail. Yes, there have been acute critics and excellent studies, detailing serious problems on campuses across the nation. Notable authors have documented the virtual take-over of academia by the frenzied leftist progressivists, and the practical result that true open inquiry and genuine debate have given way to a “single party” ideological authoritarian control worse than anything ever imagined in the old Soviet Union.

This is something we should have taken far more seriously fifty years ago. For now the “woke” descendants of the Vietnam-era radicals and the student graduates of the upheavals of 1968 have asserted near full control over our educational system.

Back in 1970-1971 I was in grad school at the University of Virginia, finishing an MA in history, and I knew and befriended some future PhDs whose own students would populate the faculties of some America’s most prestigious universities today. Their radicalism back then was strangely mild, even quaint, compared with the virus which has seemingly swept through academia in 2020. I had one friend, like me getting a Masters degree in history, who was passionately in favor of the Viet Cong, quoted Che Guevara, and actually gave me a copy of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonialist The Wretched of the Earth—useful, as I had a seminar with a Leftist professor who prescribed it in his “social history” class, and I didn’t have to purchase it! I don’t know what happened to my friend, except I heard he did earn a doctorate and then went on to teach impressionable minds at a major university. I think that became a pattern.

Later, doing my PhD in Spain, the student radicalism had not yet reached that country—in the early 1970s General Franco continued, if tenuously, to keep a lid on such things. Additionally, my university, the University of Navarra (one of two private universities in Spain at the time), was a very conservative Catholic institution, run by the Opus Dei order and heavily endowed. Even so, among some of my fellow students I detected how foreign publications and samizdat broadsides were certainly beginning to affect their thinking, and after Franco’s death that lid literally blew off. Still, for me the ability to discuss ideas and to have a superb (and very traditional) dissertation director were a special grace…I wonder how many grad students have that opportunity in Spain in 2020, or here in the United States?

For fifty years, then, the virus that began in earnest back in the early 1960s has basically been allowed to grow and metamorphosize. It is no longer just an advocacy of “third world liberation” or support for Communist and Marxist revolution; it is no longer just a rebellion against parts of the West’s moral code—on gender and marriage, especially; it is no longer resembles the older “civil rights” movement of the 1960s. It has gone far beyond those goal posts and far beyond what my Leftist classmate at Virginia espoused forty-nine years ago. It is, as my friend Dr. Paul Gottfried has called it, a “post-Marxism” which incorporates and owes much to a Marxist template, but incorporates far more into its, at times, amorphous ideology.

Whether it be the goons of Antifa or the rioters with Black Lives Matter and a host of other revolutionary groups, there is one principal tenet that more or less unites them. In slogan form it is: “Western Civ has got to go!” Our inherited Western—and Christian—civilization of the past two millennia is defined, whether explicitly or not, as evil, the work and creation of “white oppressors” and “white supremacy,” and “gender discrimination.” “Historic systemic racism”: voila’ the problem! And since our culture and civilization owe their overall existence principally to Europe (and mostly white Europeans) and to the historic Christian faith, they must be destroyed or perverted beyond recognition.

It’s that simple…but it remains unrecognized by far too many of the supposed defenders of our culture.

Thus, not just Confederate symbols, but symbols, monuments, literature, music, art, language, everything that in any way smacks of the hated Western tradition must be uprooted and cast on the trash heap, even violently. And our supposed defenders? Those so-called “conservatives” and Republicans who have promised to defend our heritage and traditions? Many of them desert the battlefield ignominiously at the first sound of grape shot.

And that brings me back to Sampson County. Recently, the Sampson County Board of County Commissioners voted to relocate their Confederate monument which has stood in the county seat, Clinton, since 1916. Commissioner Jerol Kivett, one of three Republicans on the board had sworn up-one-side-and-down-the-other to acquaintances of mine, that he would never countenance such a move. But when the push to relocate the monument came, Kivett, going back openly on his promise, led the retreat, that is, like so many other Republicans he fled to the tall grass.

Not only that, but Kivett and the other board members flagrantly violated North Carolina’s Heritage Protection Act [HPA], the Monuments Law of 2015, which clearly states that only the North Carolina Historical Commission can approve relocation of historic monuments from State or “public property.” [N.C.G.S.100.2-1(b) and (b) (1)] And that under no circumstances can a relocated monument be placed in a museum. Yet, Kivett flagrantly proposed:

“I move that the statue previously located on top of the Confederate soldier monument … be relocated to the Sampson County History Museum; and that its accompanying base…be placed in storage with the contents of time capsule that may be located in the base, being relocated to the Sampson County History Museum.”

Maybe Kivett (and his cohorts) believe that his cowardly actions will save him from being called a “racist” or “white supremacist,” or maybe he has pecuniary interests which he felt might be damaged by defending Sampson County’s veterans from 1861-1865. Or maybe his cowardice was really occasioned by the fact that all along he never was what he professed to be or to defend.

How many more Jerol Kivetts exist across not just the Southland, but across the face of the United States? Their number is legion, and their lack of courage and treason against our heritage and inheritance is reprehensible.

They do not seem to realize the age—the times—in which we live. They do not realize that taking down Confederate monuments is just the first step in an ever-widening campaign to denude our society, to cleanse it of anything which connects us to our past and the rich inheritance we have received as a trust. In effect, perhaps unwittingly, they participate in the destruction of two millennia that has given us life and sustained and enriched us, and they enable that inheritance to be replaced by the law of the jungle and sheer totalitarian barbarism.

They do not seem to understand that their temporizing now before the fanatical revolutionaries, their surrender to the mob and to mob opinion, will eventually catch up with them and will also effect the world they leave to their children and grandchildren. They have convinced themselves of their own sincerity and that they’re doing the right thing.

They may not understand yet, they may somehow justify what they do and have done. But they will stand severely accursed and accused by future generations of assisting, of being complicit, in the destruction of our civilization.

One would think that a member of the NC GOP would be the last to defend prominent public placement of statues honoring the Confederacy. Afterall the Party of Lincoln ended slavery and changed history.

Said statues were erected by what one today define as racists. And not just any old backwoods racists, but the NC demonkrap racists, many who were college educated and controlled the entire state political machinery without interruption for more than 100 years after the Civil War. I don’t think the WASP demonkraps in NC back then envisioned (specifically or even generally) that “open borders” would lead to the GOP removal of their statues. These statues should remain prominently displayed so we can learn and remember the history, and they should always be described as statues put up by the demonkraps. The party racism still exists today despite their attempts to project is on anyone who opposes their leftism. The GOP in Sampson County made a politcal mistake in helping erase the racism in the demonkrap party.

Absolutely. Those on the Trump train have no idea of the magnitude of the attack that will come following the election. If you are still hung up on the Russia hoax/impeachment crap, you aren’t seeing what is about to hit you

I’d like someone to name five significant Republican political figures that are as tough as Trump at the state or federal level. Republicans have stood down, long ago.

All this talk of conservatives shooting back is bullshit, they won’t suffer the consequences. If you didn’t buy your guns and ammo, and prepare a red state rural retreat in the last 15 years, you are screwed. That buys you a few more years at most and a place your kids can seek refuge in.

I’m strongly in favor of White European Christian Cultural Supremacy... It’s the absolute worst way of running a society, except for all the others.

Also a big fan of Gender Discrimination.

Gender: “either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones.”

Discrimination: “recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.”

When will we stop apologizing?

I knew someone such as you would show up, it never fails. The removal of Confederate memorials will not, as even the most enthusiastic bloody shirt waver, (thinking here of Mr. Schweiker), can't recognized now with the cancel culture in action. If one starts telling people what part of history is correct and what interpretation will be acceptable, this is classic cultural imperialism.

You appear to live in the Keystone state. What possible business do you have in proceeding to tell people in North Carolina what they can and cannot display as it offends your sensibility. If the people in Pennsylvania wish to erect statues commemorating Stalin, Castro, Nat Turner, or Patrice Lumumba, they certainly have the right to. Incidentally where do you get the hubris to psychoanalyze people who have been dead for decades. Sampson County is the one rural county not in the Piedmont that generally voted Republican back to the 19th century. So many of the statue subscribers may have fought in WBTS. There are too many northern people who enjoy stigmatizing Southerners and ignorant, hayseed racists.

In conclusion. Some home truths need to be stated. Much of the reason for the violent resistance to the Union invasion was that the people of the seceded states found themselves being invaded by a large, heavily armed horde, Many of whose members could not speak intelligible English and whose officers routinely engaged in and directly participated in plundering and outright robbery of Southern civilians as well engaging in widespread material destruction of the necessities of normal life.

Thanks for your comments. Unfortunately my writing led you to some misinterpretation. For that I am responsible, which led to your mis-characterization that included my attempting historical psychoanalysis and perhaps believe Southerners are hayseed, hicks, etc.

I know and disagree with that deep prejudice against Southerners perpetrated by leftists. You might be surprised to know among other things, that I never lived in PA, I am approaching 4 decades of living in Confederate states, that I met and personally conversed several times with Sampson County’s citizen Lauch Faircloth when he was US Senator, and I do not like seeing the mass migration of leftists into the South as they flee their screwed up utopian states.

The point that I tried to make, unsuccessfully apparently, was as follows. That the current demonkraps, particularly the “educated” demonkraps, justify the tearing down of Confederate statues because they claim they were put there as symbols of racism, to forever keep down our fellow black citizens. To them I say, using their race theory, that those statues need to remain to remind us all that it is their party, the intolerant, racist, educated demonkrap controlling unopposed all branches of NC state government for 100+ years that put them up there in the first place. i.e. the modern day demonkrap (who vicariously assigns racism to everyone not demonkrap) inherited and own any (historical) racism associated with said statues - we need to be reminded of that too.

You said something interesting. That Sampson County generally voted GOP back to the 19th Century. I might have to revise my remarks herein above as it relates to this locality. Was it a GOP Sampson county government erected the statues that are in controversy today?

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