Posted on 01/15/2003 9:14:10 AM PST by billbears
Boy have the bells been ringing. You know the ones that rang on "the night they drove old Dixie down."
I’ve been thinking a lot about that song lately, given the drubbing the South has been taking in the media. (Not just the national media, but in the Southern newspapers as well. Self-hating Southerners, I suppose.) I keep wondering why no one, besides LewRockwell.com and a few others, will stand up for the South against this latest reconstruction of history.
Why aren’t more people outraged when Democratic congressman and Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt, D-Missouri, said "the Confederate flag no longer has a place flying anytime, anywhere in our great nation"? What right does he have to tell South Carolina what flag to hoist on the statehouse grounds, or to tell me what to fly in my own yard?
If Americans had any courage, rebel flags would pop up everywhere just to spite him.
Why aren’t more people outraged that the Democrats are going to drag a good Southern judge’s name through the mud, based mainly on the fact that he is a Republican from Mississippi? Instead of defending the judge’s record, the new Senate Majority Leader – a Tennessean, no less – told National Public Radio that Judge Charles Pickering really is a friend of minorities. Why didn’t he say that the judge is a friend of all Americans’ liberties, no matter their race or ethnic heritage? Groveling gets one nowhere in the mean world of Washington politics.
Back to that great song, lush with atmosphere. I love the version by The Band, but Joan Baez did a credible job too. But one shouldn’t be too willing to admit a fondness for such lyrics these days:
Virgil Caine is my name and I served on the Danville train
'Til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of '65 we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well
The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing?"
The song touches on the noble Confederate cause, yet to admit that the South embodies some of the most honorable traditions in American history is akin to saying that one believes in lynching and wants to restore slavery.
It’s nonsense, of course. But those who want to destroy the reputation of an entire region smell blood now that they drove Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott down from his post. Lott, of course, said some generous things about a 100-year-old colleague, praising Strom Thurmond’s presidential run on the Dixiecrat ticket. I’ve been to many going away parties, where speakers say overly effusive things that aren’t meant to be thought about too closely. But in the world of Washington gotcha, the Democrats scored a big victory.
Despite the ambush, Lott and the Republicans could have turned the problem into an opportunity to inform and enlighten the public. Rather than deplore segregation while explaining that the States Rights Party’s platform was remarkably close to the platform of America’s founders, Lott became a born-again supporter of affirmative action, and was cast aside by most everyone, Democrat and Republican. Conservatives, especially those cheeky young neocons who run the publications that represent the pitiful remnants of a once great movement, were the worst distorters of the truth.
Their goals are not based on principle, but on partisan maneuvering. How can the GOP refashion itself into a hip, new party that appeals to minorities, with baggage such as this? That was their motivating thought, even though no one in their right mind believes that black Americans will in our lifetime abandon their commitment to Democratic socialism in favor of Republican national socialism.
I’m not interested in being hip, if hip means abandoning the limited-government principles that are supposed to be the bedrock of the Republican Party. I’m more concerned about salvaging a few scraps of Christian civilization than being an acceptable guest at cool parties. If defending the truth means a temporary setback in one’s long-term political strategy, so be it.
But it keeps getting worse. In California, a candidate for the state Republican chairmanship, Bill Back, has been savaged for having in 1999 distributed an article by William Lind asking "What if the South Had Won the Civil War." One cannot even ask a serious historical question, or distribute an article that asks such a question, or argue that Reconstruction destroyed race relations in the South, without being drubbed into silence. (Whatever happened to free academic debate? Oh yeah, it exists, but only for those on the left side of the political spectrum, such as when a black Vanderbilt professor argued recently in a Nashville newspaper that Confederate soldiers should have been executed like dogs.)
"The thoughts behind it [the Lind article] have no place in modern America," thundered Jim Brulte, the California GOP’s principle-less Senate Republican leader. Now, we’re not even allowed to think incorrect thoughts.
Is this still America?
Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that there was nothing of any value coming out of the States Rights Party platform, which – as one writer noted on this Web site – means that Powell either hasn’t read the platform or doesn’t believe in the US Constitution.
Why does the South evoke so much hatred?
It’s not the region’s racial past. I grew up in the supposedly enlightened North, where segregation was even more rife. I lived in a 95-percent white county that bordered on heavily black Philadelphia. There was no integration, other than the nasty, government-mandated kind – such as when the feds plopped a hideous, crime-ridden high-rise housing project in the midst of settled South Philly Italian neighborhoods.
In my travels, I’ve found less respect for blacks by white people up North, than by white people toward their black neighbors down South. When I lived in the South, most of the blacks I knew had a respect for their region, and were far less willing than northern liberals to denigrate all things Southern and often had a sense of humor about racial issues.
Here’s the answer. Modern-day liberals, and the Cold War liberals who claim the mantle of the conservative movement, understand that the idea of the South – the South that stood up to northern aggressors, to Reconstruction-era dictators, and to federal authorities in the civil rights era – still resonates among those Americans who want to stand up to centralized government.
They know that honoring rather than running down the South (and Christendom, for that matter) can ignite resistance to their political goals. That’s what this really is about.
If the South stands only for racial hatred, why is a Romanian friend of mine here in Southern California, who spent much of his life living under a communist tyranny, and who has never been to the South, so eager to fly the stars and bars from his car’s antenna?
I grew up as far, psychologically, as one could get from the Deep South. Yet I remember kids often sporting the rebel flag on T-shirts and on car bumpers. My Dad, despite his hopelessly left-wing politics, insisted until his dying day that the Southern cause was a righteous one. It was a view he freely expressed, even I suspect in the New Jersey public school classroom where he taught social studies. My family was more Seinfeld than Gone with the Wind, yet I learned to have a healthy respect for my neighbors below the Mason and Dixon line.
When I moved for a short time to middle Tennessee in my late 20s, I was disappointed by the degree to which the region embraced the national culture. The ideas that are destroying America are destroying the South also. But there was something special about the place nonetheless. There was the warmth and friendliness of the people, and the independent, conservative, and Christian attitudes that hung on. I got tired of the small town ethic, with its limited career opportunities and frightfully slow pace of life. Still, I remember the South with fondness, and wonder where the Southerners are now to defend their homes, their history, their sense of honor.
Maybe they can’t get their voices heard in a media dominated by liberals and neoconservatives, the two sides most eager to portray the South as a dark and mystical place where everyone harbors a secret desire to lynch his black neighbors. Whatever the case, it’s a sad commentary on our society. Even sadder still that one cannot defend the South in polite company. It’s a good thing I have no plans for public office.
January 15, 2003
Bump.
BUMP. I, I, I, me, me, me. If he decides to run, it should be as a Libertarian, given his noticable self-centered point of view.
Coming from the SF Bay Area (now in Alabama for the reasons mentioned in the article), I can tell you that liberals in the school system plan a "Sojurn to the South" every year. His High school english department sponsors a bus load of kids on a two week vacation to see the sites where the Civil Rights movement had its heyday. They also rant on about how the south is still a hotbed of racism.(But I see little of that). They are denegrating the south to make their case that liberalism is the correct political movement for these kids to join. (Thank goodness I got my son out with out the scars they are trying to give their own kids. He is going to Auburn, ((War Eagle)))
This just stuck out to me as probably the best description of what has happened to the Republican party. Sold out and left the conservatives at home
If "limited-government" principles are the bedrock of the Republician party, then he must mean the Republican (anti-Federalist) party of Thomas Jefferson.
"If defending the truth means a temporary setback in one’s long-term political strategy, so be it."
Do you recall how many were scarified (in the not-too-distant past) for believing they could hold to such a high principle? I do.
Regards,
Az
By William S. Lind
January 9, 2003
Historians often indulge in scholarly speculation as to what the course of history would have been had major wars, battles, elections or the like gone the other way. In such an exercise, William S. Lind, Director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Cultural Conservatism, wrote a commentary in 1999 hypothesizing a course of history had the South won and the Union lost our American Civil War.
Three years later a controversy has erupted. Reports in The Sacramento Bee and The Washington Post were published in the past few days centering upon that 1999 commentary. Bill Back, a candidate in the current contest for state GOP chairman in California had published the commentary in an e-letter at the time that it was originally published in 1999. In the wake of the Trent Lott controversy, Back fell under fire for having done so, eventually feeling compelled to apologize for racial insensitivity. Notable News Now readers can judge for themselves whether Mr. Lind's commentary deserves the label of 'hateful bigotry" that was thrown at it by Shannon Reeves, who is Back's opponent, or whether the attacks reflect a Politically Correct mindset.
If the South had won the Civil War, where might our two countries be today? It is of course impossible to know, and as someone who proudly wears his great-grandfather's G.A.R. ring-he served in the 88th and 177th Ohio Volunteers, and his diary records the monitors bombarding Fort Fisher as he watched from a Union transport-I'm not entirely comfortable asking the question. But given how bad things have gotten in the old U.S.A., it's not hard to believe that history might have taken a better turn. Slavery of course would be long gone, for economic reasons. Race relations today in the Old South, in rural areas and cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, are generally better than they are in northern cities, so we might have done all right on that score. When southerners say they have a special relationship with blacks based on many generations of living together at close quarters, they have a point. The real damage to race relations in the south came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won. And since the North would have been a separate nation, the vast black migration to northern cities that took place during World War II might not have happened.
Certainly Southerners would not be living under the iron rule of an all-powerful federal government, as we all do now. Northerners might not be, either; a Union defeat would have given states' rights a boost in both countries. The Tenth Amendment might still have the force of law even up north.
It is possible that both countries might still be republics, instead of a single empire. That transformation traces to America's entry into World War I, which might not have happened. Southern sympathy would probably have been with Britain and France, but the North, with a large German population, might well have lined up with the Kaiser (the Irish would have liked that, too).
No American entry into the war would have meant no Communism in Russia and no Hitler in Germany.
That's not a bad bargain. It is highly unlikely that the Confederacy would have embraced the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness that is fast becoming the official American state ideology. So at least part of North America would still stand for Western culture, Christianity and an appreciation of the differences between ladies and gentlemen. Decency might have taken its stand in Dixie, along with some other good things such as an appreciation for the merits of rural life. Perhaps most important, Americans north and south might have a choice. If the North had turned left, as the United States has during this century, Northerners who didn't care for that development could cross the Mason Dixon line and become Southerners. That's an option more than a few of us Yankees would appreciate having, even if it did mean having to eat grits. What would my great-grandfather, Union Army sergeant Alfred G. Sturgiss, say to all of this? If he could see the sorry mess the country he fought for has become, I think he might sadly say that he'd fought for the wrong side.
Bill Lind is director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Cultural Conservatism.
I'll second that quote, it's been my experience by far.
He doesn't know what he's missing. Grits are good. Grits are delicious. Grits are a true delicacy, and I could eat them 3 times a day, and sometimes have. A SMALL dab of butter, and some salt, is all they need. Mmmmm...I think I'll have some now...
That's really true, and I've never understood it. Black people are just a concept to many Northerners.
My main issue with blacks(some) down here has to do with crime.
It's real bad in some areas, where the liberal plantation has a strong hold. The liberals deliberately destroyed the black family structure with their progressive welfare programs by rewarding illegitimacy. They created a dysfuntional black culture in many inner city areas, but secured a voting block for themselves. That was their purpose all along, and it was not an accidental by-product. Before they did that, black Americans were typically conservative and very family oriented. Low crime rates, etc.. What we see today is the result of a crime against humanity perpetrated by liberals. They are as bad as nazis in my view.
Decent white folks down South have been raised to have respect towards everybody until they have shown they merit otherwise.....then all bets are off.
I grew up in a small town in northwest Alabama (Marion County), and that's how we were raised. It's up to each individual to prove that he doesn't deserve respect. Until then, it's freely given and expected in return.
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