"Southerners Will Be Polite Up To The Moment They Kill You"

Mind jog via comment by Anonymous on Southerners are meaner than Yankees, research show...

Basil Dwayne "Bazz" Childress R.I.P.

Bazz, his wife Rachel and Dixie at General Pender's grave at Calvary Episcopal church in Tarboro when they were our house guests some years ago.

  

The Bazz Childress' from Lexington, KY visiting us in Emerald Isle, NC some years ago at Bushwacker's Restaurant. 

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Who was he fighting for?

Mr. Fields,

There is an old saying in the South, that a provoked Southerner will be polite right up to the moment they kill you. I must confess that it took all within me to address you by your name rather than some term that would reflect the opprobrium you so richly deserve. I shall also suppress the rage that would result in any harm to you because then I would be behaving like a Marxist and lowering myself to the position of baseness you occupy.

Years ago I would have simply shaken my head at the kind of comments you make in your coverage of the Yates family’s loss, choosing to ascribe such nonsense to simple ignorance. An example right out of the gate regarding ignorance in your commentary is that you refer to the flag you find so offensive as the Bars and Stars. The term of course is Stars and Bars. Moreover the flag flying in the coverage you mention is neither the Bars and Stars nor Stars and Bars (which was the Confederacy’s first official national flag)- it is the Confederate Battleflag, naval jack version – and judging by its condition, I’d say it’s been flying on that pole for a very long time.

You raise the question “What was their son fighting and for who?” You repeat it, both its bad form and grammar twice and connect the query in the most tortured way to both old and new, but false judgments about the Confederate flag that are simple repetitions of a combination of northern propaganda and today’s Cultural Marxist interpretation of the country’s history. I suppose one can’t be surprised at that given you’re from New Jersey, educated in New York and a Jacobin. (I have visited your website – the editorial policy section says “coming soon”). Let me aid you a bit by answering your twice repeated question and explain to you how your editorial policy (judging by your commentary about the Yates family) should be described.

Before I do so, let me comment that it is highly appropriate to be responding to you this Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day) that has origins in the decorating of Confederate soldiers graves after the War of Northern Aggression. It is also appropriate because I’m more than likely kin to the Yates on my father’s mother’s side. Remarking on that kinship will help give more context as I continue. Our part of the Yates clan wound up in the mountains of Virginia, an area where, were you to visit you’d have an opportunity to be offended by Confederate flags frequently.

Just across the Virginia/Kentucky border is Pike County Kentucky (the County named after a Confederate Gen’l) where if you were to visit the courthouse you would find the name of one of my Revolutionary War ancestors on a plague there as one of 12 such veterans buried in the County. That grandfather’s grandson George Washington Childress, along with many of his brothers, first cousins, Yates, Gibson, Shortridge boys (the Shortridges being my great great grandmother’s family etc) – all my kin – served in the 10th Kentucky Cavalry Confederate States Army. 100 years later George Washington Childress’ great grandson, Martin Dean Childress was killed in Vietnam while serving in the 1st Cavalry Division.

When you remark that your empathy for the Yates turned to scorn upon seeing the Confederate flag, given the brief history I’ve cited above, my reaction to you cannot be covered by the word scorn. Absolute contempt for you is what you provoke. Let’s review the particulars before I attempt to answer your question – my comments in brackets. You write:

“It sounds like a harsh question for a family in grief but one that needs to be raised considering their use of such a racially offensive symbol….. [yes indeed a harsh and silly question – but only a ideologue would place politics over civility]…..

Could you have imagined the outrage if a Nazi swastika had been displayed? Sure you can. [I don’t have to imagine the outrage that your gratuitous raising of that issue provokes – that you would do so shows either your total ignorance of these matters, or your dishonesty growing from that ideological rather than historical stance – more on that in a bit]

Yet, no reporter at this press conference raised the question ..[it is not shocking that even reporters would have more common sense than you do, given what you’ve written so far]..over the use of a treasonous symbol that is a blatant insult to our national heritage….[I have included in a PS some of the US laws concerning treatment of Confederate Veterans – there seems to be a disconnect here between you and your government]

Of course, there are those who will say it would have been in bad taste for the family to be hit with such a question. I could not disagree more….[There are those! Astounding – I’d say those as you call them are legion -- Again, only an ideologue would pursue bad taste in order to propagate his political agenda in such an entirely inappropriate moment]

This young man was a soldier in the United States military and sworn to protect the ideals the American flag represents. The other flag is in direct contradiction to those ideals and an insult to every man and woman in uniform.” [Technically he was sworn to defend the US Constitution and the country from its enemies, foreign and domestic – the ideal of the US Constitution of course – what such is - is the crux of the matter – and given the actual historical record whether the US flag or the Confederate flag represents that ideal the best. You Cultural Marxists are simply trying to redefine what those ideals were and silence any and all who disagree. Redefining the symbolic meaning of Confederate flags is exactly the kind dialectical mental gymnastics for which the Jacobin project is renowned].

Now, to answer your question --- let me connect the dots for you. (And mind you, I have no illusion that you’re educable – ideologues are not educable after all, but this communication will eventually be read by a few thousand people and from that number some more will be provoked to action against you modern Jacobins – for that I thank you).

A few years ago I made these comments to a communist email correspondent concerning these matters.

“….You seem to be accepting what passes for analysis today, without being able to see the internal inconsistencies of some of your assertions… . It has been my experience that the majority of folks who expound as you have, really do understand, but make the deliberate choice to obfuscate. There are others, such as the Yankee historian James McPherson, who admit that Southerners of the 1860s believed they were fighting for liberty just as their ancestors had against England, but despite that, assert and thereby admit it is good that the original republic was overthrown by Lincoln in order to effect the establishment of the egalitarian world now almost fully in place. That egalitarian world order (The Agenda) springs from the philosophy of one Jean Jacque Rousseau whose [expounding on same] helped inspire something now known as Jacobinism, the idea that the Old Order had to be violently overthrown to obtain liberty for humankind. … My email ask[ed]… questions …that indeed intimated my opposition to Jacobin thinking, [but],… By your logic, …[the elucidation of that opposition] is responsible for the [existence of “racist thinking”]. That is nonsense. Criticizing Rousseau and the pernicious affects of his thinking, of which socialism, communism and fascism are the modern “scientific” results, mixed with other influences, (the northern victory in the War of Northern Aggression being one of the most important), does not make one a racist or one unmindful of how badly we humans can and have treated one another. To assert so is either intellectual dishonesty, evidence of muddy thinking, or of that deliberate obfuscation to which I referred above.

Moreover, the rise of totalitarian states, the existence of which are necessitated by The Agenda Rousseau helped shape, is a direct consequence of that Agenda gaining ascendancy. The South’s political philosophy was the mortal enemy of that Agenda, so as one who believes the South was correct in its opposition to it, I have nothing good at all to say about Hitler’s brownshirts. To the contrary, the South fought with every fiber of its being against the ideas that eventually became, through a complex and inadequately understood set of inter-relationships between opposing camps of Enlightenment philosophy, played out over a few hundred years of history, the breeding ground for the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. (Don’t forget, Hitler was a National Socialist. To explain how he is viewed as being of the Right would require a longer story than possible in this email to you, detailing that complex interrelationship and indeed the failure to understand that story yields the current confusion of which so many, including you,..[are deluded].

The racial supremacy stuff is also part of that overall confusion, but as a hint for now - the modern emphasis on and political use of race is also a direct outgrowth of Rousseau. There is only one human race, but there are many human cultures. To confuse the two, yields fertile ground for the kind of race based demagoguery to which your argument falls victim and precludes dealing with very difficult issues by mixing them all up into what has become a stinking stew, all for the maintenance of the political utility that mixing has for the purpose of maintaining certain folks and their world view in power. Your pounding on slavery and race is the perfect example. ........”

And you Mister Fields are simply one more of such examples. More dots (from another correspondence from a few years ago):

The problem of course, is that we Southerners did what our leaders told us. We laid down our arms and tried to become good (albeit re-defined) Americans. Indeed, Richard Weaver in is Southern Essays, complained that we did that all too well. He remarked,

“Of all the lingering evils the South suffered as a result of military defeat, none was graver that the almost total extinction of initiative. Those who marvel that the section has lived so much in memory, ….should recall that for a long period it was denied the right of exercising leadership…… We have therefore, been largely powerless to prevent these lies from gaining credence”

But today maintaining those lies is not all that is demanded. Today, the demand is to entirely expunge from memory the truth (by disallowing flag displays, tearing down monuments, etc etc) of that cause for which our ancestors fought. It might be helpful to hear an excerpt from scholar Eugene D. Genovese (a lifelong communist) who remarked in his book, The Southern Tradition-The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism.

“…[Today] We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity.....Southerners are being taught to forget their forbears or to remember them with shame …. The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely southern [viewpoint]....[and] sanctified northern institutions and intentions......in consequence, from that day to this, the southern-conservative critique of modern gnosticism has been wrongly equated with racism and white Supremacy.........To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. ….. From the beginning of my academic career in the 1950s, I have argued that the Left would have to learn some hard lessons from southern conservatives if it were ever to rescue itself from the overt totalitarianism of Stalinism and the disquised totalitarian tendencies that infect left-liberalism and social democracy. The hard lessons I have had in mind, which especially concern the Left's rosy view of human nature and the irrationalities of its radical egalitarianism [which is the philosophy that won in the American Civil War], …… For "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" requires that those of us who spent our lives in a political movement that piled up tens of millions of corpses to sustain a futile cause and hideous political regimes have a few questions to answer….[The "modernization" of the South] has a price that northerners, southerners and blacks will rue having to pay. That price includes a neglect of, or contempt for, the history of southern whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble features of American national life must remain incomprehensible…….”

I grew up Mr. Fields in Cleveland, Ohio in northern schools…. As I read more and more during my childhood, it became clear to me at a young age that the north’s victory in the war had reversed what had been won in the war to secede from the British Empire (The Revolutionary War). It is impossible to put the South’s struggle for independence some 80 plus years later in context without understanding the issues of the war against England for our original independence and that other revolution (the French). …one must remember that the Confederacy’s leaders were standing in the traditions of their fathers – for the principles of English Common Law that themselves owed to many centuries of development in what is now called The Western Tradition, constraining the arbitrary power of kings and concentrations of power (Scotland’s resistance to the English crown [think Braveheart] being very much a part of that constraining).

The French Revolution had as its conceptual base the philosophy of Jean Jacque Rousseau – which in its political manifestation came to be called Jacobinism. (Indeed, all the “isms” of modernity are either its direct offspring or reactions to it). It’s tenets were that human societies up to that point had caged humanity through the cooperation of kings and priests and had to be overthrown- in other words the Western Tradition and any other religiously founded ones had to go. In their place a new type of society was to be created, at the point of the sword as necessary. To state it differently- Rousseau believed humans could be perfected through proper political arrangements not founded on religious superstitions but on what humans thought best for themselves. Any who oppose such are the enemies of human progress and must be eliminated. As such it was the enemy of religious traditions and all then existing traditional governments. Lincoln ignorantly brought the ideals of the French Revolution (read the Gettysburg Address which turned the American founding upside down) into the driver’s seat- Europe would finally wholly follow after WWI.

That transition was aided when Karl Marx put a pseudo scientific veneer over Rousseau and when the peasants overthrew the Russian monarchy one of the more extreme versions resulted. New England’s own religious brand of this kind of spirit morphed into the Jacobin secular version (called American Progressivism.. what Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren called ‘the treasury of virtue’ stored up by fighting one of those traditional governments, The Southern Confederacy)- Indeed, I would argue that the South’s defeat, opened the door to the entire world’s adopting or being forced to react to some version of a Jacobin inspired ism. After the northern victory in 1865 and the century between then and 1965, the world experienced the bloodiest 100 years known in all human history as all those isms began to fight one another. The world was fractured asunder between 1776 and 1918. Where we end up living among the fragments is still in process.

Because modern political entities are founded on a revolutionary ethic-they themselves are subject to revolutionary re-arrangement. Many are familiar with Lord Acton’s quote, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. [By the way, the preceding is the end of the quote – it begins with “When power is allowed to concentrate into one or a few hands, you will be ruled by gangsters”] Acton was Sir John Dahlberg, one of the nineteenth century’s pre-eminent political philosophers. What is almost wholly unknown about Acton is that he exchanged letters with Robert E. Lee after the northern victory.

Excerpting:

Robert E. Lee , "All that the South has ever desired was the Union as established by our forefathers should be preserved and that the government as originally organized should be administered in purity and truth."

Acton,".....The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. …Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."

Lee replied:"…. I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, … essential to …. safeguard ..the continuance of a free government…. whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.......The South has contended only for the supremacy of the Constitution, and the just administration of the laws made in pursuance to it."

Later Dahlberg wrote an analysis of the war in which he said: "The North has used the doctrines of Democracy to destroy self-government. The South applied the principle of conditional federation to cure the evils and to correct the errors of a false interpretation of Democracy................[and the inevitable result of an unfettered federal government will be] the initiative in administration; the function of universal guardian and paymaster; the resources of coercion, intimidation, and corruption; the habit of preferring the public interest of the moment to the established law; .............. a public creditor; a prodigious budget – these things will remain to the future government of the Federal Union, and will make it approximate more closely to the imperial than to the republican type of democracy…..By exhibiting the spectacle of a people claiming to be free, but whose love of freedom means hatreds of inequality, jealousy of limitations to power, and reliance on the States as an instrument to mould as well as to control society, it calls on its admirers to hate aristocracy and teaches its adversaries to fear the people."

And just how many Peoples Republics of this and that exist today? And in the name of a given political entity’s power, consolidated in the claim to act in its peoples will and for their benefit, just how many slaughters have occurred? The US piece of this equation is daunting to see, because we’re blinded by New England’s explanation of the country’s founding and purpose in the world. We do not understand that our first experience with terrorism inspired by revolutionary fervor was John Brown’s raid into Virginia to effect the violent overthrow of Southern governments- funded and inspired by that cooperation between New England’s Puritans and Jacobins. It is significant that after many years of talking about separation, the South did so only after John Brown’s raid revealed the true nature of where matters were headed.

Rather than Lincoln’s vision of national power consolidated to reflect the iron will of the northern majority, the South believed the only way to prevent the evils attended thereto was to maintain as a counter balance, state power. As the Virginian Robert L Dabney wrote, “The people of the South went to war, because they sincerely believed what their political fathers had taught them, with one voice, for two generations that the doctrine of State-sovereignty for which they fought, was absolutely essential as the bulwark of the liberties of the people."

We know the end of that story- we’re living in it. And where have matters been brought? We have witnessed all over the globe as Lee put it governments “sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home” who claim to act in the name of their people to accomplish its particular vision of political perfection- the mantra goes something like 1) We (your moral and intellectual superiors) know how people should live 2) Your group is not living by that vision 3) It is imperative, for the sake of, peace, human rights and progress that humankind should be made to conform with that vision 3) Given that imperative, we have the right to force that result 4) Even if it means destroying the opponents of that vision.

What does mean regarding service in Iraq? It reflects the fact the current version of the United States is schizophrenic in these matters and it is so precisely because it houses within its governmental structure as a Canadian writer recently wrote that there are really two countries within its confines: One conservative and one revolutionary. No where is that fact better demonstrated than in our current troubles in Iraq. Please allow me to get you to consider some observations.

I ask you to recall what President Bush said in his 2nd Inaugural speech rendered in January 2005

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,…. It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world."

On other occasions, our purpose has been described as ‘ending evil in the world’ and our object to create in the Middle East a democratic society rather than the sorts that have grown out of the mixture of Islamic and socialist Gnosticisms. Indeed, the famous speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan, in her criticism of that speech and policy described it as too Jacobin for her and that,

“….To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division [which has been] defined as a division between moralists (modern Jacobin romantics if you will) and realists (small c conservatives, if you’ll allow)--the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power--President Bush sided strongly with the moralists….”

New York native Noonan ends her criticism with the statement that, “[One wishes for] a sense that there are [a] few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts. One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.”

Do we have a severe challenge facing us from a religious totalitarian view that has come to be called radical Islam (they being Islam’s own ‘Puritan Element)? – yes, we do. Is the solution what has been chosen; a United States that has not yet lost its own puritanical, revolutionary fervor - it freed the slaves, fights racism, sexism, homophobism, etc etc. and now radical Islam through its export of democracy? We shall see. But indeed, I ask you to consider that …..today those who have taken Lincoln global by unleashing a war against Iraq (and all the rest to follow) which will be unending and deadly because it seeks unobtainable goals against an enemy that will not do as the Christian Robert E. Lee did in 1865 isn’t the wrong path?

We’ve actually seen this all before – in the years prior to 1860, this country was told that the survival of the United States and the continuance of free government depended on the crushing of the South. Today we’re told such depends on crushing certain Middle Eastern governments. A Southern soldier, when asked why he was fighting in the 1860s said, “because you’re here”. Pat Buchanan has likewise said that Islam is an increased threat here, because we’re ‘over there’ in Iraq.

I would caution that Islam has the same (religious not secular) thing to say in return to this Jacobin assault- the world should be Muslim and we have the right to slaughter to accomplish that vision – that clash is about to bring the world to its next round of catastrophe. We’re either going to get these matters straight in our minds – and get the sand out of our eyes of which Genovese spoke, thrown in them now for over a century, or we’re going to face an apocalypse that will make WWII seem small in comparison.

The soldiers of the Confederacy fought with every ounce of their being to prevent converting our founding from one where people worked out their future cooperatively and not at the barrel of a gun for the purpose of overthrowing all that had come before, at the hands of governments given radical power to effect that overthrowing. They owed it to their family (especially those long dead) to fight such a revolutionary and dangerous development.

But it should be no surprise that the Republican Party would embroil us in such a predicament, now that it has been returned to its northeastern roots. Just as that party cloaked its naked move to squash the opponent of its profit seeking in the 1860s shielded by anti-slavery posturing, today that party is intent upon protecting its profits by securing the oil supplies of the Middle East behind the rhetoric of “fighting that war on terror against the barbarians”. One should never get between a Yankee and his money :

For some perspective from a speech by Dr. Donald Livingstion in Arlington, Virginia April 2007”

“…Lincoln’s posturing about no slavery in the West was in part an extension of this white Anglo Saxon New England ideology – that all of America should be like New England – white, Anglo Saxon. The New York Tribune declared for instance, that barring slavery from the territories would “give them an opportunity to become what New England is now, namely a uniquely white commercial and industrious polity.” That’s anti-slavery. The anti-slavery rhetoric of the 1850s had no high moral content. It simply meant that the West was to remain an African free zone….. it should be clear that Lee and the Confederacy were fighting not to perpetuate slavery but for independence and self government. Consequently the post 1960s [Marxist] histiography that dominates today is simply false. It’s false on account of the record. But that is not all for that histiography springs from a source of self deception that has corrupted to a large extent our American identity. And like any form of self deception it is grounded in a partial truth. There was in the antebellum period an intense agitation about slavery. But this agitation had nothing to do except in the rarest of cases, with a moral concern for the black man. It’s hard for us to get our minds around that. The institution was condemned because of its alleged bad effects on northern whites and their vision of what America should be.

Five elements make up this anti-slavery syndrome as I’ll call it. First, the institution encouraged laziness and hedonism in Southerners, which discouraged the virtues of hard work and inventiveness at which the north excelled, especially New England – and which were necessary for commercial success or a powerful country. Slavery was a kind of drug, you see. It drugged those people in the South.

Secondly, it produced in Southerners an aristocratic, anti-democratic arrogant and even violent character with an in-ordinate attachment to hunting, guns, horses, drinking and honor. Such people were not fit to govern in a vast commercial republic modeled on New England.

Third, slavery had lead to the moral decay of the South by bringing Southerners into too close contact with Africans. Thomas Goodwin a northern abolitionist in his book, A Natural History of Secession published at the height of the war in 1864 declared that Southerners had “African playmates, African attendants, African recreations, African food, African voices, African minds.” ……….The moral corruption of Southerners, he continues resulted from, “the direct influence of so large a population of half barbarous Africans interspersed among them.”

Fourth, Blacks had corrupted the sexual morals of Southerners. This is something that really got them exercised. And the reason for that, blacks being half savages were just over-sexed. The abolitionist Louisa Barker said that, black women, “lured young slave holders into illicit attachments.” …. Another abolitionist Henry Wright wrote, “There is not a nation or tribe of men so steeped in sexual pollution as this.” And another abolitionist wrote, “The Southern states are one great Sodom.” …

Fifth, slavery enabled Southerners to develop an agricultural, economic and political interest at odds with the rest of the country – namely the mercantilism that Prof DiLorenzo talked about earlier today. Southerners resisted a national bank, federal subsidies for business and a high protective tariff to protect northern industry. All of which [they felt] retarded economic progress of the country. And finally, Southerners were now insisting on bringing their Africans and their corrupt ways to the West. In none of this anti-slavery syndrome was there any moral concern for the welfare of the black man.

What the anti-slavery syndrome really meant is that the institution had so corrupted Southerners that they no longer had or could have an honorable place in the Union and were not even competent to govern the territory they occupied. They could see all these wonderful natural resources in the South and they didn’t have boo understanding of what to do with them. But New Englanders knew what to do with them. And so Ralph Waldo Emerson was only following out its implication of this anti-slavery syndrome when he argued near the end of the war for confiscating Southern property. [He said], “By doing this you at once open the whole South to the enterprise and genius of new men and extend New England from Canada to the Gulf and to the Pacific.” ….

Why is history taught this way? The answer is that for over a hundred years historians when they have wondered why was there a war – why did we have this war? … asked the wrong question. The question they’ve asked … is why did the South secede? Why oh why did the South secede?.....

…..But the question we should be asking is this: Why did the north invade?... Why did the north invade? The presumption behind this question .. is the founding principle of the American Revolutionary tradition - That a genuine society has a natural right to govern itself. Southerners as inheritors of that tradition did not need a reason to secede other than the desire to govern themselves and the manifest ability to do so. …..

The moral problem for anyone who has given allegiance to this founding American tradition was why was secession not allowed?…. Secession does not cause war as our historians assume. [Court historians] all assume that secession causes war – hence the question why did the South secede? – that’s why there was a war, because the South seceded. Secession does not cause war. There was no war when Norway seceded from Sweden in 1905 – or when Singapore seceded from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 – or when 15 states seceded from the Soviet Union in 1990. When the Soviet Union dissolved it was only around 70 years old. The same age as the united States in 1861.

So why did the north invade? Why was there a war? There was a war because the north invaded. Let me say that again. There was a war because the north invaded. Let me say that yet again. There was a war because the north invaded – not because the South seceded. There was no war in the Soviet Union. Wouldn’t it have been nice if we’d had the Communist Party under Gorbachev and shouldn’t they thank God they did not have the Republican Party under Lincoln.

Well let me give you an answer as to why the north invaded. There was a time early after the war in which the north was very honest about this. In 1877, Charles Bancroft distinguished northern historian gave the correct explanation in his book, The Footprints of Time: A Complete Analysis of our American System of Government. It’s what Thomas Dilorenzo has called mercantilism – that’s our American System of government. He’s telling you what our American System of government is and why there was a war.

“While so gigantic a war was an immense evil, to allow the right of peaceable secession would have been the ruin of the enterprise and thrift of the industrious laborer and the keen eyed business man of the north. It would have been the greatest calamity of the age. War was less to be feared.”

I probably need to read that to you 3 times too, but I’m not going to do it. But an invasion by the north merely to maintain a territorial monopoly on coercion governed by northern commercial interests was and is morally reprehensible. Americans should be deeply ashamed of it. But of course they are not. If that war were fought today with today’s population that war would have yielded over 5 million battle deaths – not to mention wounded and missing. But to acknowledge the stark immorality of the north’s invasion would be to throw into question the legitimacy of the vast centralized regime built upon it. ---(Today’s America in other words).

And since this truth is too disturbing to contemplate, mainline historians have turned their face from it and have cobbled together instead a picture instead of a head strong and wicked South that fought to destroy the last best hope of man on earth, merely to perpetuate slavery. …….

Henceforth instead of trying to answer the loaded question of why did the South secede – it is time for a paradigm shift in historical research – to the question why did the north invade? To answer this question historians would have to explore and dissect the antebellum northern mind as they have done the Southern mind. They have picked over the Southern mind like you would an insect. But now we need to study the northern mind. Had they thoroughly explored the darker recesses of this northern mind we might be living in a quite different country today, one in which the state of Virginia would be proud rather than ashamed to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of its most noble sons – instead we live in the vast consolidated empire that Lee feared would emerge and which he said was sure to become tyrannical at home and aggressive abroad. And he was right on both counts I’m afraid. The war was not about slavery – but about suppressing secession and consequently the founding American Principle that a society should be able to govern itself [was also suppressed]. “

The above of course Mr. Fields just references slavery. The whole of the modern “race” issue post dates the “American Civil War”, the development of which in this country was put into place to justify what the north’s war of conquest for money and power (the quest of which founds all wars), of the South and control of the US government was meant to accomplish.

The word racism entered the dictionary in 1932 as a noun and 1938 as an adjective. Its origin was from the French word ‘racisme’ which dates to 1935, originally in National Socialist (Hitler’s party’s) lexicon. That word itself replaced words that originated in 1907, (racialism) and in 1917 (racialist), having as their context the British (and German) South African colonies.

The particulars of that conquest forms the foundation of the world in which we all now live, and is why “many whites in this country are still invested in the Civil War….” The schizophrenia of which I referred above has yielded domestically a government dedicated to the proposition that the purpose of the US government has always been to eradicate traditional/racist/backward/religionist thinking both at home and abroad. Those of us whose ancestors fought on behalf of a different worldview and result disagree. That continued disagreement is exactly why that schizophrenia exists in a government divided not along the Mason Dixon line, but now down every Main Street in the country, over cultural issues (rather than the concocted “racial context”) and yielding a foreign policy also Jacobin in its practice and which now has us on the verge of the next round of potential cataclysm.

You modern Jacobins (whether you know you are one or not), demand the rest of us accede to your list of false choices. Those false choices demand that we accept the mandate of modern Jacobin prescriptions be adopted which are inevitably in conflict with the constitutional principles of this country’s founding- hence incessant reference about segregation and the 1960s civil rights legislation. We are asked to believe that the cessation of the mistreatment of the descendants of former slaves depends on that Jacobin interpretation of history and that the destruction of the founding constitutional principles of our government in order to affect “racial justice” must be disregarded.

That demand is of course, nonsense. Such nonsense wouldn’t have gained such traction had Booker T. Washington’s views remained dominate in the early 1900s. But Booker’s views of course, were ridiculed and overthrown by the Marxist founders of the NAACP whose view of such “racial justice” was founded on the Marxist view of history propounded by that organization’s founder WEB Dubois, which you reflect. Therefore, much as one encounters with “optical illusions”, whether one sees Confederate symbols as “racist” or as a symbol of an appropriate constitutional defense to these problems given to us through the hypocritical northern filter which we have inherited, .. that in actuality reflects a northern explanation of this country’s history based on ideals which post-dated the issues over which the north and South fought those many years ago. It should be remembered the US Supreme Court decisions that sanctioned segregation 30 years after 1865 were passed 8 to1 by northern appointees to that court and the sole dissenting vote was from a Southerner appointed to that court. You of course, given the blinders provided by the Jacobin world view, would be blind to the significance of that.

That blindness (or willful disregard), accounts for the attempts to cast the South and its fight in some other light (racist, backward, repressive etc) for the sake of the maintenance of today’s power elites’ continuance in positions of authority and the advancement of a French Revolution inspired political agenda. The trouble is, the lies told to accomplish those goals dishonor the dead, who can no longer defend themselves – and they happen to be the blood kin of many of us.

In conclusion I will share my response to an article back on 17 May 2009 appearing in the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader:

This past Sunday 17 May 2009 the Herald Leader published a piece by Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist that appeared in The Miami Herald concerning an altercation between two young men, one white and one black titled Race Matters. That piece concluded with the line “….They never had a chance”.

How appropriate Pitts ended his piece with that comment. The young men involved in the matter of which Pitts writes truly have no chance because those such as Mr. Pitts do nothing to further the cause of understanding history, but instead advance an ideology.

Indeed, the violence inspired by "racially disparaging remarks" Mr. Pitts decries results from a view inculcated by the propagation of the "racial" agenda French Communists invented over 70 years ago that has helped deprive us of our history rather than explain it.....Rather than the false premise of “race” what is demonstrated is the impossibility of putting history behind us. History is always an interpretation and not some “objective” truth. What passes for history today has become an exercise in ideology and not historical reflection.

In reality the claim that the violence of which Pitts writes would all disappear if the correct understanding of history prevailed is actually a call for the censuring of any interpretation that would question the prevailing Marxist reading of America’s past. In fact, the propagation of the kind of ideology Pitts holds helps create such violence. 

The ideology that sprang from the French Revolution via the Jacobins held that enlightened elites, in the name of human progress should have the power to eradicate any and all institutions from the human past that disagreed with their agenda for the advancement of the human project toward its proper perfection. It was precisely such a view and the consolidation of power into the hands of such elites that Confederate soldiers opposed, however imperfectly they expressed that opposition. Or as Zhou Enlai replied to a reporter during Nixon’s visit to China when asked about the result of the French Revolution that it was ”… too soon to tell.”

These matters are not as “racial” or as simple as Pitts would proclaim. Indeed, the Southern Populist movement of the 1890s is an example. Tom Watson, the leading light of Southern populism at the time said, "You [white and black Southerners] are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both."

Indeed. And are we not watching that unfold at this very hour? So as your pocket is picked by a federal government dominated by northern financial interests with the new bailout of the day – I would encourage all to consider that Mr. Pitts is simply one more drop in that ocean of subterfuge.

But I suppose you are proud Mr. Fields to also take part in such subterfuge. How disgusting and contemptible. Blood quilt – what you and all your Jacobin friends are drenched in – may its sweet maddening smell, haunt your stone cold morally confused souls.

Bazz Childress

PS - Several acts of Congress, which are listed below, have defined Veterans of the Confederate States of America as Veterans of the United States due the same benefits and honors as any other American Veteran. Samples:


P.L. 38, 59th Congress, Chap. 631-34 Stat. 56)
U.S. Public Law 810, Approved by 17th Congress 26 February 1929(45 Stat 1307 - Currently on the books as 38 U.S. Code, Sec. 2306)

This law, passed by the U.S. Congress, authorized the “Secretary of War to erect headstones over the graves of soldiers who served in the Confederate Army and to direct him to preserve in the records of the War Department the names and places of burial of all soldiers for whom such headstones shall have been erected.”

U.S. Public Law 85-425: Sec. 410 Approved 23 May 1958(US Statutes at Large Volume 72, Part 1, Page 133-134)

The Administrator shall pay to each person who served in the military or naval forces of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War a monthly pension in the same amounts and subject to the same conditions as would have been applicable to such person under the laws in effect on December 31, 1957, if his service in such forces had been service in the military or naval forces of the United States.

U.S. Code Title 38 - Veterans’ Benefits, Part II -

General Benefits, Chapter 15 - Pension for Non-Service-Connected Disability or Death or for Service, Subchapter I - General, § 1501. Definitions: (3) The term “Civil War veteran” includes a person who served in the military or naval forces of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, and the term “active military or naval service” includes active service in those forces.

Southerners Will Be Polite Up To The Moment They Kill You