The Sesquicentennial is under way, battle re-enactments occur around the nation. Yet, the South is not proud of it's past, why? by Mark Vogl
Secession and the bloody war that followed is a part of the history of the South, and for almost a century was politically correct in Dixie. Even as late as the Centennial, America itself honored the heroes of the South. The movies up until the sixties did not shy away from the America that existed earlier. Dixie was played often as a martial song to stir the patriotism of the people with roots to Confederate gray.
The movies of an earlier era reflect a reality not easily understood by people today. But the South was one, black and white were the South. When the war with the invading north occurred three and half million black slaves did not revolt, and most did not join the Union army. Story after story of slaves tending their master’s wounds, or carrying home the body to be buried are available. The Slave narratives done after the war prove an affection and bond between all in the South which could not be understood, and so was put in a crate, like the one in Raiders of the Lost Arc, and pushed into a warehouse to sleep in the dust of history.
The olde South was born of cultural diversity, the Confederacy home to Scot-Irish and German, the Six Tribes of the Indian Nation of what is now Oklahoma, the Mexicans, French and Cajuns of Texas and Louisiana, and the three and half million blacks of Dixie. (Because I recognize this diversity I am called a Rainbow Confederate by those in the Southern movement who do not see.)
But then, in reaction to the inability of all America (north and South ) to deal with the question of what do we do now, after the slaves were freed, the civil rights movement arose. It happened in coincidence to America’s war in Vietnam and the rising tide of opposition to America’s new role as global policemen. One we still carry today even though we won the Cold War a score year ago. The Soviet menace is dead, but America’s soldiers did not come home.
The violence of the sixties was not just in the South, but Los Angeles and Chicago both had their turn at being in the spotlight. The KKK’s largest rallies were in the north, on Long Island and in Ohio, though it is the South who solely carries affiliation with that organization.
The civil rights movement, founded on an honorable concept of equality was infiltrated by enemies of liberty, and America. A concoction of justice and anti-Americanism, spiced with racism on both sides was injected into the veins of American life. Political correctness was the anti-virus developed by the social elites of the Ivy League. This political correctness torched the Confederate flag once again, removing it from Friday night and Saturday fall battlefields of the modern South, and the raceways which to this day draw the largest crowds to sporting events.
What the abolitionists and Yankees of the war could not do, and what reconstruction did not do, the modern electronic Yankee occupation of the South would do. The olde South was occupied and overcome. And, many in the modern South have accepted it. Though it is estimated that some eighty million Americans today can trace their Southern ancestry back to Confederate gray, the symbols and more importantly the political inheritance of the South have been banished.
Recently, a Republican Presidential candidate from Texas, Governor Rick Perry, announced his personal opposition to the application of the Sons of Confederate Veterans for a vanity plate. Despite the fact that not one other application by any not-for-profit for a vanity plate in Texas had been refused, the committee making the decision voted unanimously to reject the application. And the leader of the Texas S.C.V. sat at that meeting, never saying a word. No press conference held, no action to claim for the South its inheritance by the very man elected to make the stand. His silence at the highwater mark demonstrated the impotence of those charged with vindicating the Southern inheritance.
Yes a lawsuit had been commenced. But, in Texas the Courts there are no better than in New York, or California. The last case like this in Texas, where the SCV took Governor Bush to court for tearing down historical markers in the dead of the night, the Court spanked the former President’s hand, but did not order the plaques returned. They are still missing, the Texas SCV members told they won. Pathetic, if it wasn’t so funny.
There are many values of the old South which are desperately needed in today’s America. Foremost among these values is an invitation to God to sit at the governing table. In the Preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States, the founding fathers of the nation of Dixie called on God for His wisdom and protection. In the document itself, the nation of the South recognized a Christian God and asked Him to guide them.
This sitting President of the United States has denied this nation is a Christian nation despite our history and the fact that seventy-five percent of Americans claim Christianity; this after decades of human secularism in our schools and on our televisions.
The corruption of the old Europe, the reasons for an exodus to the new world are in America today. We have been infected, and the only anti-virus, enlightened liberty, is absent to any real degree. The Confederate Constitution is filled with the remedies to today’s problems; Line Item veto, the blocking of member items, a fiscally conservative budget process, prohibition of commercial bail outs and restraints on an active judiciary, and lastly but most importantly the superior sovereignty of the states are all embedded in the document created more than one hundred and fifty years ago.
The olde South was the prophet of the modern American tragedy and collapse. She saw the traits of man which would eventually undo the document created to safeguard liberty and promote individual accomplishment, the foundation of American exceptionalism.
But the olde South is not heard from.
Politics is the art of distraction. Take the public’s eye off the ball, by giving them the blood games in the coliseum. In America, to distract America from the intellectual consideration of the Olde South’s political insight, the intellectual black hole of slavery has dominated the discussion of secession, the ante bellum era and the war. It should not, and the purveyors, the spokesmen of the old South should condemn slavery for the sin it is, so that the discussion can move to the real import and significance of the Confederacy. And this discussion should include the right of secession as the only real check on the unbridled expansion of federal power.
But alas, this discussion is muted. Like the leader in Texas who sat silently in a committee meeting while political appointees bowed before the wishes of Governor Rick Perry, so most other Southern leaders will continue to fight for the nobility of slavery, rather than condemn it for what it was, and take up the real fight, the Cause.
Have no fear Yankees and neo conservatives, as of now, those who claim leadership in the Southern movement reject political activism, preferring parades and re-enactments, and the distraction of defending slavery. At least for now, the South won’t rise again.
