FanPost

Why do "they" hate the South and its symbols?

This fanpost is adapted from the "Confederate Veteran," the publication of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Volume 75, No.6, November/December 2017, pp.20-23 by Dr. Paul E. Gottfried as given for Confederate Flag Day, North Carolina State Capitol, Raleigh, North Carolina, May 10 in North Carolina.

The University of Mississippi, fondly known the world over as Ole Miss, is the home of the Center of the Study of Southern Culture which is housed in Barnard Observatory and is the FIRST regional studies center in America. Therefore, what I am about to write is clearly apropos to Ole Miss and all her programs including football.

Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist. He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as as a Guggenheim recipient.

Born: November 21, 1941 (age 75), Brooklyn, New York City, NY

"Those Southern secessionists whose national flag we are now celebrating have become identified not only with a lost cause but with a now publicly condemned one.....Many symbols are no longer deemed as fit for public mention."
The basis for such condemnation is the fact that we are to reject a racist society, a development we are persistently urged to welcome.During the past two generations or so, the South, we have been taught, was a viciously insensitive region, and the Southern cause in 1861 was nothing so much as the attempt to perpetuate the degradation of blacks through a system based on racial slavery.We should therefore rejoice at the reconstruction of Southern society and culture in a way which excludes, and indeed extirpates from our minds, except as an incentive to further white atonement, the pre-civil rights past, also known as the "burden of Southern history." The last, frequently encountered phrase is from the title of a famous study of the South by C. Vann Woodward, who in his time was a liberal-minded Southern historian.
Further, there is the popular comparison of the Ole South and Nazi Germany. This comparison has entered the oratory of the NAACP (now calling for the removal of the National Anthem as they proclaim it to be racist) and the Black Caucus. It has also appeared with increasing frequency in social histories which have come from the American historical profession since the Second World War.A bizarre variation on this comparison, and one frequently heard from the American political left, is between the Holocaust and Southern slavery. First brought up by the historian Stanley Elkins, this seemingly unstoppable obscenity is resurrected whenever black politicians demand reparations.
Although Southern slave-owners were guilty of not providing due Christian charity and concern for their slaves, one must admit that reason would require us to acknowledge South slave-owners were vitally concerned about preserving their human chattel. Moreover, unlike the Nazis, these slave-owners were not out to exterminate a race of people; nor did Southern theologians and political leaders deny the humanity of those who served them, a point historian Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have demonstrated at some length.
In William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," a character says "No, I don't hate the South." But, today, we are to do so due to the location of the Lost Cause and of Confederate war monuments, as we are taught to put such out of our minds for even the display of the Confederate Battle Flag, particularly in the South, has been turned into a hate crime. Why have those associated with a defeated cause and one who combatants were long admired as heroic even by the victorious side, become moral pariahs for their DESCENDANTS? Is there anything startlingly NEW about our knowledge of Southern history since the early 1950s which would present such condemnation so prevalent today?
((IMHO, this condemnation today is the result of a constant and pervasive attempt at destroying ALL present American history and culture and then rebuild such history and culture to fit some wild assed concept of white bigotry, racism, and the constant "holding down" of minorities by those in power--white Europeans. What this NEW history and culture is to be is beyond me and you can only guess yourself. I believe the concept of the creation of a real Republic of New Afrika, the Black Muslim goal of total separation of races and religions, and the anti-fa credo and goal of subjugation of anyone they don't like are just a smattering what "they" have in mind for THEIR America.)) ((me))
Today, we have the fact that the descendants of the defeated are taught to vilify or treat dismissively their ancestors so that the can demonstrate their broad mindedness and remorse about past racism.The venting of hate and contempt on the South, as found in such predictable unfriendly authors as Eric Foner and James McPherson, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
During and right after the Civil War, Americans were very much alike in many ways--Protestant religion, conservative. agrarian, and respectful of each other, except when it came to slavery. North and South came up with a narrative about their past differences which bestowed honor to heroes on both sides. But this second civil war of today seeks the utter humiliation of those who are seen as opponents of a society which is still being imposed. The Southern traditionalists from this perspective are particularly obnoxious inasmuch as they are a full two-steps behind the project in question. "They" are no longer like the Southerns for "they" are post-bourgeois social engineers and despisers of Western civilization, a stage of development that these revolutionaries identity with discrimination and exclusion.

Interestingly, non-Southerners even non-Westerners are not required to dwell on similar improprieties (still honoring the national flag of nineteenth-century landed warriors from the American South and even worse, those who engage in these celebratory rites do not express the now fashionable "GUILT" about members of their race and tribe) among their ancestors or contemporaries, and so they celebrate their collective pasts without disclaimers or reservations. The hair shirt of "GUILT" to be worn ONLY fits Western bodies, and in particular impenitent Southern ones.

It is against this background that one might try to understand the loathing the political, journalist, and educational establishment reserves for the unreconstructed white inhabitants of the South. You even more so than Louis Farrakhan and those unmistakable anti-white racists, who are often found in our elite universities.
You Southerners exemplify what the late Sam Francis called the "chief victimizers" in our victimologically revamped society, an experimental society which fits well with our increasingly rootless country. But your enemies are also the enemies of historic Western civilization, or of the West that existed in centuries past. You may take pride in those whom you honor as your linear ancestors but equally in the anger of those who would begrudge you the right to honor them. What your critics find inexcusable is that you are celebrating your people's past, which was a profoundly conservative one based on family and community, and those who created and defended it.
My apologies for any typographical errors and my apologies to Dr. Gottfried for reducing his speech to a format to fit this fanpost.





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