One of them that I have heard pointed out since childhood is that modern Thanksgiving was created by Lincoln as a day for the North to give thanks over the success of the invasion and desolation of the South by the ilks of Sherman. This “let’s rejoice over our success in killing other White people for the benefit of non-Whites” holiday was grafted onto the Plymouth Colony’s Thanksgiving in American iconography and has ever since crowded out any memory of the real first Thanksgiving which took place in Virginia and which–unlike the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving–did not feature a brotherhood dinner shared by Indians and Whites.

But this parochial Southern debunking of American Thanksgiving pieties is a digression from the point I want to make in commenting on Mr. Wallace’s essay.

I have recently been reading a very interesting book by National Book Award winning historian Nathaniel Philbrick entitled Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. It has left me with a much greater admiration for the New England Puritans and has effaced some of my Southern-bred contempt for them.

This book is an account of the Pilgrims’ settlement at Plymouth in 1620 and the subsequent English colonization of Massachusetts down through the end of King Phillip’s War in 1679. (King Phillip’s War was a New England wide attack by Indian tribes upon the young settlements. It was set off by the sachem of the Pokanoket Tribe who was called “King Phillip” by the colonists who were amused that he ranked himself as the equal of King Charles II.

Since this is a modern book, it has to genuflect to all the usual liberal totems but it is not too bad and is a trove of interesting information.

In reading Mayflower I was disappointed to learn just how racially “open-minded” the Puritans were. In his little essay Mr. Wallace says, “The Puritans didn’t believe in multiculturalism, political correctness, or human rights. They didn’t believe the Pequot Indians were ‘Native Americans.’ They obviously didn’t believe the Indians they exterminated, enslaved, and/or ethnically cleansed from New England were entitled to the ‘inalienable rights’ of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Obviously, he is correct that they did not believe in this exact lingo which–as Mr. Wallace correctly points out–was introduced centuries later.

But they weren’t as “racist” as we would like, and they bore no resemblance to the image created by the minority vendors of the hate-Whitey propaganda with their claims of the Puritans sending out blankets ridden with smallpox virus so as to exterminate the Indians and so on.

I was very surprised to learn that the Squanto story is actually true. It is set out in Governor Bradford’s eyewitness account. The Puritans did need Squanto’s help and advice after all, contrary to my skepticism which I once expressed in an AmRen speech which now leaves me somewhat embarrassed. They were mostly city folk and not accustomed to farming. They also had the misfortune of landing at one of the worst possible sites for their new colony–a place offering only farmland of exceptionally poor quality even for rocky New England. They had to plant their crops on unterraced hills. Squanto knew how to bank the soil around the plants and lace it with fish so that the crops would grow even in this thin topsoil that eroded quickly.

The Pilgrims did in fact invite the Indians to their Thanksgiving feast.

It gets worse from there.

The Puritans already had in mind the conversion and “social uplift” of the Indians. When the inevitable initial armed encounters erupted, they got a scolding letter from their clergyman leader back in the Old World telling them they needed to attend to the conversion and salvation of the Indians. The learned divine was unimpressed with the Pilgrims’ claims that they were innocent victims of Indian attacks and was convinced that Whitey was somehow to blame.

And the Puritan colonists pursued the theological and civilizing mission of the Anglo-Saxons with significant success. Villages of what were called “Praying Indians” were set up replete with churches. And most of these Praying Indians remained loyal to the English in King Phillip’s War and betrayed their fellow red men by serving as scouts, spies, etc. for the White invaders.

There was much conflict among the English about the Praying Indians, with some of the colonists saying all the Indians should be gotten rid of and others strongly defending and protecting the Indians. This division among the Whites significantly impaired their organized collective response to the colony-wide Indian insurrection. Philbrick recounts glowingly the statements and moves of the pro-Indian colonists and clucks over the evil and vile racism of their opponents who wanted just to clear the Indians out in toto.

In the very infancy of the country we see that Whites were already bending over backwards to cater to non-Whites. One incident approvingly recounted by Philbrick is particularly revealing: a White man killed an Indian in what Philbrick says was a robbery of the Indian by the White. The two men encountered each other in the countryside. Philbrick alleges without particularly impressive evidence that the White man was just a robber, but the claims of several people to have witnessed the encounter seem pretty weak, and I did not see any strong proof that they were actually present in the immediate vicinity of the encounter.

The White man claimed he killed the Indian in self-defense.

The English tried him for murder. In obedience to their Anglo-Saxon precedents a jury of 12 White men were empaneled to hear the case along with 6 Indians chosen as kind of alternate jurors to consult with the Whites and to give their input!

The jurors listened to what seems to have been somewhat ambiguous evidence and unanimously found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and hanged him for killing the Indian!

It is possible to use this information to try to deprogram guilt-ridden Whites by showing that the fashionable accounts of evil White racism back in the Bay Colony are a pack of lies. I did this 3 days ago at the Decatur DeKalb YMCA. An American Indian was holding forth to an abashed, shamefaced circle of young university Whites about the racist nature of Thanksgiving, and how put upon he and other Indians felt about White people celebrating Thanksgiving. I don’t know how much I shook the faith of the young Whites in the cultural Bolshevism they had been taught. They fell silent and adopted flat affect while the Indian and I talked . . . or rather while I attempted to have a civil conversation and the Indian foamed at the mouth. (He really went through the roof when I recounted the jury trial and conviction story and asked him if the Cherokees had ever afforded this kind of kindness when they came to Georgia and exterminated their predecessors the Mound Builders.)

But this tactic–helpful as it is in the immediate circumstance of a debate in the Nautilus room at the Y–obscures the deeply disturbing greater story here.

It appears that the roots of White self-loathing and suicidal behavior run very, very deep. It is pleasant to believe that self-destructive liberal-left White behavior is something very recent but, alas, it seems to predate Coming of Age in Samoa and The American Dilemma by many, many centuries.

1910 – 1989

A highly revealing review of a recent biography of William Shockley includes many nuggets worth mining, such as this choice one:

What transformed the giant of the semiconductor revolution into an aging crank who insisted on taping every phone call to his home?

The reviewer poses his question rhetorically under the belief (unfortunately correct) that most readers — being their own commissars — will understand that the question is intended only to show that Shockley was a paranoid nut and not to provoke a thoughtful response.

But for those few readers who are not brain dead and who don’t give trusting obedience to Big Brother the question might provoke some thinking . . . some of what Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four called “thought crime.”

Could it be that maybe a clue as to what turned Shockley into a “crank” who taped conversations might be found in an interesting episode that may be recounted in the book being reviewed . . . or may not be, such things having a peculiar habit of disappearing into Orwell’s Memory Hole?

The episode involves an interview and subsequent analysis report for the Atlanta Journal Constitution which an African-American journalist (to use the politically correct term for “news-media-whore”) in the employ of the ethno-massochistic self-loathing WASP radical chic billionairess Anne Cox Chambers of Ohio (the She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed who owns most of the significant news media in my own State of Georgia) produced.

This article smoothly and confidently revealed to Anne’s devoted readership of liberal minded and progressive Georgians the “fact” that Shockley had told the reporter of his love for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Had it not been for the “crank’s” unfortunate habit of recording such conversations this ground-breaking piece of journalism might have even won for Ms. Chambers and her pet Negro a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for warning off White Americans from considering the arguments of such a “self-confessed Hitler worshiper” on the subject of IQ, heredity, and race.

Alas, Shockley had taped the interview.

And the tape revealed that Shockley had never made any such statement. Quite the contrary. What an unfortunate turn of events for the nationally admired Atlanta Journal Constitution, the paper that made such stellar contributions to American journalism and literature as the late Ralph McGill (who did get a Pulitzer) and Celestine Sibley!

Shockley sued the AJC for libel. He retained a tough, gritty, combative little Jew named Murray Silver to represent him. As surprising as it may be to anti-semites Silver aggressively and determinedly pursued Shockley’s case.

The AJC was confident that it had nothing to worry about.

After all, the Supreme Court years before back in the 1960s had emasculated the defamation laws for the virtually expressed motive of unleashing the media in its campaign of vilification against White Southerners during the Civil Rights Movement.

And not merely that.

The venue for the trial would be right here in Atlanta where billionairess Cox’s word is law, and all prudent mortals tremble and obey.

Surely the case would never make it to trial. Most compliant judges could be counted on to “do the right thing” and set aside the trifling details of the individual case before the court for the common good of racial progress and progressive intellectual thinking.

And in the unlikely event that the judge to whom the case would be assigned proved uncompliant Anne Cox Chambers and her pet Negro could almost certainly count on the jury doing the right thing. The White jurors would click their heels and obey. The black ones could be realistically expected to act on their own understandable prejudices.

No. Prospects looked good for a victory for “investigative journalists,” and Ms. Chambers could probably turn the lemon of the “crank’s” paranoid tape recording and lawsuit into the lemonade of congratulatory and admiring accounts in news media all over the country.

But the wicked are not always triumphant, and the righteous are not always defeated. Even in darkest America.

And so it proved in this episode.

Amazingly, the judge actually obeyed his oath. Based on the indisputable evidence that the AJC had maliciously lied about Shockley, the judge honestly applied the law — which even as redefined by the Supreme Court allowed extremely clear cases to go to the jury — and declined Ms. Chambers’ demands that Shockley’s case be dismissed by the Court. Had the Southern Poverty Law Center then been in full-steam operation, undoubtedly this impudent and recalcitrant judge could have been “linked” to Nazis, White supremacists, and Holocaust deniers.

After all, the SPLC was able to “link” Eric Rudolph (who is said to have been the murderous bomber of a homosexual club and an abortion clinic) with White supremacists and Holocaust deniers by the undeniable fact that from the day of his birth until little Eric’s 11th year he lived only 20 miles from where a known White supremacist and Holocaust denier lived. You can’t ask for better proof than that in the liberal intellectual’s epistemology. And surely the judge, living as he undoubtedly did within even closer proximity to numbers of thought criminals could be indisputably “linked” under the SPLC’s practice of geographic guilt by association.

Equally surprising:

The racially mixed jury unanimously found the AJC liable for maliciously defaming Shockley via its fabrication of the Hitler-loving “quotes” it had ascribed to Shockley.

In a sane society the facts of this case and the formal adjudication of the Cox media’s malicious lying by even Black jurors would have spelled the end of any credibility of the AJC whatsoever. But America is no such sane society. Southern progressives and liberal “intellectuals” found no reason to suspend their trance-like absorption of every word that proceeds from the pages of the AJC.

After all, the AJC getting caught with its hands in the cookie jar in defaming Shockley is only a trivial detail in the endless pursuit of racial justice and should not give people-of-good-will any reason for pause. No need to rethink anything here.

The AJC itself brushed off this crushing verdict by gloating that Shockley only got $1.00 in damages. The nation’s media — naturally sympathetic to the AJC — helped the Good Cause by either adopting the AJC’s interpretation that the measure of damages and not the ruling on maliciously lying was the significance of the case or not reporting the case at all.

And the case has been conveniently forgotten. The liberal Cox media lie factory has continued to hum along efficiently.

There are other details of the case which deserve comment, even if they will arm the SPLC with “proof” that Shockley was in fact a Nazi after all and was “linked” with people the SPLC itself has solemnly adjudicated and declared to be “haters.”

The AJC produced as an “expert witness” none other than Ashley Montague, the author of various United Nations declarations about racism.

In his posh and elegant English accent this bearer of the ancient aristocratic Anglo-Saxon (well, really Norman) name of Montague (complimented by the not quite so toney but still destinctly upper crust first name — what in British English is called very incorrectly one’s “Christian” name — of “Ashley” informed one and all that someone with the preposterous idea that IQ was determined by genes and that there was a hereditary basis for the difference in average Black and White IQs deservedly could be said to be a Nazi.

The lawyer representing the AJC concluded the direct examination of Montague at the close of the day.

The judge adjourned the case with cross-examination by Shockley’s attorney Murray Silver to commence the next day at 9:00 a.m.

Shockley and Silver retired to Silver’s office to plan the next day’s conduct of the trial.

Shockley told Silver that “Ashley” (to use the Christian name of the non-Christian) Montague had a long history as an apologist for Marxism and for the excesses of Marxists in their pursuit of the New Soviet Man who was to be created by obliterating racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions.

Alas, the books needed to enable Silver to prepare his cross-examination on this point were rare in free America and not-available-in-stores as the TV ads say . . . and not available in libraries either, since the ideological predecessors of the SPLC and its ilk had done such a superb job as nannies protecting the American people from information that is not deemed suitable or good for the children to have.

What do do?

Well, in evidence that God may very well exist it happened that an even more amazing against-all-odds occurrence took place.

Murray Silver’s secretary happened to be a young German woman I knew with whom I had had a long discussion about race and related matters.

She overheard the conversation between Shockley and his lawyer and popped her head into Silver’s conference room to tell him that she knew a nut who might have the very books they needed.

My phone rang and the voice on the other line identified himself as . . . Dr. William Shockley!

In minutes I was in my car with the proscribed books on my way to Silver’s office.

Silver’s cross-examination of Montague the morning of the next day was brilliant . . . and devastating.

Over furious objections by counsel for the AJC the disobedient judge required Ashley Montague to answer Silver’s questions.

The cross-examination revealed from the get-go that even the witness’ alleged name was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The aristocratic name of Ashley Montague was shown to have been purchased by the witness who was born Israel Ehrenberg.

Even the name was false. As false as the assumed upper class English accent.

And that was just the start of it.

Having reviewed the contents of the books given to him, Silver hammered away at Ehrenberg.

The expert who could by clairvoyance determine Naziphilia in Shockley turned out to be . . . a Stalin-lover who had praised the Great Leader for leading the world in the resolution of ethnic and racial prejudice.

A “decent” judge would have used his discretion to shield Ehrenberg-turned-Montague from such nasty McCarthyite tactics as actually confronting him with his pro-Stalinist writings. Nowadays, a judge who so wickedly failed to shield such a witness from such unworthy questions would get investigated by the SPLC at least and perhaps ordered by the appellate courts never to try a case like this again. (As happened in the case of Judge Acker in Alabama who failed to do right in Dees’ cases and who was ordered off any such cases by the federal appeals court. You have to remember that in the bad old days of the 1970s when Shockley’s case was tried we had not made as much “progress” as we have since then. And you can count on the liberal establishment bringing us even more such progress in the future.)

As Silver pounded and pounded away at the pompous “expert witness” the jury’s reaction was one at first of stunned disbelief and then of mirth.

Ehrenberg’s testimony turned out to be more suicidal for the AJC than homicidal for Shockley. The AJC would have had a better chance of winning its case had it not involved itself with a witness as flawed as Ehrenberg who failed to prove that Shockley’s ideas identified him as a Hitler lover but most definitely indicated that the AJC was in bed with an obvious Stalin lover. The AJC’s counsel was woefully unprepared for this development as sometimes happens with the liberal establishment’s trusting believers. He probably just never imagined that someone as esteemed and deserving of worshipful respect as Ashley Montague could be anything other than the saint he had been told he was by his priest, his sociology professor and his newspaper.

So now the horrible secret has been revealed!

Shockley — and his “traitorous” Jewish lawyer Silver — have been shown to have been “linked” after all.

What a pity that the AJC counsel was not able to show the jury where the books had come from! Obviously, in the epistemology of decent liberals like Morris Dees, Mark Potok and little “Mee Shell” Norris — who so fawningly interviews Potok for NPR to inform her listeners as to the latest persons and groups identified as “haters” by the SPLC — the fact that the books had been delivered from my hands trumps the facts contained in the books.

Now this omission can be remedied, and the SPLC can add this link to its data base and soon can broadcast it far and wide in its Intelligence Report.

The books are still in my library and bear a thank you note from Shockley above his autograph.

In the many decades I have toiled in the vineyards of American racial nationalism, I have heard very few solutions offered to our people. We have been long on problems and negativity, and very short on solutions. This is a failure of leadership.

Instead of real leadership, some in the movement have adopted what I call the “Ain’t it awful?” strategy, which is simply to report one racial outrage and horror after another, or spin out ever-worsening doomsday scenarios, always trying to outdo the one before. One day it is a horrible massacre in Wichita. The next it is a brutal killing in Knoxville. The purpose of reporting these horrors suppressed by the media is to wake our people up. And once they wake up, then they will do something.

Well, they are not going to do anything unless they are led to do something, unless concrete, workable solutions are suggested. That is what I want to talk about.

We must state what we want. We must offer a solution to this problem. What I want is a homeland for my race, on this continent, and homelands for our people in Europe, in our lands of ancestral origin.

I am not talking in terms of culture. Because, as Confucius said, the first step towards correcting problems in the state is to call things by their real name. “Cultural” conservatism, like “multiculturalism,” is a bad term, because it conceals what we are really talking about. Culture is important; religion is important. But the critical thing is race. I am talking about a racial state.

There is a poem entitled “An Old Woman of the Roads” by the Irish Catholic Republican poet Padraic Colum (1881 – 1972). This poem was written before Irish independence during the drive for land reform. Very few people in Ireland owned their own houses. The Irish Republicans wanted their people to have their own homes and not merely be tenants, paying money to predominantly Protestant landlords. But I read this poem as a metaphor for the suffering of our whole race.

O, To have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped up sods upon the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!

Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there’s never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high,
And I am praying Him night and day,
For a little house — a house of my own –
Out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.

Like the old woman of the roads, our race is longing, our American people are longing, for a home of their own. Is it extreme for us to ask for a homeland for our own people? Is this a hateful proposal, as those who desire our genocide tell us?

We need to understand that as far as the establishment that misrules our people all over the world is concerned, the only acceptable position on the future of the white race is genocide.

To those of you who think this is a nutty comment, I would suggest that you attend the next town hall meeting of your local Congressman or Senator. He need not be a liberal, not some crazed Methodist on Marx or a Marxist on meth, like Hillary Clinton. He could be a white Christian Southern conservative Republican Congressman. During the question and answer period, go to the microphone and say: “Congressman, I am concerned about the tide of non-white immigration, and the low white birthrate in this country and around world. I’m concerned that our race might become extinct.”

And just see the reaction of that Christian, Southern, conservative member of the establishment. See how you will be shouted down by his followers. See how the guard will be instructed to come and take you out of the room, because you have committed an act of hate by suggesting that your race should be anything other than exterminated.

It is considered per se immoral to advocate the survival of our race. We need to think about that when weighing the claims of our enemies to be the voices of love and tolerance.

The proposal of a homeland of our own is a modest proposal. It has been made several times in my lifetime. Two examples come immediately to mind. One is a book, The Ethnostate,[1] by the late, esteemed Wilmot Robertson, my great friend of many decades. The other was made by Michael Hart at the second American Renaissance conference.[2]

Why is this a modest proposal? Seventy percent of the people in this country are white Europeans. There is ample space for a generous partition and settlement with the other races in our society, in which they can be given homelands capable of a very comfortable standard of living, if they can sustain it. We wish them well, that they might sustain it.

They themselves tell us, in the politically correct version of history, that their involvement with us has been an unbroken saga of suffering at our hands. Surely they too should wish a divorce.

This sort of homeland existed within living memory. This is not something that you have to go back to the time of the Franks to find. Why is it unthinkable for white Europeans to have a homeland? Yet it is considered unthinkable in our society.

I am sure many of you remember the horrifying statement made by the American general Wesley Clark, in the course of our attack upon Serbia, a nation that has never done us any harm. Clark stated on CNN on April 24, 1999:  ”Let’s not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a nineteenth-century idea, and we are trying to transition into the twenty-first century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”

This is the policy of our American government. And, like me, I’m sure it makes you ashamed to be an American.

Yet those who misrule us are not consistently against such proposals. I can think of two notable exceptions, one quite recent, and one of longer standing.

The most recent example is that the American government helped to birth a Muslim state of two million people in the middle of the Balkans. I am referring to Kosovo.

There was no outcry by the American establishment that it was unthinkable for Kosovar Muslims to have their own state. No, there was no outcry at all. Instead, the United States hastened to recognize them, and to pressure European nations to recognize them.

We are not talking about two hundred million European Americans, on a continent with ample space to settle generously with other people. Kosovo is an enclave of two million. But our establishment, which would have moral conniption fits about my modest proposal, had no difficulty at all in supporting Kosovo’s independence.

But it didn’t take the establishment long to find its bearings again. Because when the predominantly Christian area of northern Kosovo proposed yet another secession, so that they could join Serbia, our President and our Secretary of State immediately made it known that we cannot tolerate partitions like this.

The other example, a stunning and inspiring example of racial idealism, is the Zionist movement. When Theodor Herzl proposed the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people, as a solution to the tensions of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, there was virtually no Jewish presence in Palestine.

There had been no Jewish state since the time of Titus, and even before, really since before the birth of Christ. There was already a population in place, which would have to be expelled to create this state. But within fifty years the state of Israel came into being. A Jewish state that had been gone for two millennia was recreated. A dead classical language was resurrected and made the official language of a modern society. Israel was recognized by the United Nations and world-wide. Support for Israel and acceptance of Israel’s right to exist are now absolute necessities for any politician or political movement to succeed in the European world today.

But our proposal is far more moderate than the Zionist project. We do not propose the conquest and colonization of a small country belonging to another people. We are proposing the separation of races that already occupy this land, and the partition of a territory so vast that we can afford to be generous and fair to the other races who occupy it. We are not proposing a form of society that has been unknown for two thousand years, but one that has existed within living memory.

Our proposal of an ethnostate, along the lines suggested by Wilmot Robertson and Michael Hart, is sensible. It is fair. It is just. And it is moderate. It will enable the different races to live side by side on this continent in peace.

As we know, the mixing of peoples does not bring greater brotherhood and love. As seen in Lebanon and Sri Lanka and all around the world, the greater the diversity, the greater the tension and hatred. Therefore, wise men making decisions for the peace and welfare of the world will work to limit and diminish the mixing of peoples that leads to tragedies like we see in Sri Lanka.

So how do we bring this modest proposal about? How do we create our homeland? I can deal here only with the first step. It is perhaps the hardest step, although it is also something we can all do right away, for both the problem and the solution lie within each individual. It is a matter of morale: we have to believe that victory is really possible.

There is always a debate between pessimism and optimism. I have to confess that I am genetically predisposed to pessimism and depression. Not being a recovering liberal like Jared Taylor, or a jolly Englishman like Michael Walker, it is easy for me to be pessimistic. But I would suggest to you that, contrary to Spengler, it is pessimism, not optimism, that is cowardice.

You have all heard T. S. Eliot’s famous lines from “The Hollow Men”:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Well I would prefer to end this talk on an entirely different tone, set by another great literary light, William Faulkner, the product of what is to the liberal mind, darkest Mississippi, the state that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, as all the glitterati like to giggle to each other at their cocktail parties.

When Faulkner was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, times were grim. It was the time of the Korean War, the nuclear arms race, and Stalin’s consolidation of power in Eastern Europe. In those dark times, Faulkner made a very short and memorable speech of acceptance, which concluded as follows:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Times are even darker today. We need to steel ourselves against pessimism, even as things are going against us. We need to embrace optimism as the course of the courageous man. We need to say, paraphrasing Faulkner:

We believe that our race will not merely endure, it will prevail. It is immortal, not because our race alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because it has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. Our duty is to speak and write about these things. It is our privilege to help our race endure by lifting its heart, by reminding it of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our race’s past. Our voice need not merely be the record of our race, it can be one of its props, the pillars to help our race endure and prevail.

I believe no matter how dark this night is, no matter how much we are bullied and threatened, no matter how much we feel that we are marginalized, no matter how much we see that the resources available to our enemies who desire the extinction of our race exceed our own, that our race will not end with a whimper. It will not end, but will triumph.

[2] Michael H. Hart, “Racial Partition of the United States,” in Jared Taylor, ed., The Real American Dilemma (Oakton, Va.: New Century Books, 1998), 107-18.

These two fratricidal wars — like the original ones among the Greeks of Antiquity — pretty much accomplished the complete and possibly fatal wreck of our race and civilization.

Patch survived a horrific service in the trenches of Flanders as a machine gunner in which he suffered severe wounds.

For most of his life he was reticent about the War and his service in it.

However, after his 100th birthday Patch began speaking out against the War and the hatreds it engendered.

His funeral was attended by thousands of mourners led by the Duchess of Cornwall.

His coffin, draped with a Union Jack, was carried into the 13th century Wells Cathedral 140 miles west of London by soldiers of The Rifles, the successor to Patch’s unit the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry.  Honorary pallbearers included 2 from France, 2 from Belgium, and 2 German soldiers in full uniform.

Patch would have heartily approved of the inclusion of the Germans.  On the 90th anniversary of the end of the War last November, he attended the remembrance service in London at which his message was “Remember the Germans.”

A German diplomat was a scripture reader at the Anglican service.

It is unfortunate that the service included the Pete Seeger ballad “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”

A much more appropriate pacifist song would have been Eric Bogle’s “The Green Fields of France” not only because it was written by a Scot but also because it is directed to World War I and is a much better song with more thoughtful lyrics and a better tune.

“The Green Fields of France”
Eric Bogle

Well how do you do, Private William McBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your grave side?
A rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone that you were only 19
when you joined the glorious fallen in 1916.
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, William McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they beat the drum slowly?
did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing ‘The Last Post’ in chorus?
Did the pipes play ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
And though you died back in 1916
To that loyal heart are you always 19.
Or are you just a stranger without even a name
Forever enclosed behind some glass-pane
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they beat the drum slowly?
did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing ‘The Last Post’ in chorus?
Did the pipes play ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’?

Well the sun it shines down on these green fields of France,
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance.
The trenches are vanished now under the plough
No gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it is still No Man’s Land
And the countless white crosses in mute witness stand.
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that was butchered and downed.

Did they beat the drum slowly?
did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing ‘The Last Post’ in chorus?
Did the pipes play ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’?

And I can’t help but wonder now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe them that this war would end war?
But the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame –
The killing, the dying — it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they beat the drum slowly?
did they sound the pipe lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?
Did the bugle sing ‘The Last Post’ in chorus?
Did the pipes play ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’?

Given that Bogle’s ballad mocks Wilsonian and British liberal manic fantasies about “War to End War,” it is unsurprising that “The Green Fields of France” is generally unfamiliar to Americans and shunned by American leftists and pacifists.  Such lyrics are blasphemies against the liberal establishment’s Holy Trinity of Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, and American liberals are notoriously intolerant of secular atheists who mock their gods.

Our race has many strengths and many weaknesses.

One of those weaknesses is its love of family quarrels and fights.  White Christian Europeans just love to fight each other.  It is a sublimated subconscious form of racism, that causes whites to believe that only a victory over a kindred white nation is worthy of pride.

All over Britain today one sees the innumerable monuments commemorating victories over other whites.  Almost nowhere does one see a monument commemorating a victory over Sikhs, Hindus, Zulus, etc.

While I am not a pacifist as Patch became, I have to confess that I read history in vain to find any significant war America or any other European nation has fought since the Mexican American War of 1848 that did any good for our race.

Ethnomasochists, however, such as Tom Brokaw with his “Greatest Generation” feel otherwise.

Only wars against whites are good wars.

Globotrash: Mary Robinson and her preferred constituency

A similar example is the former President of the Republic of Ireland Mary Robinson who will be awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on August 12th.

It is illustrative of the irrelevance of White European Americans in our society that the only objection to bestowing this honor upon Robinson comes from Jewish groups who complain that she showed an “anti-Israel bias” because she did not do enough to shut down anti-Zionist remarks at  the UN Anti-racism Conference in Durban, South Africa.

These organizations (Anti-Defamation of B’nai Brith and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) are not buying Ms. Robinson’s pleas that she did all she could, that she has been a critic of Palestinians and has a life long record of devotion to the fight against anti-Semitism.  She did not do enough.  Hence, she should not get the prize.

These concerns are being raised by members of the “American” Congress such as Representatives Eliot L. Engel of New York and Shelley Berkley of Nevada.

While even a hint of anti-Zionism might disqualify Robinson from winning America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, apparently her explicit anti-Americanism does not.

Plaque commemorating the San Patricios, San Jacinto plaza, Mexico City.

For instance, in September of 1997, both Mary Robinson (in Dublin) and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo (in Mexico City) marked the 150th anniversary of the end of the Mexican American War by honoring the San Patricio Brigade (“Saint Patrick’s Brigade”), a unit formed by Irish-American deserters who fought for the Mexicans against their former comrades in arms.

At the ceremony President Robinson spoke of standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with Mexicans against a common enemy: the Anglo-Saxons of Great Britain and their Anglo relatives in the United States.

Her remarks went almost completely unnoticed by the white-hating American media at the time and are of no concern today now that her “enemies” are in the process of presenting her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The death of the last British soldier in World War I is a time for us to reflect and to resolve that we will do our utmost for what so desperately needs to be done.

Our utmost to foster a sense of our common heritage as European whites who need to remember as our forefathers did in medieval times that there is an overarching shared race and culture of all Europeans that binds us to each other even as we remain separate and proud members of different white nations.

Our utmost to insure that the racial family feuds fanned and exploited by our enemy and by self-loathing whites like Brokaw and Robinson are healed.

Our utmost to refute and put to rest inflammatory lies intended to accentuate and preserve such family feuds.

Our utmost to prevent any more brother wars between our kindred nations.

Let us all resolve and hope that eventually we will cease to endure a dysfunctional white racial family and that we can be members of a normal, functional racial family once more.

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final online installment of this essay, which originally appeared in Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here. Read part I here. Read part II here.

What do the neo-Confederates cite as evidence for their case?

Their arguments against race and slavery as primary motivations for Southern secession rely on a potpourri of quotes from various Southern leaders that blacks should be enrolled as soldiers, that the South should even consider freeing the slaves if that would induce Britain to intervene.

The neo-Confederates ignore two apparent, and (for them) most unpleasant facts about their little arsenal of quotations. First, the statements are almost exclusively drawn from the very last months of the war, when defeat was staring the South in the face and any straw for survival had to be seized.

On August 21, 1862, President Davis denounced Union Generals David Hunter and John Phelps for stating their intentions to enlist blacks into the Union Army. Davis characterized Hunter and Phelps as “outlaws” and stated they were to be held “for execution as felons at such time and place as the President shall order.”[1] It is hard to believe that Davis favored enrollment of blacks in the Confederate Army if he was willing to execute federal officers who enlisted blacks as soldiers.

It was not until September 12, 1864 (40 months after Fort Sumter and less than seven months before the surrender at Appomattox), that Lee wrote to Davis advising that due to the extremities of the situation blacks should be used in support services in the Confederate Army so as to free whites for combat.[2]

It was not until November 7, 1864, that Davis endorsed the purchase of blacks for employment in the Confederate Army, but not as soldiers unless in the last extremity.[3]

It was not until March 13, 1865, less than a month before Appomattox, that the Confederate Congress in secret session, over vehement opposition and by a one-vote margin, approved the recruitment of blacks as soldiers.[4]

Second, even in those dire circumstances, as late as 1865, there are many statements from Southern leaders that black soldiers should not be permitted. For example, Howell Cobb of Georgia in the Confederate Congress, in the debate in 1865 on allowing blacks to serve as soldiers, characterized the proposal as the “beginning of the end of our revolution.”[5]

Despite the historical record that the South only reluctantly and at a very late date made tentative efforts to enroll black soldiers, the neo-Confederates, undeterred, claim that large numbers of blacks served as soldiers in the Confederate Army. Their sources of evidence are few. They frequently excuse the lack of evidence by citing National Park Service historian Edward Bearrs, who said, “I don’t want to call it a conspiracy to ignore the role of Blacks, both above and below the Mason-Dixon line, but it was definitely a tendency that began around 1910.”[6]

What Bearrs probably meant was that the role of minorities has been excised from history, presumably by “racist” whites bent on stealing their history from them—a fairly typical leftist claim. The neo-Confederates have twisted this into an explanation for the paucity of evidence to support their claims of large-scale black participation in the Confederacy.[7] They fail, however, to address the fact that Bearrs has expressed an opinion that only a few dozen, or at most, a few hundred blacks ever served in the Confederate Armed forces.

In contrast, 200,000 blacks are known to have served in the Union forces. An interesting subject of study would be the behavior of these black troops toward Southern white people. Such an investigation would not interest neo-Confederates because they are not interested in anything that might be considered “racist” research. One suspects, however, that research into the behavior of these troops would probably demonstrate the perspicacity of President Davis and other Southerners who were outraged by the use of these slave volunteers for the Union.

One example is what has been characterized as “the famous Marianna” incident in Florida—which is no longer famous at all. I have met Southerners who were born and reared in Marianna, Florida, who had never heard of it. On September 25, 1864, federal forces attacked the little village of Marianna. They were resisted by a home guard militia unit consisting of very young teenaged boys and a few elderly men, whom they easily defeated. The federal forces consisted of a battalion of Maine cavalry, the Thirteenth Massachusetts Volunteers, and two companies of what the Southerners termed “ferocious Louisiana negroes.”

The black Union volunteers followed up their victory by throwing the wounded Confederate teenage boys into a church and burning them alive. The white federal soldiers from Massachusetts intervened to try to stop the massacre of surrendered Confederates. The behavior of these black Unionist troops shows that many Southern blacks did not have the same love for their masters and the South that neo-Confederates such as Charles Kelley Barrow, James Ronald Kennedy, and Walter Donald Kennedy like to relate to their avid fans.[8]

The evidence advanced by the neo-Confederates to support the contention that significant numbers of blacks served in the Confederate forces consists of a handful of bits and pieces of quotations that are improbable and suspect. Their trump card is a quotation from a Dr. Lewis Steiner, chief of the Union Sanitary Commission, who was in Frederick, Maryland, during its occupation by Stonewall Jackson.

Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number [Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. . . . and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army.[9]

Steiner’s comments about 3,000 black soldiers he claims to have observed in Stonewall Jackson’s forces are remarkable in many ways. Most remarkable is the fact that he alone observed this astonishing matter. No one else is recorded as having shared his discovery. Thousands and tens of thousands of people in Maryland observed the Confederate forces. No one else saw the black soldiers. There were foreign observers with the Confederate forces. None of them observed the black Confederate soldiers either. No pictures of the black Confederates in Jackson’s forces seem to have survived.

They are unmentioned in the letters of Confederate soldiers.

None of them ever seems to have been captured by the federal forces. Indeed, after the defeat at Appomattox the North paroled 28,231 Confederate soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia. The records noted the soldiers’ race. According to the Appomattox parole records maintained by the National Parks Service, exactly 35 blacks are identified as soldiers in the Confederate Army; not one is in a combat position.

Also unexplained is how Jackson came to enroll so many black soldiers when the policies of the civilian administration did not permit it. Do the neo-Confederates believe Stonewall Jackson secretly defied and violated his orders?

Georgia’s Congressman Howell Cobb was serving with Jackson’s forces when they were in Frederick, Maryland. Over two years later, in February 1865, Cobb was vehemently opposing the proposal to allow the enrollment of black soldiers, characterizing the proposal as “the end of our revolution.” One has to ask why Howell Cobb failed to notice the thousands of blacks serving with Jackson’s corps, or to address Stonewall Jackson’s defiance of his superiors’ policies.

Despite all these improbabilities, the neo-Confederates have clutched Steiner to their bosoms as their star witness. They characterize him as a witness of the utmost credibility. When one reads the report of Lewis H. Steiner (available on the internet at http://www.edinborough.com/Learn/cw_nurses/Steiner.PDF), however, other serious problems arise as to his credibility, problems that must surely discomfit the neo-Confederates.

Steiner relates numerous farfetched stories about the Southern soldiers. He accuses an officer in Jackson’s corps of grossly insulting young Unionist ladies in Frederick by handing them a gift of a ring that he told them he had carved from the bone of a dead Yankee. Only the quick and gallant action of a Yankee gentleman who snatched away this barbaric relic saved the young women from the alleged brutality and rudeness of this Southern officer. Steiner accuses Southern soldiers of not bearing themselves with fortitude (i.e., of unmanliness). He recounts with relish a story of a stalwart, clever Union lad who tricks a stupid, gullible Southerner into buying a broken- down horse near death. He characterizes the behavior of Jackson’s troops in Frederick as a “reign of terror,” although he concedes that no personal violence was done to civilians.

Steiner seems also to have been the source of the false information given to the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier about the alleged Barbara Frietchie incident (“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag!”). Whittier, who was embarrassed when the tear-jerking story was exposed as humbug, defended himself by saying he had written the poem in good faith based upon what he had been told by a doctor in Frederick, Maryland. Steiner wrote of two women in his report, one elderly, the other the wife of a Unionist, who confronted the Rebels with “their country’s flag.” The Frietchie falsehood borders on being a pastiche of these two stories.

Steiner was also a staunch abolitionist. He had a purpose in making the claim that blacks were serving as soldiers in the Confederate Army. That purpose is suggested by the concluding sentence in the paragraph about the 3,000 black soldiers: “The fact was patent, and rather interesting when considered in connection with the horror rebels express at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defense.”

Steiner and escaped slave Frederick Douglass were both supporters of enrolling black soldiers into the Union ranks. Suggesting, as both Steiner and Douglass did, that the South was using blacks as soldiers was a means of inducing reluctant conservative Northerners to go along with the proposal.

Enough has been said to deflate the myth of Confederate political correctness and multiculturalism. What are we to make of neo-Confederate Southerners who so frantically adhere to these myths?

I believe they must be viewed as nothing less than wounded victims of the incessant psychological warfare waged not merely against Southerners, but against white Americans in general. Like Patty Hearst and other kidnapping victims, the neo-Confederates have come to identify with their abusers. They beg, “Please don’t hurt me anymore.” They desperately seek forgiveness and inclusion.

Alas, their enemies, no matter how gratified they may be to see the descendants of Confederate veterans debasing themselves by embracing the ideology of the most extreme New England abolitionists, have no intention of sitting down at the table of brotherhood with white Southerners who seek to preserve their heritage.

They intend to diabolize the South and ultimately to destroy it, all in the name of “love.”

Neo-Confederates are not the only casualties of the psychological hate war against whites in America. Huge numbers of other victims are found in all areas of our country. This is so because the liberal/Marxist coalition and its minority racist allies, while they have a special hate for the South as the last region of the country populated by the founding British stock and as the embodiment of all that they despise and detest, hate the rest of white America with only slightly less intensity. The 500th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus demonstrated this as the media and universities erupted into a frenzy of denunciation of the European colonization of the New World. Their view in essence, is that white America was a mistake, a mistake that needs urgently to be corrected.

Race, therefore, is no longer a peculiar Southern problem. It is a national problem. As Jared Taylor has written, paraphrasing Gunnar Myrdal, it is the “real American dilemma.”

The South has a wealth of experience and wisdom to offer the beleaguered whites of America. The white community in the South is still more of a cohesive whole than those of the North and West of the United States. The South needs the help of sympathetic whites throughout the nation, but it also has much help to offer white Americans in other regions.

Contrary to the fantastic conceptions of neo-Confederates, white Southerners have more in common with white Northerners than they do with black Southerners. This is not to minimize the importance of the fact that the South is still a separate cultural, linguistic, and to some extent ethnic community with values and concerns distinct from the rest of the white community in America.

Nor can Northern whites remain indifferent to the psychological “hate” campaign being waged against Southern whites. As shown by the vilification of Columbus, minority hatred is not focused exclusively on Southern whites. In resisting this minority aggression a Southerner who has been indoctrinated with hatred and guilt for his own heritage will not be a reliable ally to Northern whites.

There can be no geographic solution to an ethnic problem. A demographic tsunami is bearing down upon the South, and the nation as a whole. Thanks to the current policy of colonizing America with non-white Third World immigrants, the prospect of our becoming a minority in our own lands is no longer that distant. The hugely disproportionate birthrate of whites and blacks in the South, by itself, would reduce whites to a minority in many Southern states in only two or three generations. And if blacks and other non-whites become the majority, the Confederate Battle Flag, Confederate monuments, and all the symbols and shrines revered by true Southerners will come down. No amount of truckling by wild exaggerations of black soldiers in the Confederate Army, no amount of flattery, no amount of pleading “we just want to be friends” could change that.

The last half of the twentieth century was a discouraging time for those who desire to see the preservation and survival of our race. At times it seems as if resistance is futile. There is nothing more demoralizing to our race than the spectacle of those who, like the neo-Confederates, are ashamed to fight for its survival and who, indeed, accept the enemy propaganda that anyone who desires the survival of the white race is immoral.

However dark the present situation may be, I cannot believe that 100 million British Americans and their cousins from other European countries are simply going to walk off the stage of history. I believe, as Rhett Butler said of the retreating Confederates from Atlanta, that they will still turn and make a stand. And when they do, Southerners who still hold the faith and beliefs of Lee and Davis will be there with them in establishing a nation on this continent where the white European race may safely abide.

Editor’s Note: This essay, which will appear online in three parts, is from Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here. Read part I here.

Contrary to the contentions of the neo-Confederates, race, i.e. slavery, was the primary cause of both secession and the ensuing war. States’ rights played a very secondary role at all in secession itself. A moment’s reflection should reveal the foolishness of the idea that issue of a state’s right to secede led to secession. If our ancestors seceded just to prove a point, that states’ rights gave them the right to secede, they would certainly have been foolish, trivial, self-destructive, and petty in the extreme.

Indeed, history reveals the uncomfortable fact that the South was quite happy with a strong central government and prepared to use that government’s powers so long as the government was the protector and defender of the institution of slavery. Right down to the collapse of the Union, Southerners, who had dominated the federal government until Lincoln’s election, had availed themselves of federal power to protect slavery.

Northern states, invoking doctrines of interposition and states’ rights, passed “personal liberty laws” to thwart the federal Fugitive Slave Law. These laws erected legal barriers to Southern slave owners trying to recover their runaway slaves, and to federal agents, employees, and officials who tried to implement the Fugitive Slave Law.

Southerners were rightly enraged at this Northern experiment in resisting federal power. Indeed, Southern anger at the refusal of the Northern states to comply with federal law figures prominently in the debates on secession in the crisis following Lincoln’s victory.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, younger brother of the famous Howell Cobb who was to serve in the Confederate Congress, gave his secessionist speech to the Georgia legislature on November 12, 1860. He condemned the personal liberty laws, the effort of Northern states, invoking states’ rights, to thwart the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Law.

Cobb went so far as to say, “so long as the ‘Personal Liberty Bills’ disgrace the Statute Books of these [the Northern] States, their electoral votes should not be counted in the Electoral College.”[1]

States’ rights and interposition were not to Southerners’ tastes when such doctrines were invoked to interfere with federal law supporting slavery. The Georgia act of secession noted disapprovingly the action of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, which had rendered a decision upholding the idea that the Wisconsin legislature could nullify the Fugitive Slave Act.

Nor were ideas of limited government and personal liberties any bar to the use of government power to support slavery and keep blacks down. In 1835 President Andrew Jackson proposed a federal ban prohibiting the mailing of abolitionist propaganda in the mails. Many Southern leaders embraced this idea. While the proposed law did not pass, in part because of Senator John C. Calhoun’s opposition on correct constitutional grounds, an understanding was reached that effectively accomplished the goal. Southern postmasters were allowed to refuse to deliver abolitionist materials to the addressees.[2]

Likewise, when the Confederate Constitutional Convention met, the resulting Confederate Constitution subordinated the rights of the states to issues involving slavery.

As Professor Don E. Fehrenbacher of Stanford University commented, “With Lincoln’s election the national government shifted from one which had enforced the rights of slave owners to one which would oppose those rights. Southerners came to the conclusion that they needed another national government.”[3]

While the new national government that Southerners created enshrined many principles of states’ rights, the issue of race (slavery) trumped philosophies of decentralized government. Thus, the Confederate Constitution guaranteed rights of slaveholders in the territories and effectively made it illegal for a state to abolish slavery by guaranteeing it “in any of the States or Territories” and prohibited the Confederate Congress from ever passing legislation “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”[4]

Nor were the framers of the Confederate Constitution as squeamish in talking about slavery and the Negro as the Founding Fathers had been in Philadelphia in 1789, the term “negro slavery” being used repeatedly in contrast with the euphemisms employed in the US Constitution.

As Fehrenbacher (quoting historian Arthur Bestor) observed:

[T]he new Constitution was hardly dedicated to states rights. Instead, at least as far as the institution of slavery was concerned, “the Confederacy was a unitary, consolidated, national state, denying to each one of its allegedly sovereign members any sort of local autonomy with respect to this particular one among its domestic institutions.”[5]

All of this was, of course, completely in keeping with the sentiments and beliefs of white Southerners during and after the secession crisis, as exemplified in the famous speech of Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in Savannah shortly after the founding of the new Confederate government. Stephens praised the new constitution for having clarified “the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization” and stated that in contrast with the mistaken assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid. Its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”[6]

Stephens’ “corner-stone” speech is but the tip of a deadly iceberg for neo-Confederate Southerners that sinks their myth of an egalitarian, multicultural Confederacy. The most cursory research into the statements of Southern secessionists uncovers a plethora of “racist” remarks and positions that decisively confirms that the great motivating issue behind the decision to leave the Union was race.

Race was also a major consideration for the president of the Confederacy and one of its major theoreticians, Jefferson Davis. In May 1860, well before the secession crisis began, Davis introduced in the US Senate a series of seven resolutions expressing principles he regarded as essential for the preservation of the Union. While the first cited the vital importance of states’ rights, the second insisted:

That negro slavery, as it exists in fifteen states of this Union, composes an important portion of their domestic institutions, inherited from their ancestors, and existing at the adoption of the Constitution, by which it is recognized as constituting an important element in the apportionment of power among the states, and that no change of opinion or feeling on the part of the non-slaveholding states of the Union, in relation to this institution, can justify them, or their citizens, in open or covert attacks thereon, with a view to its overthrow; and that all such attacks are in manifest violation of the mutual and solemn pledge to protect and defend each other given by the states respectively on entering into the constitutional compact which formed the Union, and are a manifest breach of faith, and a violation of the most solemn obligations.

When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Davis issued his own response to it, which he later reprinted in his defense of the Confederacy:

We may well leave it to the instinct of that common humanity, which a beneficent Creator has implanted in the breasts of our fellow‑men of all countries, to pass judgment on a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race—peaceful, contented laborers in their sphere—are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters by the insidious recommendation “to abstain from violence, unless in necessary self‑defense.”[7]

Davis expanded on his views of Negroes as “an inferior race” in discussing Lincoln’s policy of arming black soldiers in the Union army:

Let the reader pause for a moment and look calmly at the facts presented in this statement. The forefathers of these negro soldiers were gathered from the torrid plains and malarial swamps of inhospitable Africa. Generally they were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, they were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity. There, put to servitude, they were trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization; they increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches.[8]

The views of the major leaders of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Alexander H. Stephens—on race and slavery are therefore perfectly clear.

Shall we glance at a sampling of additional passages from the acts and ordinances of secession themselves, a small sampling, but more than sufficient to lay to rest any credibility of the neo-Confederate “multiracialism and magnolias” myth of Southern history?

South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession focuses its attention on the failure of the Northern states to adhere to their constitutional obligation to protect property in slaves), quoting Article IV of the U. S. Constitution, which required non-slaveholding states to return slaves to their owners.

Georgia, the fourth state to secede, imitated the framers of the Declaration of Independence in enumerating the grievances that had impelled the delegates to vote for secession. The very first grievance is stated as follows: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” The statement continues in the next paragraph to explicitly condemn “. . . Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa . . .” because “. . . they have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them” [emphasis added]. This is about as clear a repudiation of the states’ rights doctrine of nullification as one could imagine. Surely it tells us all we need to know to judge the relative weight of racial concerns as opposed to sentiments of decentralized government motivating the state of Georgia to leave the Union.

The Act of Secession of Texas starts out: “Whereas, the recent developments in Federal affairs make it evident that the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interests and property of the people of Texas, and her sister slave-holding States . . . .” It goes on to condemn the North for (among many other things): “proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.”

The Secession Act concludes on the following note: “in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator . . . while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.”

After the formation of the new Confederate government, the Deep South states sent spokesmen to Virginia and other Middle and Upper South states to urge them to follow their example and leave the Union. In the speeches and statements made by these spokesmen (called “commissioners” by the states that dispatched them) the issues of race and slavery appear over and over again; there is scarcely a peep about tariffs or other issues.

Commissioners from Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina spoke to an immense crowd gathered at Mechanics’ Institute Hall in Richmond, Virginia, to speak on behalf of their respective states and to induce Virginia to secede.

What did they say?

Speaking for Mississippi, Fulton Anderson warned the Virginians that the Republican Party was “founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery.” The Lincoln government sought “the ultimate extinction of slavery, and the degradation of the Southern people.” Northerners were committed to “a holy crusade for our benefit in seeking the destruction of that institution [slavery] which…lies at the very foundation of our social and political fabric.”[9]

Henry L. Benning, for Georgia: “By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand that?” Benning warned that the abolitionists and their program of freeing the slaves and granting them rights would lead to a result in which “We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”[10]

Finally, John Smith Preston for South Carolina implored Virginians to secede by telling them, “For fully thirty years or more, the people of the Northern States have assailed the institution of African slavery.” He cited the example of John Brown to show correctly enough that the abolitionist fanatics were working to abolish slavery by killing the slaveholders. “There could be no doubt that the conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death.” Lincoln’s election he considered to be a decree of annihilation for the white people of the South.[11]

Surely it would appear to any reasonable mind that the quotations and facts set out above conclusively refute the improbable notion that the Confederacy was not supportive of explicit racial consciousness and solidarity in the sense that it believed in and was deeply committed to the preservation of the white race, its dominance, and its civilization in the South.

Editor’s Note: This essay, which will appear online in three parts, is from Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here.

“Across our path stands the South with a flaming sword”—W. E. B. Dubois

Seven weeks after the election of 1856, in which the Republican Party offered its first candidate for the US presidency, Robert E. Lee expressed his views on the slavery issue in a letter to his wife:

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former.[1] [Emphasis added.]

Lee’s views are the most sensible opinion on the slavery issue for a number of reasons. His statement recognizes that what is morally and politically acceptable in one age changes over time and that slavery had become an undesirable institution. Lee thus refrains from joining in the shrill, self-righteous, judgmental denunciation of the past, which is the stock in trade of modern political correctness. He is sympathetic, to some degree even “strongly,” with an alien race.

What makes Lee’s statement most noteworthy in our own era, however, is that, while he sympathizes with the black race, he quite sensibly states that his first and foremost concern in weighing the merits of slavery is whether it is good for white people.

Today, the media would annihilate anyone making such a remark. Such is the strength of the liberal/Marxist grip on our society, so narrow are the parameters of permissible public discussion in modern, “free” America, that no matter of public policy may be evaluated on the basis of whether it is good for or harmful to white people.

Surely, thoughtful people must concede that it is a remarkable state of affairs when it is impermissible and even immoral to consider the interests of the founding stock, the central core of the nation, which even now constitutes a huge majority of the population, in formulating public policy. Nor does this extraordinary achievement of the left in fettering public debate on racial issues stop at the Mason-Dixon line. It is present throughout the South. Even more amazing, it is found—and to a huge degree—among the very elements of the South who claim to be conscious, unreconstructed Southerners.

If Lee were to return today and make his remarks in a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans or similar organizations, he would meet with, at best, a very chilly reception. It is almost certain that his views would be publicly repudiated by persons in leadership positions. Indeed, it is quite conceivable that someone holding the racial views of Lee, Jefferson Davis, or Alexander H. Stephens would be requested to leave or even be formally expelled from most Southern heritage organizations. Such is the extent to which public discussion of the race issue has been suppressed in our country and even in our region.

The desperate desire to avoid dealing openly, honestly and frankly with racial issues has given rise to a virtual cottage industry of rewriting and inventing a fictitious history of the South and race relations. Neo-Confederates are determined to sanitize the history of the Confederacy and of the South in general by depicting their forebears as conforming to modern liberal standards of racial equality. In books, in periodicals, in speeches, on the Internet, and elsewhere a bowdlerized, censored, and distorted history of race and race relations in the South is peddled, and peddled, alas, to an eager audience. Wild statements are made about the role of blacks in the Confederacy, for example the claim of neo-Confederate J. H. Segars that by the “the most conservative estimates . . . 50,000 to 60,000” blacks served in Confederate units.[2]

Many Southerners in the heritage movement itself appear to be so psychologically whipped by the incessant barrage of racial hate propaganda aimed at them and at whites in the nation as a whole that they believe, in stark contrast to Lee’s primary focus on his own people, that the Confederacy can only be justified by showing that it was somehow beneficial to or supported by blacks, Jews, Indians, or Hispanics. It is irrelevant or even morally repugnant to such people to consider what role whites played in the Confederacy or whether the Confederacy was good for white people.

As will be shown later in this essay, the arguments and authorities advanced by the neo-Confederates are contrary to historical fact and are easily refuted. As unpleasant for them as it may be to accept, the truth is that the history of the South has been significantly dominated and shaped by the struggle between the two principal races virtually from the time that a Dutch ship of unknown name landed the first African slaves at Jamestown, Virginia, to the present hour.

That this has been warp and woof of Southern history is not deplorable. As Southern historian U. B. Phillips wrote in 1928, the South:

is a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country. The consciousness of a function in these premises, whether expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician’s quietude, is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.[3]

That this is so is not proof, as Marxist and liberal egalitarians would claim, of the “burden” of Southern history or the wickedness and immorality of the white South. It is simply the normal state of human affairs. History shows that wherever two distinct and dissimilar people with different interests and destinies occupy the same turf, they contend with each other and vie with each other for control of it. This was true of Spain during the Middle Ages, when Christian Europeans and Moslem Moors fought each other to determine whether Spain would be European and Christian or Moorish and Mohammedan. The same is still true today. Wherever one looks—whether in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, South Africa, or elsewhere—diversity, rather than producing human happiness and peace, is almost invariably the cause of antagonism, struggle, upheaval, and violence. Only in the silly “let’s pretend” and “make-believe” world of the liberal/Marxist is this not so.

Like Lee, I am primarily interested in the well-being of my own race. This does not necessarily mean that I hate other racial groups. However, it does mean that I wish my own race to be preeminent, for the society in which I live to be organized and operated primarily for my own race’s best interests. Such an attitude is permitted, tolerated, and even encouraged and fomented today in America . . . for blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, Indians, and others. In short, for every single group . . . except whites.

It is not remarkable that the favored groups, “the support groups of the regime” as one person has characterized them, should like this state of affairs and seek to maintain it with all the means at their disposal. It follows that they eagerly cooperate in the psychological war waged upon European whites in America in order to demoralize and defeat their racial competitors for mastery. What is remarkable, however, is that whites in general and white Southerners in particular should accept the idea that it is immoral for their ancestors to have sought—or for them to seek now—the interests of their own group.

If there is an afterlife for pioneer Northern racial egalitarians such as William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, they must be looking down with astonishment and delight to see the descendants of Lee’s soldiers vying with each other to try to prove that the antebellum and wartime South held the racial views of the most extreme New England abolitionists. Could there be any victory more complete than to have the descendants of one’s own defeated foes embrace the victor’s principles and repudiate those of their ancestors?

This must astonish (and secretly delight and gratify) the most determined enemies of the South. As Dr. Brooks D. Simpson of Arizona State University gloated on the web page of Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center:

There is a strange paradox here. These people deride what they call political correctness, and yet one of their first missions is to whitewash the Confederacy of any connection with slavery. They actually seem sensitive to any possibility that the Confederacy is linked with race, and want to absolve the Confederacy of any charges of racism at all.[4]

The Southerners of the Confederacy (and afterward, from the resistance to Reconstruction and the institution of “Jim Crow” through the “massive resistance” to the race-mixing initiatives of the federal government in the 1950s and 1960s) were not like that, as Lee’s remarks quoted at the beginning of this essay suggest (and that quote is comparatively moderate compared to other statements by this most revered Southern leader, e.g., Lee’s postwar statement in testimony before a Radical Republican congressional committee that the freed blacks should be expelled from Virginia.)[5]

As Lee indicated, slavery was bad. The clearest reason it was bad, from the standpoint of white interests, is that it imported into the midst of a white, European people a large, alien, non-white race that, as we see today, constitutes a threat to the survival of our race and its civilization and may yet contribute to our downfall.

As Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia said in his speech in favor of Georgia’s secession from the Union, “In 1790 we had less than 800,000 slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system, they have increased above 4,000,000.”[6]

Slavery thus incubated the South’s problems. Had there existed a sufficient level of racial cohesion among whites, the emergence of a large, alien race in our midst would never have been tolerated. Part of this lack of racial cohesion may be found in class conflict within our own racial community, from antebellum times down to the present day. Slavery was of course to the material benefit of wealthy slave owners, but it was disadvantageous for middle class and working class whites, for the small, independent yeoman farmer.

Like most Southerners, I have ancestors who owned slaves and others who did not. During my childhood, my relatives took great pride in those branches of the family tree that were the wealthy, slaveholding ones. Now, from the perspective of late middle age, I have come to entertain reservations about these slaveholding ancestors. I see them in many respects as precursors of the corporate interests in our society that are colonizing our nation with Third World aliens: quite willing to burden America and its white posterity with rival, sullen, and hostile racial aliens so that these interests can obtain cheap labor at the expense of white Americans.

Little has been written about the burdens borne by non-slaveholding whites in the antebellum South. Those burdens were not light. The non-slaveholders were required to spend their weekends drilling in militia groups and slave patrols to protect their communities from slave uprisings. Such uprisings were a real menace, as the example of Haiti abroad and the experiences of the Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner rebellions in the South itself demonstrated.[7]

Non-slaveholders were forced to compete against slave labor, cheapening the quality of production in the South and degrading the white working classes, just as today native-born white workers are expected to allow themselves to be degraded financially and otherwise in competition with cheap Latin American or Asian labor. White farm owners had to shoulder taxes to protect the slave property of wealthy plantation-owning whites and to protect the slave owner and white society from those slaves. Ultimately, they had to die in a war largely occasioned by the problem of African slavery. During that war, owners of large numbers of slaves were exempt from service in the Confederate army, while independent farmers had to go off to the front.

The abolitionist program would have increased (and ultimately did increase) the burdens and dangers to working and middle class whites posed by the presence of racial aliens. Governor Joseph E. Brown, who came from the mountainous area of north Georgia, which was virtually slave-free, but who nevertheless supported secession, recognized this fact in speaking of the problems that would ensue if the blacks were freed:

The Negro therefore, comes into competition with the poor White man, when he seeks to rent land on which to make his bread, or a shelter to protect his wife and his little ones, from the cold and from the rain; and when he seeks employment as a day laborer. In every such case if the Negro will do the work the cheapest, he must be preferred. It is sickening to contemplate the miseries of our poor White people under these circumstances.[8]

In such facts we dimly foresee the same problematical class divisions among white people as to the racial issues of today.

This split in white racial solidarity occurred again after the defeat of the Confederacy, during Reconstruction. The rich “Bourbons,” on the one hand, and the yeoman white working and middle classes, on the other, were in significant disagreement about the necessity of formally or informally suppressing black political participation.[9]

The factor of economic class rears its divisive head all through Southern history, from the willingness of the rich planters to import racial aliens to do their manual labor for them down to the struggle against desegregation (in which the greatest enemy to the South was the Chamber of Commerce) to the selfish yuppie of today, only too happy to burden future generations with yet another alien group so long as he can get an illegal Mexican to rake his lawn for a couple of dollars less than he would have to pay a white neighbor’s teenage son.

This essay is based on a talk given at The Occidental Quarterly Editor’s Dinner on July 26, 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia.

White people have a penchant for abstract thinking. This is one of the glories of our race, making possible advances in philosophy, mathematics, science, and technology. But it is also a danger, for white people can become so fixated on abstractions that we lose touch with reality.

This is particularly true in the realm of action. It is useful to for­mulate abstract principles of morality and prudence to guide action. The trouble comes when people fixate on the principles and lose touch with the real world in which they have to act. When that happens, ab­stract principles stop promoting success and start promoting failure.

Sometimes a general rule does not apply to a particular situation. Sometimes following a rule will lead to bad consequences. But the rule will not tell you that. You have to see it. You have to figure it out for yourself. It is a matter of concrete fact, not an abstraction. And people who focus only on abstractions do not see concrete realities, often at their own peril.

I want to share with you some thoughts about the necessity of our people using abstract principles in a much more mature and flexible way when thinking about political, economic, and racial issues.

The Greeks were very different from modern people. (By modern people I mean people of the last two centuries.) The Greeks had a much more mature view of things, a less categorical view of things. Two of my favorite Greek maxims were on the altar of Apollo at Delphi.

One was: “Moderation in all things, nothing in excess,” which of course is a self-contradiction, when you think about it. That also implies moderation in moderation. So there are times when it’s right to be im­moderate. And the maxim will not tell you when that is the case. That is a matter of concrete circumstances. You will have to see and under­stand them for yourself.

The other maxim was: “Know who you are.” This is knowledge of the concrete, not the abstract. This maxim is often translated as “Know thyself,” which sounds like a counsel of subjective, atomistic individualism, as if the men who fought at Thermopylae and Marathon needed to “get in touch with their feelings” or “find themselves.” But who we are is not merely subjective. It is defined by our relationships to others: to our family, community, homeland, nation, and race. Knowing who you are means knowing all those things too. Being true to yourself means being true to them as well.

Contrast the spirit of these maxims to Lord Acton’s oft-quoted dictum that “Power corrupts, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” Americans love this maxim, Southerners in par­ticular, because Lord Acton was a strong Southern sympathizer in our Civil War.

But it’s interesting to set the quote in the context of who Lord Acton was, the circumstances in which he made it, and the words that come before and after it.

It is often said that Acton made this statement in correspon­dence with Robert E. Lee. But that is not true. He actually wrote it in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in April of 1887, expressing his op­position to the doctrine of papal infallibility. (Lord Acton was himself a life-long Catholic, from a recusant family that had adhered to Catholicism for generations despite the Reformation and the establishment of the Church of England.) The full statement reads as follows:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to accept Pope and King, unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal re­sponsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men . . .

Not only is Acton’s statement taken out of context, it is often turned into an absolute, categorical statement by omitting the words “tends to.”

Now Americans love this statement. When they hear it, their eyes glaze over, and they get a warm, gushy, virtuous feeling. They just know how bad power is. They feel superior to those who have it. They even feel glad they have none, and are thus in no danger of corruption.

Americans feel this way because this is a Whig nation: a nation born in opposition to monarchy, aristocracy, and tradition, and firmly wed­ded to individualism and the principles of the Enlighten­ment. America was settled mostly by Whigs. And with the American Revolution and the expulsion of the Loyalist minority, the United States became a firmly Whig nation. America is a totally Whig version of England. It is all Whig sail with no Tory anchor.

But even a minute’s reflection will show you how misleading and false Acton’s dictum is, as a guide to people in their personal lives, and in making decisions for their country and community and ethnic group. The most casual reading of history shows that many great men were good men, that power does not necessarily corrupt, that many good men exercised power for good purposes.

Was Charles Martel a bad man simply because he sought and used power? Remember that Martel used his power to unite the Franks and defeat the Moslems, who were on the verge of conquering Europe, which would have been catastrophic for our people. Would Lord Acton have deemed it better if the Franks didn’t have a powerful leader? Would it have been better if the Frankish lands had been divided and decentralized and incapable of uniting as the Moslems poured over the Pyrenees into France?

Was Pope Urban II a bad man, because he had power and helped rouse Europe to the Crusades? The crusades drove back the two pin­cers of Islam that were coming through Spain and the Balkans to take our continent from us.

And would it really matter even if Charles Martel and Urban II were somehow corrupted by their power, as long as they still used it for the common good? Acton’s dictum focuses exclusively on the effect that power has on the characters of those who have it. But what about the consequences of power for the larger community?

Charles Martel and Urban II are long dead, but every person of European descent owes them a great debt, a debt that increases with every new generation that is born. In light of that, the consequences of power on these men’s conscience matters very little.

Now some might feel a little frisson, a little thrill, of moral superiority as they say that it is right to disappear as long as one maintains one’s moral superiority. I don’t think so. I think it is better to survive and to triumph than to disappear. Those who feel otherwise will simply leave the world to people who feel differently, people who have no scruples about gaining and using power. Unfortunately, these people may have no scruples about anything else as well.

Because of the Whig sentiments that make Acton’s principle so ap­pealing to Americans, the founding stock of the nation has been en­gaged in unilateral disarmament from the inception of the country—disarmament in contrast to their rivals, who do not believe that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The amazing thing to me is that this country is not even worse off than it is.

But there is no way that our people can win in the long run, so long as we remain enchanted and enslaved by a philosophy of power­lessness, by an abstract principle that tells us that coercive power is per se wrong and must never be used.

History is replete with tragic examples of the con­sequences of powerlessness.

Many American conservatives, Southerners in particular, find the doctrines of States’ Rights and decentralized government very attractive. But these very doctrines played a major and a decisive role in insuring the defeat of the South in the Civil War.

When the South seceded, when the Confederate government assembled in Montgomery, they were in a revolutionary situation. Things were fluid. Many new things were possible. And—as Lenin and Robespierre, alas, knew—in a revolutionary situation, you hit . . . and you hit hard. You go as fast and as far as you can while the time is favorable. You make the most of the opportunity before things solidify again.

But with the instinctive English desire to compromise, the South did just the opposite. Jefferson Davis had been a staunch Unionist and op­ponent of Secession until the late 1850s. And his government was made of people like him, who were relatively new converts to the idea of se­cession. There were no militant secessionists or Fire-eaters of any sig­nificance, none of the people who long before had prophetically seen the need to separate from an increasingly hostile North.

Even worse, in choosing their Vice President, they turned to a physi­cal weakling and pettifogging legalist, Alexander H. Stephens, who had been opposed to the whole idea of the Confederacy. Stephens was cho­sen for the admitted purpose of placating Southerners who had op­posed the Revolution.

As a result, the government was divided and hobbled from the start by its second-in-command. Stephens would spend the next four years disrupting the Southern war effort. He spent most of the war pouting at home, corre­sponding with people all over the South, attacking President Davis, urging that there be no draft, urging people not to support the army, warning that the central government was becoming despotic like the Lincoln govern­ment, and demanding more States’ rights and decen­tralization, in the middle of an invasion of the country.

Lincoln, representing the forces of evil in our society, was much wiser. He did not care about the Constitution. He understood that there was a crisis, and he meant to have his faction win. And he didn’t give a damn whether that required him to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, arrest members of Congress, shut down newspapers, impose a draft, or raise armies by presidential order. And he was quite frank about that.

In his correspondence, Lincoln made clear that he wanted to show that a republican government could be just as “strong”—just as harsh and coercive, capable of just as many atrocities—as a monarchical gov­ernment. By the way, that is expressly what he’s referring to in the Gettysburg Address when he says that the war is testing whether any government “so conceived . . . can long endure.”

Well, the tragedy is that there wasn’t more Jefferson Davis and Alex­ander H. Stephens in Lincoln, and more Lincoln in Davis. Things very likely would have ended very differently if the South had leaders who understood the necessities of a revolutionary situation, and were will­ing to use power to save the country at a time of invasion.

You hear another categorical statement frequently in American poli­tics today. We hear people like George W. Bush—the same George Bush who drew upon his profound mastery of world religions and history to tell us that Islam is a religion of peace—assuring us repeatedly that we must learn “the lesson of Munich”—that you never negotiate with dic­tators.

Well, the fact of the matter is that most of mankind has been ruled by dictators throughout most of recorded history. And if you adopted a policy of never negotiating with dictators, and always going to war with them, the United States would be engaged in perpetual war for perpetual peace. And we would be destroyed in the process.

The fact of the matter is that we have negotiated successfully with hundreds, if not thousands, of dictators in the more than two centu­ries the United States has been in existence. We’ve had many benefi­cial treaties with despots, with absolute monarchies, with dictator­ships. So there isn’t any “lesson of Munich” that you never negotiate with dicta­tors.

The people at Munich, the people who believed they could negotiate with Hitler, had learned “the lesson of August 1914”—that you always negotiate, that wars always occur because of failure to negotiate.

The tragedy of life is that concrete circumstances, individual person­alities, and particular details are what determine whether you should negotiate or whether you should fight. It is the height of folly to ignore these and focus on abstract lessons based on wholly different circum­stances, sometimes decades or centuries old.

Consider the issue of free trade. In October of 2007, a friend of mine attended a small financial seminar. He sat with a number bright young college students and recent graduates. When the issue of free trade came up, he pointed out what this means to America’s working people and increasingly the middle and professional classes: how free trade is destroying their jobs, pensions, health care, vacations, and ability to have and rear children, while undermining the nation’s economic and political independence.

Several of these young men, many of whom were working on their MBAs, actually conceded this was happening. But then they said we can’t ever abandon the “principle” of free trade. Free trade is the right principle, and we’ve got to hang on to the principle, even if it means the destruction of our nation and race.

Now is it conceivable that anywhere in China a group of comparable young men would be saying that China must be destroyed to adhere to the principle of free trade? Could you find any Chinaman this nutty? No. Only White Europeans are subject to such goofiness.

Consider also the issue of private property. During the time when Australia had an immigration policy designed to maintain its identity as a white and British nation, one of the largest groups that fought it were Anglo-Saxon farmers with large plantations. They didn’t want to have to hire free British immigrants. They wanted cheap labor. They wanted Chinese coolies who would work for less. Do we really want to respect that kind of private property right?

To save our people, it will be necessary not merely to change those who hold public power but also those who hold private power. A vast share of the nation’s wealth is held by our enemies. They are particularly heav­ily invested in the news and entertainment media. That has to change. But it cannot change except by the dramatic use of public power to change who holds private power.

Imagine that by some fluke a libertarian like Ron Paul were elected president. Imagine that he really could bring American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, block the drive for war with Iran, and end Israel’s ability to loot our treasury and control our foreign policy.

Private money and private media power would immediately be used to thwart his policies. He would be lucky to avoid impeachment or as­sassination. And, as a libertarian, his own principles would prevent him from doing anything about it. After all, his enemies have freedom of speech and the right to use their money however they wish.

In England when the Wars of the Roses were concluded by the bat­tle of Boswell Field, when Richard III was defeated by Henry VII and the Tudor dynasty was established, what was the first order of busi­ness? To take the lands and titles of the aristocratic families who had backed the losing side, and to give them to the able and devoted ser­vants of the winner. Henry VII understood that if his enemies retained their estates and could still call their tenants out against him, the civil wars that had wracked England would soon begin again.

If Henry VII had followed the advice of a Ron Paul or an Ayn Rand, he would have failed.

So will we.

Jews have a much more supple and realistic attitude toward abstract principles. A few months ago, a Jew published an article in which he said, quite brazenly, that when Jewish survival is at stake, abstract moral principles must be set aside. In my circles, much to my disap­pointment, this was met with a great deal of clucking about how bad the Jews are.

Quite the contrary. It shows how wise the Jews are. The survival of their people should be more important to them than abstract moral principles.

Our people’s survival should be just as important for us.

To wed ourselves to a philosophy of powerlessness, a philosophy of decentralized government, a philosophy that always stresses private property rights and free trade over the health of the community as a whole, will inevitably lead to our downfall. Yet these very policies are embraced by the finest element of our nation’s citizenry.

I am not a statist. I don’t like the idea of government power. I’m a typical Anglo-Saxon Whig. I’d rather live on a farm and not have to see anybody else, not even the smoke from my neighbor’s chim­ney.

But as a realistic person I know that it can’t be that way. And, as un­pleasant as it may be, in the kind of desperate life-or-death emergency our people are going to face some time in the next two generations, very firm action will be necessary if we are to survive. This will include state coercion on a scale that will make many in our movement un­happy. But the alternative will not just be military defeat, as with the South, but extinction. To stave off that day, we must learn to evaluate and apply all abstract principles by reference to the supreme principle of collective survival and flourishing.

Our people once knew this. Jews are famous for evaluating every­thing in light of their own collective interests: “Yes, but is it good for the Jews?” I certainly can’t condemn them for this. This is the key to their survival down through the millennia as a people scattered among other nations of the world, as well as to their current position of con­spicuous wealth and power.

The ancient Romans had the same principle: salus populi lex suprema. The welfare, or the salvation, of the people is the supreme law. We too must learn to evaluate all issues of political and economic policy by this standard.

Which brings me to The Occidental Quarterly, which does stand as a unique publication in the English-speaking world. It’s an indication of the degree of our dispossession that it is the only publication dealing with issues like this in a thoughtful way.

TOQ is in its eighth year of publication. The Nation, which was founded in July of 1865, just celebrated its 143rd anniversary. We hope that TOQ will last as long as The Nation has lasted, even longer. We hope that it will impart the same sort of continuity to our movement that our enemies have enjoyed. We hope that its lonely defense of the legitimacy of white racial consciousness will become the common sense of a new age.

Lenin is an example of someone who was supple, not to say cynical, in choosing whatever policies advanced his faction. One of Lenin’s publications while he was in exile, plotting revolution, was called Iskra, which is the Russian word for “spark.” Its motto was: “From the spark shall come the flame.”

I hope that TOQ, by providing a forum for the thoughtful discussion of ideas like this, could be a spark that will touch off a flame and enable our people to understand what must be done for our survival, and to deal with a revolutionary situation with revolutionary means.

Thank you.

Sam G. Dickson is a lawyer, writer, and white community organizer.