June 10, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
TWO RECENTLY PUBLISHED COLUMNS: Abbeville and Unz Review
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Leftist Crazies Don’t Want You to Exist
I try to collect all the business that I must do in
Raleigh into one day. One trip a week into North Carolina’s increasingly
cosmopolitanized and rapidly de-Southernized capital city is about all I can
take these days: it’s become too much like just about any other homogenized,
faceless metropolis in any other part of the country. Most of Raleigh’s
historic and traditional Southern charm and character have been erased and
overawed by transplants and interlopers from “up North” and elsewhere who feel
that their mission in life is to remake the Tar Heel State’s capital into a
copy of the decaying cities they left behind! Unlike Columbia, South Carolina,
Raleigh wasn’t burned by Sherman back in 1865, but the city fathers back then,
I’m certain, would be appalled at what has happened since then to a once
gracious Southern city. As the late superb Southern writer Tom Landess once
said about modern-day Atlanta: “Where is Sherman when we really need him?”
When going into town I usually park in the public for-pay lot
across the street from the North Carolina State Archives where I used to be
gainfully employed. It’s a short block to the historic old North Carolina State
Capitol (1840), where on May 20, 1861, North Carolina representatives voted
unanimously to secede, and a short, usually pleasant walk to most any office or
business downtown. Curiously, there are some, usually newer residents of the
capital city (mostly transplants, I suspect) living either out near Cary and
Apex or way up in the northern extremes of the city, past the outer beltline,
who have never even been “downtown” (when I was working downtown I used to get
queries from persons who wanted to come to the Archives, but had no idea at all
how to get there).
Anyway, I was making one of my mostly weekly forays into what
has become for me “the heart of darkness,” and I parked my 2006 Kia Spectra in
the public lot. The lot was nearly full of cars, and as I got out I viewed
literally hundreds of mostly women, but a few men and children tagging along,
all gaily vested in summertime outfits, many carrying placards and signs.
Almost immediately I was aware that these folks were protesters
assembled in the capital city for some event, and from their signs—the ones I
read—they were there to protest President Trump, his immigration policies,
“police brutality,” those “racist” Confederate monuments, “income inequality,”
and a multiple of other societal “wrongs,” all of which I would say were on the
Left, or better said, the Culturally Marxist Left.
One lady who walked by my car apparently noticed my state-issued
Sons of Confederate Veterans license plate with its Battle Flag and the sticker
I affixed to my car back in 2015: “Putin for President,” which always gets a
few views and second-takes!
I smiled at her—as I was always taught to do by my good Southern
parents—and said: “How’s it going?” The lady (she probably wouldn’t have
liked that word) responded: “I’m great.” Then she added almost immediately:
“Why that racist Confederate license plate and that Putin bumper sticker?”
Now, let me describe this female: she could have passed for
anyone’s favorite aunt. She had greying hair, large sun glasses, a
smart-looking summer dress, and a large handbag. She could have been on her way
to vacation Bible school for all I knew. She was white and from her demeanor
appeared to be middle or upper middle class. At the beginning of our short
tete-a-tete she had one of those frozen plastic smiles on her face that you see
on various store clerks at the end of a long work day or perhaps on a car
salesman if he thinks you might purchase a vehicle from him. But when she
opened her mouth and spoke, it was with a distinctly clipped non-Southern
accent. As my grandfather used to say, I knew “she wont from around here!”
I responded to her question politely, with a smile on my face:
“The license plate is state-issued, and it means that I am a member of the
North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is a heritage group
defending our state’s traditions and history.” And I added with a broader
smile: “The Putin sticker is mainly there to provoke thought…and maybe
conversation.”
I could tell from the lady’s expression that she wasn’t at all
amused. “These are racist and fascist symbols!” she exclaimed, becoming
agitated as she spoke.
“Not really,” I responded. I tried to smile, but it was no use.
I changed the topic: “Are you here for a protest,” I asked. She
answered huffily: “Yes, I am with the North Carolina Peace Action Center. We
believe in peace, in pacifism. I’m a member of the United Church of Christ, and
we believe in international brotherhood and social justice, equality, and the
dignity and rights of the individual.” (I think that was what she said, but I
am only summarizing her). “We are protesting fascism and racism, and demanding
full equality and voting rights, and that our legislature take immediate action
to stop upholding white privilege!”
At that point I understood that this brief conversation was
going nowhere and that nothing I could say, other than forced pleasantries,
might make matters better. So, I just smiled, hoping to quickly end the
conversation. But I couldn’t help myself and had to say one last thing as I
tried to get away: “Equality doesn’t exist in this world. Respectfully, I would
suggest that all those cultural Marxist slogans you’re stating only end in much
greater pain, hardship, and social disaster. Now, I must really go to my
appointment. Nice to meet and talk with you.”
I thought that would end it, but it did not. And before I could
steal away, she uttered in a rising crescendo: “You must be Trump supporter!”
As I continued to move away from her, I nodded my head.
“Trump supporters are f—ing fascists! You neo-Confederates are
racists!” she angrily shouted. And I thought if I didn’t move on quickly she
might slug me with her handbag.
There it was: from this respectable looking lady, who probably
was around 60, certainly not impoverished (materially), most likely college or
university-educated, a member (apparently active, as well) in an established
mainline Protestant church—the “F-bomb,” uttered at a stranger, someone she had
just casually met getting out of his car on a hot summer day in Raleigh, North
Carolina. She had never seen me before (unless—extremely doubtful—she had
attended a Confederate flag event!), she didn’t know my name—but she understood
correctly that I was a “Trump supporter” in 2016, and obviously, with that
Confederate license plate, well, then, I was the epitome, the symbol, of all
that stood in the way of her goal of remaking America into a cultural Marxist
utopia.
“Full equality?” And I was reminded of the “equality” pictured
by various writers who had either experienced the Communist kind or who were
wise enough to understand what it meant: George Orwell’s depiction in his
fanciful novel, Animal
Farm, but even more aptly, perhaps in Arthur Koestler’s dystopian
novel Darkness
at Noon (1940), a thinly-veiled account of Stalin and his
great purges, or even more, by the late Spanish traditionalist, Rafael Gambra,
in his marvelous volume, El
silencio de Dios (1967), which desperately needs an English
translation.
I don’t think that protesting woman, despite her probable
university training and membership in the UCC, would have fathomed anything
those writers wrote, or understood anything they were saying. And she would
never understand what Southern heritage means and encompasses.
What I found perhaps most disturbing in this short encounter—and
something not even the Stalinists of old were that guilty of—was the near
complete decline linguistically, in language. How had things in our society
degenerated so far that a perfect stranger would, after less than two minutes
of conversation, decide to unleash the “f-bomb” on me? Has our national
discourse declined this far?
And, in reflecting, the answer is a definite “yes,” and all we
need to do is make a cursory search online (or via the television) of just
recent statements and imprecations uttered by the more noteworthy minions of
the Left in American society. Just before I began writing this column, I was able
to go online and find about fifteen instances in which the foulest four-letter
words were spoken publicly,
to national audiences, or to large groups of online recipients. Robert De Niro
or Peter Fonda, anyone?
And, no, I do not accept the faux-argument that it was Donald
Trump who began all this decline and abuse in the English language. This
degradation was there in full force long before he ever became president—it was
there in the dialogue sequences of almost every Hollywood block-buster since at
least the 1980s. It was there on our college campuses, countenanced by the
professoriate; it was there in our culture. It was there for years in the
vicious attacks on Confederate heritage and our symbols. All Donald Trump did
was tear off the scab which thinly disguised the gutter mindset of our supposed
political, cultural and educational arbiters. His unanticipated and unexpected
presence in the White House infuriated and maddened them—forcing them, as the
fetid pus under those scabs, to come forth in all their oleaginous stench and
foulness.
So, in this age of Donald Trump I should have expected that
“peace demonstrator” I encountered—that self-proclaimed pacifist and
“anti-racist” social justice warrior advocating for “equality” and “justice”—to
act exactly as she did. Her vaunted and repeated deep concern and desire for
equality and for dialogue does not include me, or the millions like me—or you.
Only if we repent continuously for our past sins of racism, repent for the
multiple sins of all our (white) ancestors, and for the white privilege we
somehow enjoy (although I’ll bet my meagre retirement income is far less than
that lady’s financial resources!), then there might be a tiny glimmer of hope
for us in that lady’s view. And even then, with the goal of open borders and
the long-range population replacement strategy of the Left, whatever I could
say would assuredly mean little to her.
In the end, we are in an immense battle, a cultural war to the
death, what Pat Buchanan wrote about and described back in 2002 with his
volume The
Death of the West, and in subsequent works—such as the brilliant
Paul Gottfried has documented in his critical studies on the intellectual
earthquake that has shaken Western European and American civilization to its
foundations.
In the end, one side must win, and one side must lose. It is
that simple.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd
D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of
Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual
history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was
assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more
recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of
Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on
historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the
Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical
organizations.
THE UNZ REVIEW
July 4th and What It Really Means for Us
BOYD D. CATHEY • JULY 4, 2018
We
celebrate July 4 each year as the anniversary of America’s declaration of
independence from Great Britain. For many Americans, the day has become little
more than another holiday, a day off from work, and a time to barbecue with
family and friends.
The
Declaration of Independence and the day we set aside to commemorate it should
make us reflect on the sacrifices of the men who signed it. Representatives
from thirteen colonies came together to take a momentous step that they knew
might land them on the scaffold or suspended by the hangman’s noose. They were
protesting that their traditional rights as Englishmen had been violated, and
that those violations had forced them into a supreme act of rebellion.
For
many Americans the Declaration of Independence is a fundamental text that tells
the world who we are as a people. It is a distillation of American belief and
purpose. Pundits and commentators, left and right, never cease reminding us
that America is a new nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.”
Almost
as important as a symbol of American belief is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address. It is not incorrect to see a link between these two documents, as
Lincoln intentionally placed his short peroration in the context of a
particular reading of the Declaration.
Lincoln
bases his concept of the creation of the American nation in
philosophical principles he sees enunciated in 1776, and in particular on an
emphasis on the idea of “equality.” The problem is that this interpretation,
which forms the philosophical base of both the dominant “movement conservatism”
today – neoconservatism – and the neo-Marxist multicultural Left, is basically
false.
Lincoln’s
opens his address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth …”
There is a critical problem with this assertion. It was not the Declaration
that “created” the new nation; the Declaration was a statement of thirteen
colonies, announcing their respective independence from the mother country,
binding themselves together in a military and political alliance. It was the
Constitution, drafted eleven years later (1787), after the successful
conclusion of the War for Independence that established a new nation. And, as
any number of historians and scholars have pointed out, the American Framers
never intended to cobble together a nation based on the proposition that “all
men are created equal.”
A
brief survey of the writings of such distinguished historians and researchers
as Barry Alan Shain, Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, George W. Carey, and
more recently Kirkpatrick Sale, plus a detailed reading of the commentaries and
writings of those men who established the nation, give the lie to the claim
(See for example, Elliott’sDebates,
a compilation of the debates over the new Constitution).
The
Framers of the Constitution were horrified by “egalitarianism” and “democracy,”
and they made it clear that what they were establishing
was a stratified republic, in which most of the “rights” were left to the
respective states (with their own particular arrangements), and in which
serious restrictions and limitations on voting and participation in government
were considered fundamental. Indeed, several states also had religious tests,
and others had established churches, none of which were directly touched by the
First Amendment, added to insure that a national religious
establishment would not be effected. A quick review of The Federalist Papers confirms
this thinking; and a survey of the correspondence and the debates over the
Constitution add support to this anti-egalitarianism.
Obviously,
then, Lincoln could not found his “new nation” in the U. S. Constitution; it
was too aristocratic and decentralized, with non-enumerated powers maintained
by the states, including the implicit right to secede. Indeed, slavery was
explicitly sanctioned, even if most of the Framers believed that as an
institution it would die a natural death, if left on its own. Lincoln thus went
back to the Declaration of Independence and invested in it a meaning that
supported his statist and wartime intentions. But even then, he verbally abused
the language of the Declaration, interpreting the words in a form that its
Signers never intended.
Although
those authors employed the phrase “all men are created equal,” and certainly
that is why Lincoln made direct reference to it, a careful analysis of the
Declaration does not confirm the sense that Lincoln invests in those few words.
Contextually, the authors at Philadelphia were asserting their historic — and
equal — rights as Englishmen before the Crown, which had, they believed, been violated
and usurped by the British government, and it was to parliament that the
Declaration was primarily directed.
The
Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally,
“created equal” to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created
with no less or no more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential
before God. But this is not what most contemporary writers mean today when they
talk of “equality.”
Rather,
from a traditionally-Christian viewpoint, each of us is born into this world
with different levels of intelligence, in different areas of expertise;
physically, some are stronger or heavier, others are slight and smaller; some
learn foreign languages and write beautiful prose; others become fantastic athletes
or scientists. Social customs and traditions, property holding, and individual
initiative — each of these factors further discriminate as we continue in life.
None
of this means that we are any less or more valued in the judgment of God, Who
judges us based on our own, very unique capabilities. God measures us by
ourselves, by
our own maximum possibilities and potential, not by those of anyone else —
that is, whether we use our own, individual talents to the very fullest (recall
the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of St. Matthew).
The
Founders understood this, as their writings and speeches clearly indicate.
Lincoln’s “new nation” would have certainly struck them as radical and
revolutionary, a veritable “heresy.” Even more disturbing for them would be the
specter of modern-day neoconservatives — that is, those who dominant the
conservative movement and claim to rigorously defend the Constitutional
republic against the abuses of the Marxist multiculturalist left — enshrining
Lincoln’s address as a basic symbol of American political and social order.
They
would have understood the radicalism implicit in such a pronouncement; they
would have seen Lincoln’s interpretation as a contradiction of the “First
Founding” of 1787 and a revolutionary denial of its intentions; and they would
have understood in Lincoln’s language the content of a Christian and
millenialist heresy, heralding a transformed nation where the Federal
government would become the father and mother and absolute master of us all.
Thus,
as we commemorate the declaring of American independence 242 years ago, we
should lament the mythology about it created in 1863, and recall an older
generation of 1787, a generation of noble men who comprehended fully well that
a country based on egalitarianism is a nation where true liberties are
imperiled.
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