August 23, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
OUR MONUMENTS: “Silent
Sam,” John Hood, and the Battle for Western Civilization
Friends,
It has
been a tumultuous week in the Tar Heel State—a week which began on Monday,
August 20, with a loud revolutionary mob loose on the campus of the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a vicious mob that toppled the
historic monument, “Silent Sam,” that memorializes the over 250 students from
that university who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy—a flagrant
challenge to state law and an offensive attack on the traditions of the
citizens of the state.
And, on
Wednesday, August 22, just two days afterwards, came a meeting of the North
Carolina Historical Commission at which the fate of the three iconic
Confederate monuments on Capitol Square in Raleigh was decided.
National
news media covered the assault on “Silent Sam,” and Tucker Carlson on his
popular Fox News prime time program covered it as well. In fact, observers
throughout the South, also confronted by unhinged demands that they take down
or relocate Confederate monuments, watched these events unfold with great
interest: North Carolina had become ground zero in the ongoing war against our
heritage, a multifaceted and seemingly unstoppable “cultural war” against not
just Confederate symbols, but also against all
the symbols of our Western Christian civilization.
The
following essay appeared on The Abbeville Institute Web site August 23, 2018.
Although it incorporates portions of a MY CORNER column I wrote on August 19, I
have expanded it, revised it, and added substantially to it to reflect what
happened this week.
And I
pass it on to you today.
Our Monuments: A Battle for Western Civilization and the South
On Monday night, August 20, 2018, approximately 200 to
250 raucous demonstrators gathered in a mob on the campus of the University of
North Carolina-Chapel Hill and proceeded to tear down the century-old statue,
“Silent Sam,” a monument memorializing the over 250 university students who
fought and died during the War Between the States. University police, whose
primary goal is to protect university property from vandals and destruction,
stood down and did nothing to protect the monument, apparently acting on orders
from university administrators.
All across the nation—and not just
in the states below the Mason-Dixon Line—there is an insistent effort to take
down, remove, and, at times, destroy the monuments that represent our history
and heritage. Certainly, it has been the statues honoring Robert E. Lee, P. G.
T. de Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and Confederate veterans that have been
highlighted most specifically as targets by this movement and featured in the
Mainstream Media. Indeed, very likely a majority of American citizens not that
familiar with this advancing campaign probably believe that it is only those
Confederate symbols which are the object of this frenzied attack, and that once
those monuments are disposed of, further demands for “cultural cleansing” can
be blunted and contained, or will just go away.
In many ways, this temporizing approach
appears to be the view of much of the establishment “conservative movement,”
and as well, of many leaders of the Republican Party.
It is an approach that leads to cultural
suicide.
An excellent example of this
pusillanimous position came recently in an article by John Hood, chairman of the board of the
conservative John Locke Foundation, in Raleigh, North Carolina. In his essay on
the status of the three Confederate monuments now standing on Capitol Square in
Raleigh currently being challenged by the administration of Democratic Governor
Roy Cooper, Hood demonstrated obvious discomfort at having to defend symbols
admittedly of his own Tar Heel heritage, declaring:
“Why not erect
more monuments and public art to commemorate a broader range of individuals,
movements, and events? That’s a noble enterprise that could unify North
Carolinians across the political spectrum…. There has to be a better way.”
Hood was a vigorous and very vocal Never
Trumper (and continues to be), whose positions on most issues mirror standard
establishment Republican boilerplate. And like them he answers accusations of
racism, bigotry, and white supremacy from the Farther Left, as a dog answers
the dog whistle of his owner…and like how most Neoconservatives respond in
fearful fright to their Farther Left critics.
What actually bothers him are not the
ideologically-motivated attacks on the monuments as symbols of Southern
heritage and history, but, as he makes clear, the physical attacks
on them. And to prove his bona fides to the Farther Left, he
adds his own exculpatory mea culpas for his state’s and
region’s “history of hate,” and points proudly to his own record of reparations
(of the financial kind) for slavery, racism, and white supremacy:
“Although my
love of state history is broad and deep, it does not extend to the Confederacy
itself, the founding principles of which I view with contempt. Not only do I
celebrate the abolition of slavery, the destruction of Jim Crow, and the
expansion of freedom, but I also believe these events deserve far more official
commemoration than North Carolina has yet erected…. I admire the planned North
Carolina Freedom Park, for example. To be constructed in Raleigh on land
between the General Assembly complex and the Executive Mansion, the park would
“celebrate the enduring contributions of African Americans in North Carolina
who struggled to gain freedom and enjoy full citizenship.” Similarly, the Z.
Smith Reynolds Foundation has just announced its Inclusive Public Arts
Initiative, which will fund up to 10 new projects across the state with grants
of up to $50,000 each. The intent is to “share stories of diversity, equality,
inclusion and equity as they relate to the people and places of North Carolina,
especially those whose stories have not been or are often untold,” the
Foundation stated….. Indeed, the grant maker for which I serve as president,
the John William Pope Foundation, helped pay for a mural painted several years
ago at North Carolina Central University’s law school. ‘
Hood, like the other epigones of the
establishment “conservative movement”—the “Big Con” as my friend Dr. Jack
Kerwick terms them—is unwilling to engage in the intellectual battle required
because, essentially, he agrees with the Farther Left
historically and philosophically, and he is willing to temporize: just don’t
damage the monuments physically, and, somehow we can all do a
“Rodney King” and get along—“There has to be a better way.”
This defeatist approach—which is that of
Neoconservatives generally in the cultural war we find ourselves in—puts me in
mind of a quote I first heard used by my mentor Russell Kirk; it is from
Hilaire Belloc’s This and That and the Other (1912) (p.
282):
“[T]he Barbarian
is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog
or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline
or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true. We sit by and
watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we
are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of
our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But
as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these
faces there is no smile.”
Is this not the very essence of modern
Neoconservatism’s—and of John Hood’s–craven compliance in what is, in fact, an
ignominious retreat, an insouciant giving way to the enemies of our
civilization?
The standard template employed by those
self-denominated “social justice warriors” is that the monuments to the
Confederate dead represent “racism,” “a defense of slavery,” and “white
supremacy.” Yet, as is apparent from reports from across the nation (and from Canada
and Western Europe), Confederate monuments are only a first step.
After them—indeed, now concurrently with the attacks on them—come assaults on
symbols memorializing Christopher Columbus, Franciscan Fr. Junipero Serra (who
founded so many of the early Spanish missions in California), Andrew Jackson,
Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, the politically-incorrect names of cities,
towns, streets, and even colleges—any visible marker of our Western Christian
civilization. The list is enlarged almost daily.
What John Hood and his Neoconservative
associates do not understand…or, refuse to understand…is that their praxis
leads to the imminent peril that Belloc wrote about in 1912, and to the
triumphant return of the “rough beast” determined to destroy and replace
Western Christian civilization that poet William Butler Yeats foresaw at the
cataclysmic end of the World War I in his poem “The Second Coming” (1919): that
“rough beast” held at bay for twenty centuries “vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle” in Bethlehem, who now “slouches” as the Demon Serpent of the Old
Testament to be (re)born.
The John Hoods of this world wish to
have it both ways: unwilling to antagonize the dominant and vociferous voices
on the Farther Left, while giving the illusory appearance of opposition to the
Barbarians.
Such allies in the civilizational war in
which we find ourselves are no allies at all: like the chicken in the middle of
the road, they will be ground down by the cultural Marxist “semi” that comes
hurtling down the highway.
And who are those who have largely
inspired and motivated this multifaceted campaign of cultural destruction? And
who have injected fear and fright into the hearts of not just the leadership of
the Democratic Party, but increasingly have neutered real opposition from
“conservatives” such as John Hood? Who are they—the proverbial tails that wag
the establishment dog?
There are two groups that have played
primary and critical roles in this ongoing effort and in the destruction of the
Confederate veterans’ memorial in Durham back in August 2017, and, more
recently, in the tearing down of the “Silent Sam” monument on the grounds of
the University of North Carolina:
(1) The Democratic Socialists of
America, who have been at the forefront of rowdy demonstrations, petitions, and
other actions aimed at removing the “Silent Sam” monument from the Chapel Hill
campus. In addition to these activities, their Web site (May 7, 2018) declares full
support for
student Maya Little and her vandalism of the monument.
(2) The Communist Workers World Party,
whose members led and actively participated in the destruction of the
Confederate veterans’ monument in Durham, North Carolina, and who advocate
“mass struggle” and “revolutionary solutions,” including: “Abolish Capitalism –
Disarm the Police & ICE Agents – Fight for Socialist Revolution – Defend
Black Lives Matter.” The Workers World activists have turned Durham into a
center of revolutionary Communist ferment. A detailed description of their
actions may be found on their Web site.
These radical groups have spearheaded
the efforts and mob actions, and they hold both the state Democratic Party and
many Republicans in subinfeudated bondage to their rhetoric and demands. They
set a linguistic narrative and policy template which have captured not just
major portions of our politics, but are fawned over by the near totality of our
media and are taught as unchallenged truth by our educational system and in our
colleges. To dissent is to risk an organized and violent demonstration, demands
for censorship, and, at a minimum, the smearing of one’s reputation by the
press.
Unlike John Hood and those like him,
these groups and individuals fully know what they are doing and what the
results would be should they succeed. They respond only to our uncompromising,
intelligent, and fierce opposition.
Back in 1951 English-Cornish poet Jack
Clemo (1916-1994) foresaw the age in which we now find ourselves:
“The darkness comes as you foretold.
You hear the fretful moan,
The alien winds that rave
As bitterly the grey truth breaks
On disillusioned Church and frantic world.
You see what form the judgment takes,
What harvest faithless generations reap:
The folds half empty, no clean pasture for the sheep;
Soil sterile where the liberal waters swirled
Which now have hardened into mud
Of festering ethic, fruitless hands grown chill
With their starved, pallid blood;
And the sky freezing still.” [from Jack Clemo, “The Broad Winter”]
You hear the fretful moan,
The alien winds that rave
As bitterly the grey truth breaks
On disillusioned Church and frantic world.
You see what form the judgment takes,
What harvest faithless generations reap:
The folds half empty, no clean pasture for the sheep;
Soil sterile where the liberal waters swirled
Which now have hardened into mud
Of festering ethic, fruitless hands grown chill
With their starved, pallid blood;
And the sky freezing still.” [from Jack Clemo, “The Broad Winter”]
And the poet’s answer, as must be our
answer:
“When I saw this I chose to dwell
With torturing symbols of the Citadel.”
With torturing symbols of the Citadel.”
We must stand for—we must dwell
within—our Citadel, our inheritance and culture, our very identity and being as
a people representing 2,000 years of Western Christian heritage, or we shall
disappear into the abyss of history.
Postcript: On Wednesday,
August 22, 2018, the North Carolina Historical Commission met to take
action on a proposal by Governor Roy Cooper (D) to move the three Confederate
monuments (i.e., the Henry Wyatt Monument, the Monument to North Carolina
Women of the Confederacy, and the Confederate Veterans’ Monument) on
Capitol Square in Raleigh, North Carolina, to the Bentonville Battlefield. The
Commission had appointed a subcommittee at its meeting of September 22, 2017,
to research the legality and advisability of such an action. The governor
made his proposal purportedly based on his interpretation of the
North Carolina Monuments Protection Law of 2015. But after due examination
the subcommittee reported that they could find no way around the conditions set
down in the Monuments law, that they were, thus, unable to approve the
governor’s proposal. The final vote of the full Historical Commission was 9-2,
against relocation, with two members demanding that the Commission simply
ignore state law.
But what the Commissioners also did was
attempt to placate the Farther Left by strongly condemning racism, white
supremacy, and the principles which, they declared, motivated the
Confederacy—recommending that signage be erected near the existent Confederate
monuments to put them into historical “context.” And that the state executive
should proceed with proposing additional monuments to celebrate the state’s
“diversity and minorities.”
It is thus obvious that the “John Hood
syndrome”—and the historical and ideological narrative that sends the political
and cultural establishment into paroxysms of fear, not wishing to be labeled a
“racist,” “white supremacist,” or “fascist”—played a primary role in their
considerations. Although the law prevented them from relocating the monuments,
with alacrity and haste they proposed a way around those reminders of North
Carolina’s heritage, and it will be fascinating to witness how this latest
stage in our culture war develops.
One thing, however, is certain: if
it had not been for those staunch defenders of our heritage and history—mainly
North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, who were unwilling to compromise
or give way in 2015—the North Carolina Monuments Protection Law would never
have been enacted. And without that unalterable resistance, that willingness to
hold high the principles and honor of our Confederate ancestors, the results of
the August 22 meeting would have been entirely different.
This war—this time—is not a time for compromise
or for leaving the battlefield. The battles have just begun. Either our
enemies win, or we do. The options are that simple…and that stark. Our
civilization and culture are at stake.
John Hood, take note.
--------------------
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.
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