December 1, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
A New, Very
Passionate Review of the book, The Land
We Love
Friends,
My friend
and fellow writer, “The Dissident Mama,” authors a regular column for her site
- http://www.dissidentmama.net/. She writes with fierce conviction and verve
about the Southland and about the present parlous condition of these United
States, taking no prisoners and not worrying about the politically-correct
taboos that strangle dissent in our age. She goes for the jugular!
She has
just published a review of my book, The
Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (which appeared one year ago,
Scuppernong Press). And her review is unlike most of the other reviews of the
volume. She centers on and fathoms the deeply personal reasons for the book and
how those reasons—and that Southern background—shaped its creation. I admit
that I am a bit overwhelmed by her praise and her ability to get at the “heart
of the matter,” as the saying goes. Nevertheless, she does understand those
reasons and that background, that history, which she conveys in the review.
And she
does so while launching stinging verbal missiles at all our enemies as she
writes. I am deeply honored by her kind words.
I pass
the review on to you:
Boyd Cathey:
Barbarism resistor & storyteller
The “Ok Boomer” meme has been an ongoing joke in alternative
media for a while now, but corporate media just recently caught wind of it and
predictably had a tizzy, saying it “marks the end of friendly generational
relations.”
“You
can’t stereotype like that,” lectured the apparatchicks while tightly clutching
their pearls. “Those seniors deserve our respect. That’s the generation that
gave us Civil Rights and Roe v. Wade and the Great Society and liberalized
immigration. You can’t criticize them. Where would America be without their
progressive values?”
But I
wholeheartedly agree with historian Tom Woods, who wrote this in a recent
newsletter: “Boomers should be exercising some kind of leadership role today,
as our elders. They should be giving us something to look up to.”
“Instead,”
he continued, “even the Boomers who consider themselves cheeky and
anti-Establishment just repeat slogans and talking points handed to them by
talk radio or the Heritage Foundation.”
Boyd ain’t no typical Boomer
Patterns should never
broad-brush 100% of a group, but they are patterns none the less. Well, Dr.
Boyd D. Cathey busts the Boomer mold. He is a
wise and learned man who uses his endless fount of knowledge in an eloquent and
outspoken way to defend truth against its varied post-modern enemies. Cathey’s
book, “The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage,” is an intellectual
sledgehammer against the Establishment however it may manifest itself.
The book,
an anthology of previously published articles, is comprised of Cathey’s essays
smashing the very “conservative” movement that defines so much of his
generation. These neoconservatives claim to be patriotic defenders of First
Principles, yet they promote an “inversion of American history.” They are the
inheritors of the “Lincolnian Revolution,” which was “the real triumph of the
19th century ‘Idea of Progress.'”
To him (and me) there is
no difference between the “leftist crazies” razing Confederate monuments and
the alleged “peace demonstrators” violently attacking law-abiding citizens in
the street (with little to no recourse) and the “Wall Street billionaires” who
fund them, and the Conservative Inc. charlatans who work at National Review or Fox News and the normie foot
soldiers who empower them. They’ve all made a business of “demonizing the South
[in order] to purify the nation.”
The
neocons have built their careers on the same egalitarian principles as the
perpetual revolutionaries of the left. So, they ridicule and attack (always
verbally and sometimes even physically) the “unwashed, rednecky ‘Southern
conservatives'” who hold a mirror up to progressivism’s historical
inconsistencies and fundamental fallacies.
Cathey
knows that if you get the “War for Southern Independence” wrong, you get
America wrong. If you don’t grasp the true history of 1861-1865, your ideology,
your principles, your worldview, and your institutions are built upon sand.
What’s
there to conserve if you don’t understand states’ rights and
self-determination, Jeffersonianism and the anti-federalists, sectionalism and
the South? At best, you half-ass buttress leftism because you think “America is
an idea,” and at worst, you wanna destroy it all. Either way, it’s a cultural
genocide meant to silence “backwards” thinking and ring in the age of
“progress.”
History is in his bones
Cathey is the product of
10 generations of loyal Tar Heel stock. An ancestor on his mother’s side was a
provincial delegate at Halifax when on April 12, 1776, the Halifax Resolves
were adopted, “making the colony of North Carolina the first to call for
independence from Great Britain.” (I bet most of today’s NC residents – I hate
to call them “North Carolinians” since so many of them are identityless transplants
from Yankeedom or even more foreign
climes – don't know the bottom of the state’s flag features a scroll emblazoned with
that important date.)
Family on
Cathey’s father’s side “were some of the first settlers west of the Yadkin
River,” by way of Scotland, through Ulster, and “down the Great Wagon Road from
Pennsylvania … eventually [making] it to almost every Southern state.” His
roots run deep.
Both
Cathey’s paternal and maternal great-grandfathers served as privates in
different regiments of the North Carolina Troops, and his
great-great-grandfather as captain of The Onslow Grays and his father as
private in the 101st Cavalry in WWII.
Cathey’s
paternal grandmother was born in 1865, but lived until 1962 and “remembered
vividly as a girl the years after that war and Renconstruction. “When I was a
boy,” he wrote, “she recounted and passed on those memories and stories to me.”
It was
this rich familial history that served as a “seedbed” for Cathey, who earned a
master’s degree in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a
Jefferson Fellow) and a doctorate in European history from the Catholic
University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (as a Richard Weaver Fellow). He went on
to serve as State Registrar of the NC Division of Archives and History, and a
long-time leader in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
But
Cathey didn’t just earn fancy degrees and work quietly behind the scenes in
preservation organizations. He writes. And writes. And writes. Passionately and
prolifically. Sometimes about opera or classical music or even his beloved
Cocker Spaniels. But it’s his politically incorrect works, of course, that draw
him so much ire.
Resisting barbarism
The War
is a “window into your view of Western Christian heritage,” Cathey explains, so
you cannot understand America without the Southern tradition. People used to
understand that. But no more. Gone are studies on brilliant statesman John C.
Calhoun and gentleman warrior Robert E. Lee. Enter in the worship of new
“conservative icons,” like the heretical MLK and tyrant Lincoln.
Thus,
Cathey’s book includes succinct essays to straighten this devolving historical
bent. Because “a people without a past have no future,” Cathey elucidates the
lives of some of the greatest but long-forgotten Southern heroes, such as
Nathaniel Macon, James Johnston Pettigrew, Robert Lewis Dabney, and Jefferson
Davis.
The book
also features a 1985 interview with Eugene Genovese, whom Cathey describes as
an “objective Marxist, a leftist scholar, and a Yankee gentleman.” Genovese
would go on to shed his progressive precepts, and become a conservative in the
most authentic meaning of the word, as well as one of the South’s most ardent
defenders.
Another chapter is a
personal story about philosopher Russell Kirk, author of the seminal work “The
Conservative Mind” and contributor to the nonconformist Southern Partisan magazine.
In the early ’70s, Cathey was the personal assistant to Kirk, “who founded back
in the 1950s what became American Conservatism (which has now been so
perverted).”
Cathey
also digs into the controversy surrounding another anti-progressive stalwart,
Mel Bradford, whom Cathey says is “perhaps the greatest historian and man of
letters that the South produced in the 20th century.” In the ’80s, Bradford was
deemed to have unacceptable opinions by the “newly dominant neoconservatives
who were rapidly establishing their control over the ‘conservative movement.'”
Bradford’s
crime? The distinguished scholar simply “did not worship at the shrine of
Abraham Lincoln.” Therefore, the power-hungry progressives within the budding
Conservative Inc. juggernaut “torpedoed” his candidacy for two humanities
positions in the Reagan administration. Cathey powerfully decries the injustice
perpetrated against his “dear and close friend” by “intellectual terrorists”
who today still claim the mantle of defending Constitutional principles.
“Defending
our story is not backward and provincial but is a part of the defense of
civilization as we have known it,” comments Southern historian Dr. Clyde Wilson
in the book’s foreword. “Herein [Cathey] has erected a sturdy wall where
we can gather to resist the barbarism of our time.”
The triggered barbarians
In an era
of leftist outrage mobs and neocon skulduggery, speaking such candid truths can
be dangerous business. Having been in the progressive cross hairs for 35-plus
years, Cathey knows the risks.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center, which I’ve heard more aptly described as the
Soviet Political Lying Center, has longtime labeled Cathey an “extremist,” a
“hater,” and a “Neo-Confederate” – all meaningless character-assassination
charge of the race pimps. But it’s not just Cathey’s pro-Southern writings that
trigger the SPLC subversives, it’s also his traditional Catholicism. He’s a
believer in Christian dogma and time-honored liturgy. Gasp!
When Cathey found out the
introduction to his book would be excerpted in a forthcoming issue of Confederate Veteran and that
the magazine would also include a book review by the ultra-unReconstructed
Donnie Kennedy, he joked, “That may get my status as one of Morris Dees’
‘hatemongers’ raised a bit!'” Cathey offers reflections on the scammin’ SPLC
and its grifter co-founder Dees in two riveting essays. You simply won’t
believe the shocking levels of corruption until you read it for yourself.
In more
recent days (and since the book’s publishing last November), Cathey was
targeted by “anti-fascists” because he hosted the annual Confederate Flag Day
event held inside NC’s Historic 1840 Capitol. The anarcho-tyrants, who
organized through the social-media handle @CrushConfederates, claim the
historian wants to “reignite a civil war.”
The
unhinged ignoramuses from Smash Racism Raleigh, Capital City Democratic Socialists,
and World Workers Party of Durham shrieked that they must “rally against white
supremacy” and stop the gathering of people with “known ties to the KKK.”
“About 50-75 vile Marxist
demonstrators serenaded us from outside, and when we left we had to have police
escorts!” Cathey explained in an email. He wrote about the March 2019
experience here.
Home is never a lost cause
“Racist, go home!” chanted
the protesters while flipping the bird to this Carolina son and his Southern
brothers and sisters in arms (and their children and grandchildren). One man
interviewed by the local press remarked that Flag Day attendees were
“interrupting what we already got going on. We ain’t got no drama. Keep it
where you’re at.”
Translation: We
progressives run the South, and you traditionalists better beware. Wow, such
hubris that the bullies consider themselves morally superior to anyone, much less proud
Confederate descendants. And even more astounding that these intolerant clowns
feel entitled to dictate where Southern-without-apology folks can go and what
they can do … and in their own damn home!
Well,
Cathey is not going gentle into that good night. And he is inspiring others to
the fact that we must begin “rejecting progressivism by recovering the fullness
of the American past.”
As Wilson noted, “History
is not a science, it is a story.” And Cathey is indeed one of the preeminent
American storytellers of our time. He is a
leader, and that is precisely why the barbarian Establishment hates him so
much.
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