August 29, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
LewRockwell and Reckonin’ Publish Gottfried’s
Confederate Flag Day Essay
Friends,
Another
column in the MY CORNER series has been picked up and, with editing, published
by Web journals. And in its edited form I pass it along today.
It is the
piece I
did a month ago on the incredible work of Dr. Paul Gottfried [July 25,
2020], specifically recalling and republishing his memorable address at the
North Carolina Confederate Flag Day ceremony on March 3, 2007, in Raleigh,
North Carolina. Dr. Gottfried is perhaps this nation’s pre-eminent Old Right
conservative scholar, and the remarkable address given back thirteen years ago
needs to be read anew by every Southerner (and American) who treasures his
traditions and heritage…and is willing to answer the Charge to preserve them in
these perilous times.
LewRockwell.com
published the essay on July 29, “Recalling Paul Gottfried on Southern Heritage,”
and the access link is:
Clyde
Wilson’ Reckonin.com journal
published the essay on August 23, “Appreciating Paul Gottfried,” and the access
link is:
I offer the full essay here with my introductory commentary:
*****
Back a little over thirteen years ago
(2007) as chairman of North Carolina’s annual Confederate Flag Day observances,
I invited my friend Dr. Paul Gottfried to travel to the Tar Heel State to be
the keynote speaker for our event at the historic 1840 State Capitol. His
remarkable address was later reprinted in several journals, including the old
and much-lamented Southern Partisan magazine.
Recently, in surveying the hundreds of older files I’ve collected I noticed
Paul’s address, and I re-read it. And I noticed how prescient and still-current
it remains. In 2007 he observed events occurring and trends that were quickly
developing, and in dramatic fashion he both saluted the dwindling number of
Southerners who were actually defending their culture while also warning them
about what was happening and about to happen.
Since Dr. Gottfried’s Cassandra-like advertence to that audience of 150 brave
souls in the State Capitol’s House of Representatives chamber that crisp March
Saturday, things have gotten incredibly worse…to the point that there is now a
real question as to whether anything, not just symbols and monuments, but
anything in our Southern heritage will survive the present revolution and the
utter and craven cowardice of the political (and cultural) elites who are
supposedly on “our side.” Almost without exception those leaders have deserted
the battlefield, even given way to the Enemies of our culture.
These days lines from William Butler Yeats’ eschatologically-tinged poem
written after the devastation of the First World War, “The Second Coming,”
return to me constantly, emblematic of our current age:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ironically, I know of no stronger defender of our Southern heritage and
traditions and our rights historically, than my friend Paul Gottfried. Of
Jewish Hungarian descent, educated at Yale (PhD), professor emeritus at
Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, author of around twenty superb books
mostly on political theory, a polyglot whose work is actually better known and
appreciated in Europe—he has continued the, at times, lonely task of defending
the older Conservatism (which welcomed Southerners) that once enjoyed
respectability and currency, but now has been overwhelmed and practically
exiled by the pseudo-conservative, warmed-over globalist Neoconservatives,
descendants of Marxist Leon Trotsky, who despise our Southern traditions and
heritage.
They much prefer embracing all the “civil rights” conquests of the far Left and
zealously pushing American involvement in wars—almost anywhere—across the globe
to establish what they call “liberal democracy.” Which of course, means the
imposition of same sex marriage, transgenderism, destruction of older
traditions and religious belief if these stand in the way of their plans: thus,
for example, the late John McCain’s frenzied attack on Russia’s Vladimir Putin
because Putin supports traditional marriage and because Russia has outlawed
homosexual propaganda in Russian schools. Such positions are a no-no,
unacceptable to our Neoconservative elites in the Republican Party or on Fox
News. Older traditions which stand in the way of Neoconservative
internationalism and egalitarianism must be attacked and displaced, and anyone
defending them maligned and excluded from “the Conservative Movement.”
Just recently the American embassy in Moscow ostentatiously flew the gay
liberation flag to celebrate gay rights (Russia had just overwhelmingly passed
constitutional amendments completely outlawing same sex marriage). President
Putin’s comment (July 3) was to mock the silly American gesture: "Let them
celebrate,” he responded to the stunt. “They've shown a certain something about
the people who work there," he added with a wry smile. But the embassy’s
action also illustrates something about current American culture and society,
and the Neocon dominance even within the Trump administration, and it may help
to explain why the Neoconservative virus which dominates the Conservative
Movement and the GOP also despises the traditional South and its
heritage.
I pass on Professor Gottfried’s remarkable clarion call, his 2007 speech, which
is still current and spot on, even more so in today’s revolutionary,
anti-Southern and anti-Confederate atmosphere. Prophetic and hard, but
necessary truth, if we would only listen and act.
Why do they hate the South and its
Symbols? By Paul Gottfried
Confederate Flag Day, State
Capitol, Raleigh, N.C. – March 3, 2007
Those Southern secessionists whose national
flag we are now celebrating have become identified not only with a lost cause
but with a now publicly condemned one. Confederate flags have been removed from
government and educational buildings throughout the South, while Confederate
dignitaries whose names and statues once adorned monuments and boulevards are
no longer deemed as fit for public mention.
The ostensible reason for this obliteration or dishonoring of Southern history,
save for those civil rights victories that came in the second half of the
twentieth century, has been the announced rejection of a racist society, a
development we are persistently urged to welcome. During the past two
generations or so, the South, we have been taught, was a viciously insensitive
region, and the Southern cause in 1861 was nothing so much as the attempt to
perpetuate the degradation of blacks through a system based on racial slavery.
We told now that we should therefore rejoice at the reconstructing of Southern
society and culture in a way that excludes, and indeed extirpates from our
minds, except as an incentive to further white atonement, the pre-civil rights
past, also known as “the burden of Southern history.” This last, frequently
encountered phrase is from the title of a famous study of the South by C. Vann
Woodward, who in his time was a liberal-minded Southern historian.
Arguments can be raised to refute or modify the received account of Southern
history now taught in our public schools and spread by leftist and
neoconservative journalists. One can point to the fact that a crushing federal
tariff falling disproportionately on Southern states contributed to the
sectional hostilities that led to the Southern bid for independence. One can
also bring up the willingness of Southern leaders to free blacks and even to
put them in grey uniforms, as the price of the freedom that Southerners were
seeking from Northern control. And even if one deplores slavery, this
commendable attitude, which was also shared by some Confederate leaders, does
not justify the federal invasion of the South, with all of its attendant
killing and depredation. That invasion took place, moreover, in violation of a
right to secede, with which several states, including Virginia, had entered the
Union.
A comparison is drawn nowadays between two supposedly equivalent evils, the Old
South and Nazi Germany. This comparison has entered the oratory of the NAACP
and the Black Caucus; it has also has appeared with increasing frequency in
social histories that have come from the American historical profession since
the Second World War. A bizarre variation on this comparison, and one
frequently heard from the American political Left, is between the Holocaust and
Southern slavery. First brought up by the historian Stanley Elkins (when I was
still an undergraduate), this seemingly unstoppable obscenity is resurrected
whenever black politicians demand reparations. Not surprisingly, those who
claim that the Holocaust was unique and that comparing it to any other mass
murders, particularly those committed by the Communists, is an impermissible
outrage have never to my knowledge protested the likening of American slavery
or segregation to the ghastliness of Auschwitz.
The benign acceptance of this comparison by would-be Holocaust-custodians has
more to do with leftist political alliances than it does with any genuine
reaction to Nazi atrocities. At the very least, reason would require us to
acknowledge that Southern slave-owners were vitally concerned about preserving
their human chattel, even if they sometimes failed to show them due Christian
charity and concern. Unlike the Nazis, these slave-owners were not out to
exterminate a race of people; nor did Southern theologians and political
leaders deny the humanity of those who served them, a point that historians
Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have demonstrated at some length.
But all of this has been by way of introduction to the gist of my remarks. What
interests me as a sympathetic outsider looking at your culturally rich region,
goes back to an agonized utterance made by someone at the end of William
Faulkner’s magnificent literary achievement, The Sound and the Fury. The
character, Quentin, who has journeyed from Mississippi to Cambridge, Massachusetts,
to study at Harvard, and who will eventually take his life, tries to convince
himself that “No, I don’t hate the South.” This question is no longer a source
of tortured embarrassment, but part of a multicultural catechism that requires
an immediate affirmative answer. That is to say, every sound-thinking
(bien-pensant) respondent is supposed to hate the “real” South, as opposed to
warm-weather resorts that cater to retirees and in contrast to places
commemorating Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King. The South, as the location
of the Lost Cause and of Confederate war monuments, is one that we are taught
to put out of our minds. It is something that a sensitive society should
endeavor to get beyond—and to suppress.
Looking at this anti-Southernness, in whose filter displaying a Confederate
battle flag, particularly in the South, has been turned into a hate crime, one
may wish to consider the oddness of such an attitude. Why should those
associated with a defeated cause, and one whose combatants were long admired as
heroic even by the victorious side, become moral pariahs for their descendants?
Is there anything startlingly new about our knowledge of Southern history since
the early 1950s, when my public school teachers in Connecticut spoke with respect
about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which would account for the present
condemnation of the same figures? A few years ago, following my viewing of
“Gods and Generals,” a movie that deals with the personality and military
career of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, I was struck by the widespread attacks on
the movie director, Ron Maxwell. Apparently this celebrated director had failed
to use his art to expose “Southern racism.”
In fact there was nothing in the movie that suggests any sympathy for human
bondage. In one memorable scene, for example, Jackson’s black manservant raises
a question in the presence of his master, about whether it is proper to hold a
fellow-Christian as a slave. The devout Presbyterian Jackson, who ponders this
question, has no answer for his manservant, with whom he has just been praying.
How any of this constitutes a defense of slavery is for me incomprehensible,
but it does confirm my impression that there is something peculiarly twisted
about the current repugnance for the Old South-- and indeed for any South
except for the one reconstructed by federal bureaucrats in the last fifty
years. On visits to Montgomery, Alabama, I have noticed two local histories,
which, like straight lines, never intercept, but nonetheless confront each
other on public plaques. One is associated with the birthplace of the
Confederacy; and the other with the political activities of Martin Luther King
and the distinctly leftist Southern Poverty Law Center. The headquarters of the
SPLC, this watchdog of Political Correctness, stands obliquely down the street
below the state capitol.
It may have been a pipe dream that the two historical narratives, divided by
culture as well as race, could be either bridged or allowed to function
simultaneously. What has happened is entirely different. One of the two
competing narratives, the one about the South as a bigoted backwater until the
triumph of revolutionary forces aided by the federal government changed it, has
not only triumphed but has been used to drive out its rival narrative. It might
have been a happier outcome if Southern whites and Southern blacks could have
agreed on a single narrative that would not demean either race. The second best
outcome would have been if both had retained their accounts of the Southern
past, as separate non-intersecting ones that nonetheless remained equally
appropriate for different groups. The worst outcome, however, is the one that
we now have. It is one in which the descendants of the defeated are taught to
vilify or treat dismissively their ancestors, so that they can demonstrate
their broadmindedness and remorse about past racism. As a result of this
inflicted attitude one is no longer allowed to speak about the South as an
historical region without focusing on its real or alleged sins.
But this has not always been the official situation. Certainly this was not the
case, even in the North, from the years after Reconstruction up until the
second half of the twentieth century, when even veterans of the Union army
praised their former foes. It was also not always the case even afterwards, as
Shelby Foote’s treatment of the losing side in his work on the Civil War, a
classic that has gone through multiple printings, would indicate. The venting
of hate and contempt on the South, as found in such predictably unfriendly
authors as Eric Foner and James McPherson, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
It underscores the fact that the Old South has been defeated twice—and the
second time at the level of historical memory even more disastrously than in a
shooting war that it lost in the 1860s.
The American white South has fallen victim to the “politics of guilt,” a dreary
subject, albeit one on which I have written widely. The Yankee victors of the
1860s, who overwhelmed the Southerners by virtue of their numbers and superior
industrial power, did considerable wartime damage. They also subsequently
occupied the land of those whom they had vanquished militarily, but then did
something that was equally important. They went home, and permitted their
devastated opponents to rebuild without an occupying army. What I mean to say
is that the first occupation was morally and psychologically less destructive
than the ever deepening humiliation that is going on now.
The first victors were mostly Yankee Protestants, who in some ways were similar
to those they had invaded and occupied. Once the passions of fratricidal war
had cooled, these Yankees were able to view their former enemies as kindred
spirits. Although they were establishing a bourgeois commercial regime, one
that differed from the prevalent Southern way of life, the winning side had
also recruited farmers and those whose culture did not diverge significantly
from that of those who had fought on the Southern side. In a certain sense Socrates’
observation about Greeks once applied to Americans as well. While they could
fight brutally with each other, they were still brothers, and so some form of
“reconciliation” was eventually possible for the former enemies. And both North
and South came up with a narrative about their past differences which bestowed
honor to the heroes on both sides. This was possible with the Yankee Unionists,
who wished to draw Southerners back into their community, even after a terrible
war had been fought to keep the Southerners in a Union that they had tried to
leave.
But the second civil war seeks the utter humiliation of those who are seen as
opponents of a society that is still being imposed. The Southern
traditionalists from this perspective are particularly obnoxious inasmuch as
they are a full two-steps behind the project in question. Those who insist on
these changes are no longer Victorian capitalists or Methodist and
Congregationalist villagers from the North. They are post-bourgeois social
engineers and despisers of Western civilization, a stage of development that
these revolutionaries identify with discrimination and exclusion.
In Southern traditionalists they see those who are still celebrating a
pre-bourgeois, agrarian, and communally structured world. That world appealed
to hierarchy, place, and family, and its members displayed no special interest
in reaching out to alien cultures. Such ideals and attitudes and the landed,
manorial society out of which they came point back to a nineteenth-century
conservative configuration. For our post-bourgeois leftist intelligentsia, this
point of reference and model of behavior cannot be allowed to persist. It
clashes with feminism and the current civil rights movement, and hinders the
acceptance of a multicultural ambience.
The fact that people like yourselves are still around and still honoring the
national flag of nineteenth-century landed warriors from the American South
might have the effect, or so it is thought, of making others equally
insensitive. Even worse, those who engage in these celebratory rites do not
express the now fashionable “guilt” about members of their race and tribe.
Those being remembered had owned slaves, and they would have denied women, whom
in any case they treated as inherently different from men, equal access to
jobs. Needless to say, non-Westerners are not required to dwell on similar
improprieties among their ancestors or contemporaries, and so they may
celebrate their collective pasts without disclaimers or reservations. The
hairshirt to be worn only fits Western bodies, and in particular impenitent
Southern ones.
It is against this background that one might try to understand the loathing
that the political, journalistic, and educational establishment reserves for
the unreconstructed white inhabitants of the South. You seem to bother that
establishment to a degree that Louis Farrakhan and those unmistakable
anti-white racists, who are often found in our elite universities, could never
hope to equal. You exemplify what the late Sam Francis called the “chief
victimizers” in our victimologically revamped society, an experimental society
that fits well with our increasingly rootless country. But your enemies are
also the enemies of historic Western civilization, or of the West that existed
in centuries past. You may take pride in those whom you honor as your linear
ancestors but equally in the anger of those who would begrudge you the right to
honor them. What your critics find inexcusable is that you are celebrating your
people’s past, which was a profoundly conservative one based on family and
community, and those who created and defended it. For your conspicuous
indiscretions, I salute you; and I trust that generations to come will take
note of your willingness to defy the spirit of what is both a cowardly and
tyrannical age.
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