March 17, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

A SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR Responds to My Article on Confederate Flag Day, 2019

Friends,

Back on March 6 in this series I wrote a column detailing what had occurred at the 31^st Annual Confederate Flag Day ceremony this year, March 2 at the State Capitol in Raleigh [https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2019/03/march-6-2019-my-corner-by-boyd-cathey.html]. Almost immediately that installment of MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey was picked up by several online journals, including The Abbeville Institute, the NC Heritage PAC, and Reckonin.com.  And it brought an outpouring of reaction, not just from supporters and defenders of Confederate heritage, but also from some of the fanatical uber-Marxists whose goal is to not only wipe America clean of anything reminding us of the sacrifices of Confederate veterans, but to “exterminate” those who are considered by their ever-advancing, ever-manipulated template to be representatives of or infected by what they term “racism,” “white privilege,” or the “accumulated sins of European [white] civilization.”

I do not use the term “exterminate” lightly, for that word can be defined as: “destroy completely,” “put an end to,” and “do away with.” And that is precisely the long range goal of the new class of social justice warriors who attempted to physically attack the families attending the flag day ceremony. Their unhinged passion and unmistakable fury and madness were visible for all to see and witness, as I described in my March 6 column.

Apparently I hit a nerve; apparently my analysis of these frothing-at-the-mouth Leftists struck too close to home. For after the publication of my column at the Reckonin.com Web site [See, “What Happened At Confederate Flag Day,” March, 8, 2019, at https://www.reckonin.com/boyd-cathey/what-happened-at-confederate-flag-day-2019], one of their number, “Johnathan Brown”—from all appearances he may have been a part of the mob that attempted to storm our event back on March 2—scribbled kind of a response [attached at the end of my comments].

And it is quite fascinating not for just what he says, but for how he says it, and the rather explicit promises that he makes.

Notice, first, the attempted and awkward use of elevated language, the use of a certain scientific jargon to analyze what I wrote. What is remarkable is the use of such words “pathologize, “disingenuous,” and “reifies” which are misspelled and employed in a pseudo-intellectual manner. Based on several MA theses I’ve read recently and the level of instruction now present at UNC and other universities in this state, I would reluctantly hazard the guess that the writer was either a budding college instructor or maybe an aspiring grad student, perhaps taking a semester off to engage in the crusade for social justice. That is what tens of thousands of dollars will buy today for students at our most prestigious universities: the continued infection of their already poisoned minds, attained by what is called “education” at our once­ storied institutions of learning.

My column’s analysis of one of the major reasons impelling that almost entirely white mob, that they were through that manifestation trying in a way to expiate “white guilt” which they had inherited and felt responsible for, was met by the writer’s charge that I was somehow engaged in “psychological projection.”  

That accusation not only raised my eyebrows but caused me to chuckle.

Wikipedia defines psychological projection as: “a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.”

Alas, the writer fails to understand: unlike the hysterical social justice warriors, I do not carry a “burden of white guilt,” I do not believe I must “expiate the sins of my forefathers.” Just the contrary, I am proud of them and honor them. Indeed, I really wish I could “project” that impulse onto some of the miserable members of that mob. Unfortunately, that does not appear doable at present, barring some massive Damascus Road conversion…or perhaps their mass emigration to, say, North Korea. [As tight as I am with my finances, I would be inclined to pay for a one-way passage for the correspondent to remove himself to Pyongyang.]

If anyone—especially many of our run-to-the-tall-grass conservative political and business leaders—believes that simply by looking the other way, this issue, the question of the unhinged attacks on our Western culture and traditions, will somehow go away, then they need to read this writer. Better yet, they need to read carefully the Web sites of such groups as the Communist Workers World Party (centered in Durham), Democratic Socialists of America NC, or Redneck Revolt, or check out some of their chatter online at Twitter.

As the frenzied Leftist respondent makes explicitly clear, all methods, both legal and extra-legal, form part of their strategy. If they can utilize the laws of the state—as they have done in North Carolina counties with Left-leaning court systems like Durham and Orange, well and good; but, if they must, they will violate our laws and, depending on the cowardice of local law enforcement, hope to escape with impunity…which in fact they have managed to do thus far.

Even more, as in the case of the toppling of the monument “Silent Sam” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to student veterans who volunteered for the Confederacy, the demonstrators clearly and visibly involved—including grad student Maya Little, got off with not even a slap on the wrist. Indeed, the school’s honor court handed down no punishment at all—if they could, they would probably have given her a medal, when she richly deserved expulsion—and jail time.

In late May 2019 the UNC system Board of Governors will render its decision on whether to place the “Silent Sam” monument back in its proper place, as state law demands; or if they will attempt to placate the mob—and those like the respondent to my March 6 essay. Perhaps they hope that by some compromise or giving in to loud and offensive demands, they can avoid or put off the question?  If so, they should re-read the last lines penned by this social justice warrior:  “The protests the other night against you are simply the continuation of the long struggle and march forward against the forces of division and barbarism.  Expect more of them. Your time is over. Ours is just beginning.”

The Progressivist Revolution has a way of engorging itself on those who think that they can escape it or avoid it. It is the forces of the lunatic and fanatical Left who are the real barbarians who wish to eradicate and destroy our civilization. And the sooner such groups as the UNC Board of Governors and well-meaning but pusillanimous legislators understand this, the better for them, and for the survival of our culture.

Over a century ago the English essayist, author and poet Hilaire Belloc foresaw the temporizing attitude of those who believed they could elude the tentacles of Revolution:

“The 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.”  [Hilaire Belloc’s This and That and the Other (1912) p. 282] 

As you read the semi-literate screed of my respondent, take his words seriously.  Thousands like him are incubated and turned loose into the body politic each year by thousands of colleges across the land. Turning the other way, refusing to administer radical educational reform, failing to stand up to this challenge, is to enable the demonic forces of our doom. While my friend Dr. Clyde Wilson’s suggestion that our universities need to be napalmed is certainly hyperbolic, his urgency is not.

Here are those words of the commenter:

*************

Johnathan Brown  3/11/2019 04:09:29 am

https://www.reckonin.com/boyd-cathey/what-happened-at-confederate-flag-day-2019

“Perhaps it is time for you to recognize that much like the values embodied by Confederate monuments, the values embodied by the SCV are no longer the values of society at large.

To be sure, the installation of the monuments were part of a broader attempt not to chronicle history, but to actively distort it. In 2019, to continue to fetishize and rehabilitate the Confederate cause in the face of historical reality is beyond everything else, a white supremacist flight of fancy.

Your sloppy and disengenuous attempts to patholigize the people who protested your cosplay event betrays both the frailty of your position and demonstrates perhaps more then a slight bit of psychological projection.

The attempt to reduce the protests to an expression again is a crude attempt to pathologize and is also a "straw man" arguement. What is shows is that you either have not ever enagaged in good faith with the arguments made against your position or you are simply posturing for your audience.

The battle against white supremacy is not born out of a feeling of guilt, but of a concrete analysis of material reality. White supremacist ideology never provided actual benefit to the majority of white people. It functions im such a way that it reifys existing class relations through the enforcement of a racial hierarchy. This has prevented the white working class from recognizing their own class interests as they often have mistakenly viewed their bourgeoisie oppressors as their equals and their black and brown co-workers as their lessors. The fight against white supremacy is an attempt to right this longstanding historical and still prescient, wrong.

The removal of the monuments will continue, both thru legal and extra legal means. The protests the other night against you are simply the continuation of the long struggle and march forward against the forces of division and barbarism. Expect more of them. Your time is over. Ours is just beginning.”