July 25, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Two Remarkable Articles by Paul Gottfried on the South and
Confederate Heritage
Friends,
Back a little over thirteen years ago
(2007) as chairman of North Carolina’s annual Confederate Flag Day observances,
I invited my good 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 lamented Southern Partisan
magazine.
This morning in surveying the hundreds
of files I’ve collected over the years I noticed Paul’s address, and I re-read
it. And I noticed how remarkably 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 far 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 a century ago, “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.
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 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 Neconservative internationalism and egalitarianism must be attacked and
displaced, and anyone defending them maligned and defamed.
Just recently the American embassy in Moscow ostentatiously flew
the gay liberation flag to celebrate gay rights (Russia had just passed
overwhelmingly 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 two items by Professor Gottfried, one very recent, and
the second, the 2007 speech, which is still current and spot on, even more so
in today’s revolutionary, anti-Southern and anti-Confederate atmosphere.
Prophetic bookends and hard but necessary truth, if we would only listen and
act.
The 2007 speech remains a remarkable clarion call.
Reenacting the
Civil War Is a Losing Strategy
By Paul Gottfried July 15, 2020
I had to
double-check recently that the Civil War actually did end in 1865. I wondered
whether this was still the case after hearing Republican spokesmen and
Conservative Inc. celebrities demonizing Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and
other 19th century Southern leaders. American history seems to
grow more hateful to our establishment conservatives as the years flow by.
Anti-Confederate
rants are now common on Fox News and in mainstream Republican publications.
These conservatives seem to approve, at least implicitly, of the toppling of
Confederate statues, and they seem shocked and hurt when the left doesn’t give
them credit for this stance. Fox News commentator Brit Hume in an interview
with Bret Baier expressed
shock that President Trump’s July 3 Mt. Rushmore speech caused
Democrats to accuse him of being pro-Confederate. Trump, notes Hume, kept out
of his speech any defense of anything even remotely Confederate, while
glorifying Lincoln, Grant, and especially Martin Luther King, Jr. The president
even managed to suppress any outrage over the toppling and dishonoring of
Confederate memorial monuments.
Since GOP
propagandists Dinesh D’Souza and Mark Levin have been
attacking the Democrats repeatedly as the party of Southern traitors, I have
begun to wonder whom these tirades are supposed to persuade. This is aside from
the question of whether the South had an at least defensible right to secede,
given the circumstances in which it joined the Union. Or, whether the 11
Southern states, which collected an army of a million men, were necessarily
engaging in traitorous rebellion by deciding to form a new nation (they weren’t
traitors).
Today’s
conservative movement may be beyond pondering such historical questions. On
July 12, the New
York Post published a two-page exposé by Michael
Goodwin on The New
York Times’ late 19th-century founder Adolph Ochs. A
German-Jewish newspaper magnate from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Ochs came from a
pro-Confederate family that had fought in the War for Southern Independence, as
Robert N. Rosen wrote in The Jewish Confederates. Ochs’s beloved
mother belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Times’ owner went out
of his way to fly Confederate Battle Flags. A few years ago, the Post’s editorial
board expressed pleasure when a tile with a Confederate flag that the Times’ founder had
embedded in the New York subway system was removed. According to the Post, Ochs had been buried with a Confederate banner.
This fixation with
ritualistically denouncing the Confederacy is rather bewildering. The Civil War,
which appears still to be traumatizing the GOP, has been over for some time.
Moreover, the winning side was wise to eventually accord equal honor to the
defeated South. This was a highly intelligent strategy to restore peace, as was
the decision to pay the pensions of Confederate as well as Union veterans; as
was allowing the conciliatory Virginian aristocrat who commanded the Southern
armies, Robert E. Lee, to become one of America’s most honored heroes. Lee was
until recently venerated by Americans of all political stripes. The Republican
president of my youth, Dwight Eisenhower, came close to worshipping him.
This grace in
victory is exactly what made Americans of the past different from the
Spaniards, who have never stopped fighting their civil war, waged between the
two irreconcilably hostile sides of their country, since it began in 1936.
Today, some Americans have decided to descend into the same muck of
irreconcilable hostility. This conflict might escalate more thoroughly if
Southern whites cared a bit more about being slimed. Remarkably, most of them
do not. But Southern white indifference or Southern Republican servility in the
face of being collectively insulted still does not make this bizarre obsession
look any more sensible.
Whom are
establishment conservatives trying to impress by trashing the Southern side in
the Civil War? Pace Levin
and D’Souza, the present Democratic Party has nothing in common, other than its
name, with the party of Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Franklin Pierce. As Fox
News host Tucker Carlson has pointed out between his own broadsides against the
Southern “traitors,” Democrats today may indeed be unfit to govern—but not
because the politicians who called themselves Democrats owned slaves in 1860.
English Tories in the 1820s opposed the enfranchisement of Catholics. Still, it
is hard to figure out what that position has to do with the party of Prime
Minister Boris Johnson. American Democrats up until a few years ago opposed gay
marriage, but are now fanatically supportive of LGBT rights. European parties
of the right have switched to become working-class parties, while European
parties of the left attract woke corporate executives and radical lifestyle
activists. Political landscapes do change and have done so dramatically since
1860.
All this gnashing
of teeth over the events of the 1860s would make some sense if it were likely
to bring about an electoral windfall. But it’s hard to see whom the
anti-Southern conservatives and GOP operatives hope to win over by engaging in
such hysterics. Do they really think more blacks will vote for them if they
stridently demand the removal of the statues of Confederate “traitors,” which
has become a hallmark position of the editor
of National Review?
The blacks who will likely vote Republican are concerned with the burning of
their businesses and homes, acts of violence that the Democrats either incited
or excused. The GOP has no hope of recruiting those of the left who are
seething with rage, or pretending to seethe, over Confederate monuments.
WHY DO THEY HATE THE
SOUTH AND ITS SYMBOLS?
By
Professor 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 your
selves 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.
Thank you. Can you recommend any criticism of the Civil Rights movement and its implications? shortpumpsuzuki@gmail.com
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