Remembrances for October - 2022

 

Dear friends, if you have time, please pray for these members of the Southern family on the day they reposed.  Many thanks.

But one may ask:  ‘What good does it do to pray for the departed?’  An answer is offered here:  https://orthochristian.com/130608.html

Along with prayers and hymns for the departed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6je5axPodI

3 Oct.

Henry Hughes of Port Gibson, Mississippi.  He did a little of everything:  lawyer, sociologist, State senator, soldier.  Some of his ideas are no longer of interest, but his vision of an economy that looks and functions like a family is still worthy of consideration.

https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/henry-hughes/

His book, Treatise on Sociology:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000000449458&view=1up&seq=5

7 Oct.

Edgar Allen Poe of Virginia, one of the South’s finest writers.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/poe-of-virginia/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/822/edgar-allan-poe/photo

8 Oct.

Norbert Rillieux of New Orleans, greatly improved the sugar-refining process.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/norbertrillieux.html

12 Oct.

Gen Robert Edward Lee, our dear and loving father.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-robert-e-lee/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/the-real-robert-e-lee/

23 Oct.

Chief George Washington Harkins, leader of the Choctaw tribe who led them along the Trail of Tears from Mississippi to Oklahoma.  His memorable farewell to the people of Mississippi may be read here:

https://www.ushistory.org/documents//harkins.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Harkins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_removal#/media/File:Trails_of_Tears_en.png

His son David Harkins served as a Lt Col in the Confederate Army as part of the Choctaw Mounted Rifles and also served as a stateman in Choctaw politics:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/18910347/david-folsom-harkins

29 Oct.

Sir Walter Raleigh, helped establish one of the earliest colonies in the South on Roanoke Island; he also found time for writing poetry and prose and for military service.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Raleigh-English-explorer

Some of his poetry is here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sir-walter-ralegh

29 Oct.

Joel Sweeney of Virginia, he popularized the banjo inside and outside of the South.

http://www.cgim.org/sweeneyclan/misc/musical.html

29 Oct.

Clarence Jordan, another recent Southern agrarian, founder of the Koinonia Farm in Georgia.  Also a preacher and a defender of black folks during the turmoil of the Civil Rights era, which made him and his Farm a target of violent attacks.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clarence-jordan-and-the-southern-tradition/

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of October from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow this link on over:

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/11/happy-feast-for-saints-of-october.html

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Leadership and Culture Creation’

 

We have perhaps imbibed a little too heavily of the libertarian likker here at the South of late, believing naively that when a need arises, ‘the market’ will spontaneously act to meet that need.  This is not an ironclad law by any means.  Especially when it comes to the creation and preservation of a people’s culture, strong leadership that is willing to undergo hardships and sacrifices, rather than acquiesce to the soft seductions of monetary profits and related interests, is often needed.

Serbian and Southern history again intertwine to illustrate this for us.  We begin with Stefan Lazarevic (+1427; also called Stefan the Tall), the son of the Great Martyr at the Battle of Kosovo Polje, Prince Lazar (+1389).  Serbia had been crushed by the Muslim Turks; if decisive action were not taken, Serbia’s Christian identity itself was at risk of being lost.  Thankfully for the Serbian people, the very young Stefan did not shrink back but took upon himself the difficult task of putting the shattered pieces of the Serbian ethnos back together again:

 

Already as a thirteen-year-old, by coincidence, he began his ruling career. And the task is too difficult - Serbia with great material and human sacrifices, in which there is powerlessness and general fear of the Turkish invasion.

 

The surviving nobles retreated to their territories without wanting to take care of the population.

 

In such circumstances and with the wholehearted help of his mother, Stefan matured as a person, statesman and warrior.  . . .

 

As an Ottoman vassal, Stefan led Serbian detachments in the battles of Rovine, near Nikopolje and Angora.

 

The Battle of Angora in 1402 was a heavy defeat for the Ottoman forces, but also the place where Stefan's warrior skills shone the most. After her, he received the title of despot.

 

The writer Aleksandar Tešić, the author of the novel about despot Stefan "The one who taught darkness to shine", says:

 

"After this battle, the fame of despot Stefan spread far and wide. Everyone admired him like a warrior. Even the Mongols "took off his hat". On the other hand, in the battle of Angora, Sultan Bayezid was captured and soon died, and there was a statement by despot Stefan that it was his happiest day because he freed himself from Bayezid's shackles."

A parallel may be seen in the way Dixie had to pull herself together after falling to the Yanks in the War:

 

William G. “Parson” Brownlow was a Tennessee Unionist who did not discriminate between black Africans and white Southerners; he hated both equally. After the war, Brownlow was elected Tennessee Governor in an election in which only other white Unionists were allowed to vote. Of Southern whites Governor Brownlow decreed, “Let them be exterminated,” and called on the federal government to “make the entire South as God formed the earth, without form or void.” In turn, Forrest responded, “If they bring this war upon us, there is one thing I will tell you – that I shall not shoot any negroes so long as I can see a white Radical to shoot, for it is the Radicals who will be to blame for bringing on this war.” When Brownlow went to the U.S. Senate and Clinton DeWitt Senter (a more moderate Tennessee Unionist) took his place as Governor, Senter ceased his predecessor’s apocalyptic threats, disbanded the militia, and promised to restore suffrage to former Confederates. Forrest considered the Klan’s mission accomplished and ordered its disbandment. “There was no further need for it,” he explained. “The country was safe.”

James R. Roesch

But a leader’s work does not end simply because the clash of swords has ceased.  The well-being of a people is not secure without the protection and enhancement of their cultural edifice.  Just as a man needs a home to dwell in, so a community of men needs a culture to live within.

St Stefan’s example is helpful and very multifaceted:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/leadership-and-culture-creation.

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘An Education Worthy of the Name’

 

Cheers to Representatives Amedee, Crews, et al., for their essay advocating a more responsible approach to public education than the social engineering model being pushed by those who are woke, Marxist, and so on.  A focus on fundamentals in the classroom is good and needful, but the Representatives have narrowed the list of essentials a little too much.  From their essay:

In our estimation, the mission of education in the public sector is to provide a foundational system that teaches, evaluates, teaches AGAIN if necessary, then graduates into the work force the school-age children of our citizens.  The state is obliged to provide to the taxpayers who live within our borders a safe and healthy environment for students from elementary grades up through the completion of high school.  Anything else is extraneous and potentially distracting and harmful.

 . . .

The mission of our schools should be to teach children first the basics, then intermediate, then, where appropriate, advanced levels of instruction.  Children need to be able to read.  They need to be able to write and speak in the English language (yes, it’s ok to teach foreign languages, but English is the language of our country).  They need to be able to understand and demonstrate basic skills in mathematics.  Children need to be able to understand and apply varying types of science, including biology, chemistry and physics.  Students need to understand and use the Scientific Method.  Finally, students need to understand the framework of history and how our governments are structured and how they are supposed to work.

This sort of instruction, focused on the natural/physical sciences, has a valuable place in society, but to say that it is the essence of good education for all children is to reduce human beings to something subhuman, to a mere faceless worker-drone in a corporate business hive, whose only unique characteristic of his identity is his Social Security number.

No, mankind is infinitely more complex than this; and boys and girls and young men and young women require an education broad and deep enough to match that multifaceted spiritual and material nature.

What are the fundamentals of an education that is really fit for a human child?  The excellent conservative writer and thinker of the 20^th century, Dr Russell Kirk, gives us a good outline:

The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

He goes on elsewhere to criticize the shallowness of modern education:

Humanism is a discipline that traces its origins back to the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, and has existed ever since to humanize men. Cicero and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were at once the Roman exemplars and the Roman preceptors of this humanizing process, for which our term is “a liberal education.” The humanists believed that through the study of great lives and great thoughts the minds of earnest men could be molded nobly. The process was both intellectual and ethical. This humane discipline, passed along in the literature of Christian theology, classic philosophy, poetry, history, biography, dominated the thinking of the whole of the Western world—until very late in the nineteenth century. Humanism persists today, but with influence greatly weakened.

. . .

But with the successive industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with what Friedrich Juenger calls “the triumph of technology,” this veneration of humane learning began to disappear—especially among businessmen in America. Applied science, “positivism,” seemed to be the keys to complete power. Powerful voices were raised then in disparagement of the humanities and in praise of “efficiency,” “pragmatism,” “progress.” The School of Business Administration pushed the Schools of Theology and Classical Studies into a dim corner. People asked impatiently: Why waste years in school over Cicero?

A people can live upon their moral and intellectual capital for a long time. Yet eventually, unless the capital is replenished, they arrive at cultural bankruptcy. The intellectual and political and industrial leaders of the older generation die, and their places are not filled. The humanitarian cannot substitute for the humane man. The result of such bankruptcy is a society of meaninglessness, or a social revolution that brings up radical and unscrupulous talents to turn society inside out.

But this sort of narrow, industrial-style education is exactly what the Representatives are telling us we need.  C. S. Lewis saw exactly where this utilitarian form of education leads in The Abolition of Man (quoted in another relevant Kirk essay):

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2022/07/garlington-an-education-worthy-of-the-name/.

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Darya Dugin: In Memoriam’

 

A youthful sunflower,

   Golden, beaming,

Standing with your father

   Proudly musing,

Cut down by coward’s hand

   With hidden bomb,

IED assassin

   Riding along

In your car – explosion,

   Mangled body

Burned past recognition –

   Latest Yankee

Victim, another corpse

Without remorse

Thrown upon the heap –

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/darya-dugin-in-memoriam.

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!