The 2022
session of the Louisiana Legislature looked promising, with bills to ban
transgender men in women’s sports, to allow concealed carrying of firearms
without a permit, to nullify Roe v Wade, and others. But then along comes a poison pill:
A bill to remove
Robert E. Lee and Confederate Memorial Day from the list of legal holidays in
the state advances unanimously in House Judiciary. Bill Author New Orleans
Representative Matthew Willard said he was unaware the legal holidays were
still on the books until a constituent let him know.
“I actually
didn’t believe it, truly I didn’t believe it. And so I looked into our statue
and there enough among our list of legal holidays contains those two,” said
Willard.
Willard said it
was very emotional as a young black man to see the two holidays still
recognized. . . .
While the
holidays are no longer formally observed in Louisiana, they remain listed as
official holidays. Willard implored members to show compassion for how these
holidays impact himself and others like him.
“I plead with
you, I guess to try to put yourself in my shoes, as a young black man in this
state, who just found out that those two holidays existed and how that would
affect you,” said Willard.
The bill now
moves to the House floor.
Passing this
bill would be a horrible thing to do. In
an age that is in desperate need of real heroes (not the phony Marvel comics
type), we should be doing more to draw attention to the virtues of Lee and our
Southern forefathers, not less.
General Lee
et al. had virtues? Yes, indeed, my
fellow victims of Yankee-written education.
Here is some of what a distinguished Southern professor and writer from
South Carolina, Dr. Clyde Wilson, said about him recently:
His father was a dashing cavalry officer in
the struggle to free the colonies from the British. Two uncles signed the
Declaration of Independence. His wife was the granddaughter of Martha
Washington.
At West Point he was second in his class
with an outstanding record of no demerits. His brilliant engineering work
was credited with saving St. Louis from destructive floods. In the war
with Mexico he was chief of engineers on the staff of the general commanding
the expeditionary force deep in Mexico and carried out vital and dangerous
missions.
As commandant at West Point he improved the
institution, giving the cadets an environment of professionalism and
honour. In the period before the war between the States he was commanding
cavalry on the dangerous Texas frontier.
When division became inevitable with the
election of an aggressively sectional President, he was offered the
supreme command of the forces of the U.S. government to put down “the
rebellion,” an opportunity that could lead to fame, wealth, and even the
Presidency. The crafty politicians made the offer indirectly so they
could deny it if he refused, which they did. A “Union” held together by
bayonets did not meet his idea of the “Union” that his folks had done so much
to create.
He went home to defend his folks, which he
did with world-class skill. He won epic battles again and again with
greatly inferior numbers and resources. In sharp contrast to high-living
Northern generals with large staffs and lavishly uniformed escorts, he lived
the simple life of a soldier in the field. He was admired around the world and
so valued by his soldiers that they blocked him from advancing into the line of
fire.
When defeat was inevitable, he quietly
accepted surrender and returned to his family as a paroled prisoner of war and
a non-citizen of a country which his people had done so much to
create. He might have dispersed his men to carry on a guerilla war that
could have lasted for years but he knew that his Southern people would continue
to suffer with that course.
His family home had been stolen and
maliciously turned into a cemetery for his enemies, but his fame brought
offers of a gift of an English estate and efforts of businessmen to use
his name that would have made him rich. Instead, he accepted a meager salary as
president of a small, struggling college. His only hesitation in accepting was
fear that he might bring persecution on the college.
At Washington College, which in time would
become Washington and LEE University, he expanded the curriculum in useful
directions and installed a notable honour code. He urged young men to
quietly work at rebuilding the South. He created what was once known as
LEE Chapel, where his final resting place is being hidden from visitors.
President Truman had an equestrian painting
of Lee and Jackson in the front lobby of his Presidential Library.
President Eisenhower had Lee’s portrait in the Oval Office, defended him
vigorously, and commissioned a nuclear submarine, the Robert E. Lee.
Churchill described him as among the greatest captains in the long history of
the English-speaking people.
Almost 20 years after the war, with
thousands of small contributions from an impoverished people, was made a statue
for Monument Avenue in the city that he had defended. It was not only a
magnificent memorial but also a significant work of art. Hundreds of
people volunteered labour in the erection. Hundreds of former soldiers
slept on the grass around the monument the night before the dedication. The
dedication drew the greatest crowd ever seen in the city, and it included
African Americans and former Union soldiers.
What about
that makes him worthy of being cancelled by the La. Legislature?
But he and
other Southerners owned slaves! They are
beyond redemption!
Oh, you mean
the same kind of slavery that went on in the North, that built up her shipping
and manufacturing might? Via Gene Kizer, Jr.:
THE INTRODUCTION
TO COMPLICITY makes it clear that the North got rich and powerful because of
its enthusiastic relationship with slavery yet it has hidden its history well.
Few people, as the authors of Complicity found out, know about the
North's enormous involvement with slavery.
Northerners were
slave traders, the flesh peddlers, who, along with the Brits before them, made
huge fortunes buying and selling Africans into slavery. They built much,
perhaps most, of the infrastructure of the Old North with profits from the
slave trade.
Northerners
created a powerful manufacturing industry thanks in large part to a huge,
wealthy, captive market in the South, and they built a shipping industry that
shipped mostly slave-picked cotton all over the world.
While Southern
history has been falsified to the point where esteemed historian Eugene
Genovese called it a "cultural and political atrocity," Northern
history has been whitewashed making it a lie:
[T]he North's
story is thought to be heroic, filled with ardent abolitionists running
that train to freedom, the Underground Railroad. The few slaves who may have
lived in the North, it has been believed, were treated like members of the
family. And, of course, Northerners were the good guys in the Civil War. They freed
the slaves.1
The statement
above is about as far from the truth as you can get.
Northerners
chained hundreds of Africans at a time, side by side, to the decks of their
slave ships. Slaves were so crammed in they could barely move.
They had to lay
in vomit, feces and urine for months, the stench made worse by the stifling
heat below deck where there was no ventilation during the Middle Passage. Many
died and lay there among the living for days. It was said you could smell a
slave ship five miles away.
Those poor
Africans had been sold into slavery by other Africans, the result of tribal
warfare. They were held in slave forts called barracoons in places like Bunce
Island off the coast of modern Sierra Leone where they waited on Yankee and
British slave ships and their passage through hell.
Even beyond slave
trading, the Yankee record is not good.
When a Northern
state ended slavery, always through a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation
that would free the slave on, say, his 21st birthday, the poor slave would
never see a day of freedom. Thrifty Yankees sold him South just prior to the
date he was to be free. This is well documented by books such as Edgar J.
McManus's Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1973).
Northerners were
slave traders until the last major slave country on earth, Brazil, abolished it
around 1888. During the War Between the States, 53 years after the slave trade
was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution, Boston, New York and Portland were the
largest slave trading cities on the planet as W. E. B Du Bois noted in his
book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of
America, 1638 to 1870.
Will Rep.
Willard and his fellow cancel culture warriors in the State Legislature be
hollering for a bill to punish New York, Providence, Boston, etc., for their
horrible record on slavery? Probably
not. Thus, they reveal themselves to be
hypocrites.
Yet, two can
play the game of iconoclasm. If we are
going to desecrate the memory of Gen. Lee and other Confederates, then Martin
Luther King, Jr., for instance, is also fair game. Consider his moral failings. Pedro Gonzalez writes,
While Republicans
and Democrats have been able to selectively quote King to fit their policy and
propaganda needs, what may soon be indisputable is his reputation as the vilest
kind of abuser, as revealed by Garrow’s 2019 research. Garrow is no right-winger
eager to trash King’s reputation. On the contrary, Garrow is a democratic
socialist, who won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier glowing biography of
Dr. King. Garrow spent weeks poring over never-before-seen FBI documents, publishing his shocking findings in the British
magazine Standpoint.
They reveal the agency’s surveillance of King in new detail, which began due to
his connection to Stanley D. Levison, a New York attorney with Communist Party ties, who gave King $10,000 in cash over two
years, or nearly $90,000 in 2021 dollars.
Garrow reviewed
one report showing that King’s friend, Logan Kearse, the pastor of Baltimore’s
Cornerstone Baptist Church, brought several of his female “parishioners” to
Washington. He offered King and his friends an introduction. “The group met in
his room and discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for
natural or unnatural sex acts,” the report states. “When one of the women
protested that she did not approve of this, the Baptist minister immediately
and forcibly raped her.” King “looked on, laughed and offered advice” as the
minister raped the parishioner.
Garrow added that
the agents who captured the incident on a microphone-transmitted tape-recording
“would not have had any apparent motive … to inaccurately embellish upon the
actual recording and its full transcript.”
King and his
friends rendezvoused the following evening at a hotel and resumed their lewd
soirée as a dozen people “participated in a sex orgy.” Assistant Director
William C. Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, noted the
night’s entertainment included “‘acts of degeneracy and depravity … When one of
the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and several of the
men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect. King told
her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul.’”
Behold a
“fundamentally conservative” hero and the man at our nation’s moral center, to
whom Americans are supposed to pay homage to every year.
The paleocon
writer Sam Francis adds,
. . . the campaign to enact the legal public
holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march
to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and
ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s
own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the
Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is
authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all
institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial,
cultural, national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and
discarded.
“By placing
King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and
reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday
provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and
reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the
center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine
any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to
symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a
defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political order, those who
oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to
resist that agenda.” [January 16, 2006]
Will the
woke Legislators caterwaul until King’s holiday is removed from the calendar? Will they mourn until King’s name is removed
from street signs? If not, then, again,
they prove they are hypocrites.
Few in the
US were innocent when it came to slavery – North or South. Indeed, one must be careful not to succumb to
‘presentism’ – a mindset that harshly judges past generations for not measuring
up to the moral standards of our own day.
They should be judged according to the morals of their time. And in that time, slavery was acceptable in
most parts of the world, not just in North America. What is noteworthy about the South is how
humanely she treated her slaves in contrast to the historical norms. From another essay by Dr.
Wilson:
Technically, the
slave was not the possession of the master. Though it made little
practical difference, perhaps, a slave was not owned. He was bonded for
his labour and had legal claims upon the master for support.
Although for most of our gabbling classes Southerners are always
the default villains in any scenario, in fact Southern courts were
conscientious in seeking justice for bonded people when such issues came before
them.
The definitive
work on slavery in antebellum America, largely ignored since its appearance in
1975, is Time on the Cross by
Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Laureate, and Stanley L. Engerman. These
economic historians, neither of whom can be accused of sympathy with slavery or
the South, showed that in general antebellum slaves fared well in nutrition,
housing, leisure—superior to the norm for the working poor in the North and
Europe and were, contrary to Northern claims, more productive than Northern
workers. They reported that Southern slaves received a 90% lifetime return on
their labour. It is said that some Louisiana slave cabins have been converted
into vacation cottages. Such residences were frequently used to
hospitalise wounded soldiers.
Northerners, fond
of theorizing, believed that slave labour was unproductive because they
defined it as unwilling—invalidated by the simple fact of the immense
productivity of staples that provided the majority of American exports.
Tobacco in the 1700s and cotton in the early 1800s were the bulk of
American exports. Without the South the U.S. would have had little
international trade.
You have no doubt
been told about how Northern visitors were shocked by the cruelly over-worked
and starved slave population. There was a little of that, but most
reactions were otherwise. Many visitors found the plantations peaceful
and contented and Southerners admirable. Others in their letters home
complained that the blacks were lazy, slovenly, and inefficient, and their
masters not much better. Some could not stand the lack of puritan order
and failure to focus on the bottom line. Sympathy for the enslaved was
not very evident.
. .
.
Another
neglected aspect of antebellum African American history is the free black
population of the South. In 1860 more than half of American free
blacks were in the South. In the South many free blacks had a
secure accepted place in society and were prosperous although not political
citizens. It is reported that half the free blacks in Charleston were
slaveowners. A section of Louisiana was occupied by free “Creoles
of Colour” with large plantations. Union soldiers had not the least
hesitation to rob and burn the hard-earned property of free blacks in the South.
By contrast, the
black communities of the North and Canada were depressed in every social
measure, exhibiting the urban dysfunction that we are all too familiar with in
later times.
For trying
valiantly to defend their inherited, Christian, agrarian way of life against an
unlawful, dishonorable, and barbaric invasion instigated at the behest of a vampiric Northern elite
class dedicated to conquering the South and exploiting all her people and
resources,
Confederate veterans should be roundly praised and honored. In fact, they have been, even by ‘important
folks’ like Churchill and Eisenhower, as seen above in the first quote.
It used to
be this way here in the South, before Yankee education taught us to hate our
ancestors. But this is exactly the
opposite of one of the 10 Commandments: Honor
your father and mother. By despising our
Southern mothers and fathers, we are inviting social disorder. The great commentator on the Holy Scriptures,
St. John Chrysostom (+407), speaking in a sermon about
Ephesians 6:1-3,
spells this out quite clearly:
And observe how admirable a foundation he
has laid for the path of virtue, that is, honor and reverence towards parents.
When he would lead us away from wicked practices, and is just about to enter
upon virtuous ones, this is the first thing he enjoins, honor towards parents;
inasmuch as they before all others are, after God, the authors of our being, so
that it is reasonable they should be the first to reap the fruits of our right actions;
and then all the rest of mankind. For if a man have not this honor for parents
he will never be gentle toward those unconnected with him.
However, for
those who would still like to claim that Confederate memorials are all about
white supremacy and other such nonsense, Philip Leigh sets the record straight in this short video.
The American
Psychological Association – a group with no fondness for us ‘backwards’
Southrons – defines cultural genocide in these words: ‘destruction of a culture’s heritage, values,
and practices, usually by another, dominant cultural group.’
Is cultural
genocide occurring in the South?
Yes.
Does
dressing it up in the garb of virtue signaling make it okay?
No.
With all due
respect to Rep. Willard, his ‘feelings’ aren’t the only things that matter when
it comes to memorials for Lee and our other Southern forefathers.
The
Louisiana Legislature should consign his despicable proposal to oblivion, not
the memory of honorable Southerners, and get back to work on more productive
legislation.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!