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