Friday, April 8, 2022

Offsite Post: ‘In Defense of the South’

 

‘After the South had been conquered by war and humiliated and impoverished by peace, there appeared still to remain something which made the South different—something intangible, incomprehensible, in the realm of the spirit. That too must be invaded and destroyed; so there commenced a second war of conquest, the conquest of the Southern mind, calculated to remake every Southern opinion, to impose the Northern way of life and thought upon the South, write “error” across the pages of Southern history which were out of keeping with the Northern legend, and set the rising and unborn generations upon stools of everlasting repentance.’—Frank Lawrence Owsley, ‘The Irrepressible Conflict’, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, LSU Press, Baton Rouge, La., 2006 [1930], p. 63.

We consider ourselves fortunate to know about Mr Matthew Ehret’s writings.  His research into the machinations of the global Elite is enlightening, and his promotion of a peaceful, cooperative, multipolar world order is something we heartily concur with.  However, he is forever describing the American South as a place of abominations and President Lincoln and his cohort at the North as the embodiment of virtue.  As one whose family has lived in the South since the middle of the 1600s, we hope he will accept a friendly rejoinder as it regards his view of the two sections, and that he will likewise contemplate how his reconsideration of them might advance his vision of a multipolar world.

Regarding China, he says in his essay ‘Manifest Destiny Done Right’,


‘What we have seen in places like Tibet and Xinjiang are cultural heritage centers, exploding literacy rates, the celebration and teaching of traditional languages, songs, stories and dances given full government patronage.


‘While evidence of this cultural growth has grown across all minority ethnic zones, we have also seen a dramatic growth in longevity, population density, quality of life, poverty reduction, infant mortality reduction, and access to advanced industrial skills, clean water, internet and abundant electricity.


‘ . . . NED-controlled propaganda outlets in either region would have you remain blind to these demonstrable facts of Chinese life.’

About the South, though, he avers,


‘The southern perversion of Manifest Destiny promoted by Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Albert Pike envisioned increased black slavery and Native Americans crushed under the heel of the “superior” white race, and cordoned off into cage-like plantations or reservations never to have a say in their own destiny.’ 

If he would read from the forbidden histories of Southerners that the cancel culture of the North has proscribed for decades, he would see that what is said about the South and her slaves in approved, mainstream sources is very much akin to what they say about China and Xinjiang that he opposes so strenuously; while the Presbyterian minister, Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney, wrote in his book A Defence of Virginia, and through Her, of the South1 (1867) words strikingly similar to his own about Xinjiang.  Said Rev Dabney:


‘The malignant industry of our enemies in propagating these monstrous slanders, compels us, therefore, to pause at the outset of the discussion, to rebut them, and disabuse the minds of readers. And it is here asserted, once for all, that the popular apprehension of the slave's condition and treatment, spread throughout Europe and the North, is utterly false: that 214it is the result of nothing less than persistent, wilful, and almost incredible lying on the part of interested accusers; and that this is recognized by every intelligent European and Northern man who has resided among us long enough truly to know the institution of slavery. The character disclosed by the Yankees in the war lately closed, has effectually taught the rest of the world to recognize the probability of our charge.’

In other words, then as now, there was ‘fake news’ about the South and slavery.  He went on:


‘And now, it is emphatically asserted that Southern masters, as a class, did not seek or desire to repress either the mental or religious culture of their servants' souls; but the contrary. It is our solemn and truthful testimony, that the nearly universal temper of masters was to promote and not to hinder it; and the intellectual and religious culture of our slaves met no other general obstacle, save that which operates among the labouring poor of all countries, their own indifference to it, and the necessities of nearly constant manual labour. If there was any exception, it was caused by the mischievous meddling of abolitionists themselves, obtruding on the servants that false doctrine so sternly condemned by St. Paul. Southern masters desired the intelligence and morality of their servants. As a class, masters and their families performed a large amount of gratuitous labour for that end; and universally met all judicious efforts for it from others with cordial approval. An intelligent Christian servant was universally recognized as being, in a pecuniary view, a better servant. Is it asserted that there is still much degrading ignorance among Southern negroes? True: but it exists not because of our system, but in spite of it. There is more besotted ignorance in the peasantry of all other countries. It is the dispassionate conviction 216of intelligent Southerners, that our male slaves presented a better average of virtue and intelligence than the rank and file of the Federal armies by which we were overrun: and even the negro troops of our conquerors, although mostly recruited from the more idle and vicious slaves, were better than the white! The Africans of these States, three generations ago, were the most debased among pagan savages. A nation is not educated in a day. How long have the British people been in reaching their present civilization under God's providential tutelage? The South has advanced the Africans, as a whole, more rapidly than any other low savage race has ever been educated. Hence we boldly claim, that our system, instead of necessitating the ignorance and vice of its subjects, deserves the credit of a most beneficent culture.’

Again, just as with Saddam Hussein butchering babies in 1990-1 or harboring WMD in 2002-3 and with the other lies of the Elite, they are telling lies about the condition of the Africans living in the South.

The advancement of Christianity among the Southern Africans, pointed out by Rev Dabney, is much like the positive religious environment Mr Ehret describes in Xinjiang:


‘It is charged again, that slavery impiously and inhumanly sacrificed the immortal soul of the slave, to secure the master's pecuniary interest in him. This slander is already in part answered. We farther declare that neither our laws, nor the current temper and usage of masters, interfered with the slave's religious rights. On the contrary, they all protected and established them. The law protected the legal right of the slave to his Sabbath, forbidding the master to employ him on that day in secular labours, other than those of necessity and mercy. Instances in which slaves were prevented by their masters from attending the publick worship of God, were fully as rare among us, and as much reprobated, as similar abuses are in any other Christian country. On the contrary, the masters were almost universally more anxious that their servants should 219attend publick worship, than the servants were to avail themselves of the privilege. There was scarcely a Christian church in the South, which had not its black communicants sitting amicably at the table beside their masters; and the whole number of these adult communicants was reported by the statistics of the churches, as not less than a half million. We can emphatically declare, that we never saw or heard of a house of worship in the South, where sittings were not provided for the blacks at the expense of the whites: and it is believed that if there was such a case, it was in a neighbourhood containing no negro population. And in nearly every case, these sittings were more ample than the blacks could be induced to fill. Nor was there any expenditure of money on ecclesiastical objects, which was more cheerfully and liberally made, than that for the religious culture of the slaves. Further, with a few exceptions they enjoyed the fullest religious liberty in the selection of their religious communions and places of worship.’

Mr Ehret wishes us to consider population growth in Tibet and Xinjiang as a metric with which to prove Chinese benevolence towards those peoples.  Rev Dabney wished for folks to do the same vis-à-vis Dixie and the slaves:


‘The reader is emphatically cautioned that he must not judge slavery in Virginia by slavery in Jamaica or Guiana. Whether the charge of the great Paley is correct, who accounts for this difference by the greater harshness of British 236character,[89] politeness may forbid us to decide. But the comparative fates of the Africans in the British colonies, and those in our States, tell the contrast between the humanity of our system, and the barbarity of theirs, in terms of indisputable clearness. If political science has ascertained any law, it is that the well or ill-being of a people powerfully affects their increase or decrease of numbers. The climate of the British Indies is salubrious for blacks. Yet, of the one million seven hundred thousand Africans imported into the British colonies, and their increase, only six hundred and sixty thousand remained to be emancipated in 1832. The three hundred and seventy-five thousand (the total) imported into the Southern States, had multiplied to four millions. Such is the contrast! How grinding and ruthless must have been that oppression which in the one case reduced this prolific race, in the most fertile and genial spots of earth, in the ratio of five to two! And how generous and beneficent that government which, in the Southern States, nursed them to a more than ten-fold increase, in a less hospitable and fruitful clime! Well may we demur to have the world take its conceptions of our slavery from the British.


‘ . . .


‘This seems the suitable place to notice the most insulting and preposterous of the abolitionists' slanders. It is that expressed by calling Virginia the "slave-breeding commonwealth." What do these insolent asses mean? Do they intend to revile Virginia, because she did not suppress the natural increase of this peaceful and happy class of her people, by wholesale infanticide? Or because she did not, like the North, subject them to social evils so cruel and murderous, as to kill off that increase by the slow torture of vice, oppression, and destitution? It was the honour of Virginia, that she was a man-breeding commonwealth; that her benignant government made existence a blessing, both to the black man and the white, and, consequently, conferred it on many of both. If it has been proved, which we claim, that servitude was the best condition for the blacks, and that it promoted their multiplication, then this is a praise and not 343a reproach to Virginia. How perverse and absurd is the charge, that Virginia was actuated by a motive beastly and avaricious, in bestowing existence on many black men, and making it a blessing to them; because, forsooth, her wise government of them made them useful to the State and to themselves! By the same reason, the Christian parents who rejoice in children as a gift of the Lord, and a blessing to him "who hath his quiver full of them," are "slave-breeders," because they make their children useful, and hope to find them supports to their old age.’

On the virtues of the slave-free North vs the vices of the slave-holding South, which Mr Ehret mentions from time to time, Rev Dabney also set the record straight:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/defense-south

Or https://katehon.com/en/article/defense-south.

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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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