Southern History: The Second Reconstruction

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The Second Reconstruction
Thomas Allen

The Second Reconstruction began in 1954. Like the First Reconstruction, the Second Reconstruction is a political assault against the South. It seeks to destroy Southerners by the genocide of integration.

Along with the Second Reconstruction has come an even more intense attack against that which is uniquely Southern: the Confederate flag; songs of the South, such as “Dixie,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Virginny;” the immortal, eternal Confederate soldier and the monuments that honor him, etc. Even major corporations have entered the genocidal attack against the South. A major motel company took down the Georgia flag because it bears a Confederate emblem. (This old Georgia flag has been replaced with a new Georgia flag.) A major telecommunication company and a major bank joined the gang to remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol dome in South Carolina. (The Confederate battle flag has been removed.) Major Southern universities proscribe flying the Confederate flag. At least one university has gone so far as to proscribe flying the flag of the State whose taxpayers supports it.

Those who condemn the Confederate flag as being a symbol of slavery, racism, White supremacy, etc., should with more vigor and vehemence condemn the Unites States flag. The United States flag flew over slavery, segregation, and White supremacy in the North before the Confederate flag did, while the Confederate flag did, and after the Confederate flag ceased to in the South.

Blacks have shown no hesitation, concern, or sensitivity about imposing, nay forcing, their company on people who do not want to associate with them. Southerners should not sacrifice the Confederate flag in the name of sensitivity about the feelings of Blacks towards the Confederate flag. Some of those who love that flag see Black hostility towards it as just another attempt to impose the Black man’s will on them to deprive them of one of their few remaining liberties in the Black man’s attempt to establish Black supremacy. If Blacks find the Confederate flag offensive, then they should avoid associating with those who display and revere the flag. After spending a lifetime trying to outlaw freedom of association by forcing their company on others, such an obvious solution cannot be accepted. The Confederate flag must bow to their prejudices.

The Confederate flag flew in Lithuania when the Lithuanians were struggling to free themselves from the oppression of the Soviet Union. The Confederate flag flew in Berlin as the Berlin Wall fell. Oppressed Europeans recognize the Confederate flag for what it is: the symbol of liberty. Perhaps this explains the antagonism against the flag. It represents what the enemies of the South despise: LIBERTY!

That big business is among the leaders in the genocidal war against the South is not difficult to understand. Big business, like all bureaucracies, strives for uniformity. The big corporations generally operate as self-contained businesses. They also strive to become self-contained social entities. They expect employees, especially at the managerial level, to place loyalty to the company (although the company feels no loyalty towards its employees) above loyalty to the community and even often above loyalty their family and God. Such loyalty to the company makes for a highly mobile personnel among its various units. (An employee who does not place the company first seldom advances beyond the lower ranks.) Anything that stands in the way of loyalty to the company and standardization must be destroyed. Because traditional Southerners place loyalty to God, family, and community above all, the Southern way of life must be destroyed. To Southerners loyalty to the company that employs them ranks down on his list of loyalties. They may be highly loyal to an employer they know personally, but they have difficulty being loyal to an abstract corporation and a board of directors whom they do not know and who are far removed. Thus, big business is among the leaders of the assault against the South.

The role of the establishment media is so obvious, it hardly needs commenting on. The establishment media “revel in smearing the South and Southerners by adjective and innuendo.”[1] These attacks appear not only in editorials but also in so-called objective news articles. The media are also notorious for seeking out the ignorant, inarticulate, uncultured, spokesman to present the pro-Southern view instead of knowledgeable, articulate, respectable spokesman.

One of the most useful and effective weapons being used against Southern males is “affirmative action.” This weapon destroys the White male economically, politically, and socially as it gives other races preferential treatment and special privileges at the expense of White males. But this is not the worst aspect. The most hideous aspect of affirmative action is that it treats White women as part of the privilege minority. Thus, it attempts to drive a wedge between White men and women and thereby create discord where there should be harmony. The purpose is to drive White women to non-White men. The objective is the demise of the White race.

The Reverend Ray Aycock provides a cogent concise description of what the Second Reconstruction has brought the South:

They have taken over our schools, forced their laws on us, destroyed our customs, mongrelized and brainwashed our children, allowing the murder of millions of unborn children. They used deadly chemicals on our men and theirs, and they performed medical experiments on people that would make Hitler blush. They killed more people than Nazi Germany. They have not only made the sick practice of homosexuality acceptable, but they are glorifying it. They sent a message to all churches in the United States, and it occupied states by telling Bob Jones, the Mormons and the Branch Davidians, “Worship like we tell you or be burned out!” Now they want to tax our products, tobacco, to pay their medical bills.[2]

This sentiment is echoed by the author in Southern Manifesto:

Being a chivalrous, charitable, Christian people, we do not request or require reparation or restitution from those who came to conquer us, to pillage our lands, to plunder our wealth, to imprison our forefathers and friends, to desecrate that which we hold sacred, to destroy our culture and heritage, to pollute our race, to indoctrinate us with alien philosophies, to coerce us to pay tribute to finance our enslavement and their follies, to force us to die in their wars, to corrupt our leaders, to subvert our governments, and to impose multitudes of repugnant and oppressive laws upon us. We require only that they depart and leave us in peace. We recognize that our liberties and prosperity can only be protected and expanded and preserved for ourselves and our posterity through a free and independent confederation of free and independent Southern States.

The South and all that is Southern must be destroyed. It must be remade into the image of Yankeedom. As long as the South retains any of its unique character and identity, the spark of freedom lives. This spark must be smothered out so that all can live under the enslavement of Yankeedom.

As vile as the external forces are in seeking the destruction of the South and the death of the Southerner, those exerted by the New South Southerner are infinitely more satanic. The New South Southerner has sold his soul for what? Nothing of lasting value. He is a worse miscreant than opportunistic demagogic Fourth of July orators that the Reverend James O. Branch described in his sermon on public opinion, “It [public opinion] chains the rebel, Jefferson Davis, in a dungeon because he was the unsuccessful leader of Sovereign States in their assertion of the right of self-government; and, from the throats twenty thousand fourth of July orators, it fills the ears of the unsuccessful rebel in prison with the praise of the successful rebel, George Washington, who led revolting colonies against the armies of their lawful sovereign.”[4] Traitor of tradition and worshiper of “progress” that he is, the New South Southerner admires one and condemns the other because one won and the other lost, although both fought for the same thing. The New South Southerner is worse than a traitor of tradition. He betrays his State, his race, his ancestors, and God — albeit not his gods, for his gods are the god of equality, god of envy, god of material progress, and god of political power. (One wonders why good Southerners keep voting these demagogic quislings into political office.) These are the people whom Richard Weaver described as “the obnoxious professional Southerners. These people have been quite willing to use whatever they possess of Southern inheritance to procure what is, traditionally, anti-Southern, and they have been impatient with those who remind them of the contradiction.”[5]

The New South Southerner is typified by George Allen, Republican Governor of Virginia. He is a scalawag who has nothing but total contempt for Southern heritage. He offered Disney millions of dollars to destroy battlefields on which many patriotic Southerners shed their blood for independence. Disney proposed to build a historical theme park. Based on whom Disney chose for its historical advisor, the South would surely have been depicted in a derogatory, ignoble way.

The genocidal war against the South is often overt and obvious, but it also contains its subtle and covert aspects. One of these is in the education of the children of the South. There is much truth in Dr. Hunter McGuire’s assertion that one of the worst crimes committed against the South has been committed by those men “who immediately after the war . . . brought Northern men and Northern historians into our schools and for years employed them to teach us why and how Southern men fought against the North.”[6] The situation in the Southern schools today is much worse than when this statement was made a century ago. The South looks to Northerners and Southern renegades to write their history and to teach their children. Why?

Donald Davidson is correct when he writes, “The South, because of its regional differentiations, some of which are certainly valuable, is at a disadvantage, and so long as political and economic power dwells where it long has dwelt, it will continue to be at a disadvantage.”[7] This power has long dwelt in Yankeedom. Only through independence can the South break this bondage and regain its political and economic power.

Even if many Southerners fail to see this war of genocide being waged against them, foreigners see it. In one of his editorials, Albert H. Baxendale, Jr., describes a conversation between a Britisher and a Southerner:

“We English,” he told the Southerner, “think of you Southerners as the Welsh of your country.” Asked what he meant, the Britisher replied, “The English have been trying for decades to stamp out the Welsh traditions — their language, their music, their speech, their customs. The rest of American is trying to do the same to you Southerners.” He was right. There are two forces at work today, engaged in a continual effort to destroy the last vestige of the Southern heritage. Those forces are knee jerk liberal Yankees and Southern renegades, also known as gutless politicians, spineless school administrators, and over-educated academic types.[8]

Edward Lawton describes the situation in the South following the war:

Since 1865 the situation of the South has been unique in the Western World. Asides from rights and wrongs, a population and an area appropriate to a pre-World War I great power have been, following conquest, ruled against their will by a neighboring people, and have had imposed upon them social and economic controls they dislike. And the great majority of these people are of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic descent. This is the only case in modern history of a people of Britannic origin submitting without continued struggle to what they view as foreign domination. . . . It is amazing that a people as proud and warlike as Southerners should have been as docile as they have.[9]

The docility of Southerners defies explanation. The time has long past for Southerners to rise up and throw off their oppression. No other people of their stock would have so meekly tolerated the oppression that Southerners have endured for as long as they have.

Unreconstructed Southerners continue to resist for a number of reasons. Among the most important are as Alexander Stephen wrote, “Time changes and men often change with them, but principles never!” and as T. S. Eliot wrote, “We fought for lost causes because we knew that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successor’s victory. . . . we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.”[10] Jefferson Davis wrote, “The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered on a new and enlarged arena. The champions of constitutional liberty must spring to the struggle . . . until the government of the United States is brought back to its constitutional limits.”[11] A Massachusetts writer corroborated Mr. Davis when he wrote, “Such character and achievement were not all in vain; that though the Confederacy fell as an actual physical power, it lives eternally in its just cause — the cause of constitutional liberty.”[12] Whenever an unreconstructed Southern hears that the Confederacy is dead, he needs to reply, as Sheldon Vanauken did, “Not while it [the Confederacy] lives in the hearts of thousands of Southerners.”[13]

The unreconstructed Southerner is in firm agreement with General Lee’s statement that “a Union held together by bayonets has no charms for me.”[14] Like all empires, the Union today is still held together by bayonets.

Richard Weaver reminds both Southerners and Northerners:

that the Southerner today is the only involuntary tenant of the American Union. . . . he is where he is as the result of a settlement of force against him. . . . Therefore, in the national legend the typical American owes his position to a virtuous and effective act of his will; but the Southern owes his to the fact that his will was denied; and this leaves a kind of inequality which no amount of political blandishment can remove entirely.[15]

William Workman gives an excellent explanation of why Northerners find forgetting the War easy and Southerners find it difficult:

Forgetfulness comes easy to victors who fought and won on what to them was foreign soil. It does not come so easily for the vanquished whose homeland was ravaged and laid desolate, whose manhood was blighted by death and war by the aftermath, and whose leaders were stigmatized by imprisonment and ignoble treatment after giving all they had to a cause in which they believed. And as insult added to injury, the South was taxed by the national government to pension the very Federal servicemen who devastated the South, while being taxed by their own Southern states to provide for the Confederate servicemen who defended their homes and ideals.[16]

When Southerners are accused of living in the past, they need to recall the words of John Peale Bishop, “Without a past we are living not in the present, but in a vague and rather unsatisfactory future.”[17] Southerners are among the few Americans with a deep firm tap root in the past. Therefore, they are among the few that will bear true fertile fruit in the future.

Furthermore, Southerners also need to remember John Peale Bishop’s words, “long after the Confederacy is lost in the national archives and the last old lady has forgotten in the grave that this was conquered territory, there will still be, regardless of the government, a deep division between states that grow cotton and those which first manufactured it into cloth.”[18] A great division still exists, which helps explain the intense genocidal war being waged against the South and Southerners. Only by annihilation of the South can the empire be preserved.

Unreconstructed Southerners agree with Woodrow Wilson’s words, “I would rather fail in a cause that I know some day will triumph than to triumph in a cause that I know some day will fail.”[19] (Mr. Wilson also told us that “No people should be compelled to live under a sovereignty which it does not willingly accept.”[20]) When accused of trying to perpetuate a lost cause, Southerners need to remember the words of Henry A. Wise, Governor of Virginia, just after the War: “A lost cause! If lost it was false; if true, it was not lost.”[21] The cause is not yet lost. It is true. It lives on. In the meantime, they need to recall M. E. Bradford's advice, “If our friends tell us that these days are dark then we should recite something like the hopeful formula ‘that in order to get better, it must get a good deal worse.’”[22]

Southerners need to remember the enemy that they fight against and the dream for which they fight. Allen Tate describes the beast against whom all unreconstructed Southerners war as:

Regionalism without civilization — which means, with us, regionalism without the classical-Christian culture — becomes provincialism; and world regionalism . . . becomes world provincialism [i.e., one world citizenship with one world government, i.e., the new world order]. For provincialism is that state of mind in which regional men lose their origins in the past and its continuity into the present, and begin every day as if there had been no yesterday.[23]

“It is, in short,” as Donald Davidson writes, “life without principle, which is hardly life at all above the bestial level — that is to say, the low-grade but often pretentious life reflected in the succulent pages of Life and Time, in the T-V show, in the blaring radio with its singing commercials, and in the stream of ‘remorseless motors’ on street and highway.”[24] Samuel T. Francis adds to this description the following:

The lifestyles, aspirations, and values of the current elite are bound together, rationalized, and extended by what may be called the “cosmopolitan ethic.” This ethnic expresses an open contempt for what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” of human society — the small town, the family, the neighborhood, the traditional class identities and their relationships — as well as for authoritative and disciplinary institutions — the army, police forces, parental authority, and the disciplines of school and church. The cosmopolitan ethic, reversing a Western tradition as old as Aesop, finds virtue in the large city, in the anonymous (and therefore, “liberated”) relationships of declassed, desexed, demoralized, and deracinated atoms that know no group or national identities, accept no given moral code, and recognize no disciplines and no limits. The ethic idealizes material indulgence, the glorification of the self, and the transcendence of conventional values, loyalties, and social bonds. At the same time, it denigrates the values of self-sacrifice, community, and moral and social order. Its most perfect (though extreme) expression is perhaps Mick Jagger, but a more typical and vapid form is portrayed in advertisements that tell us What Kind of Man Reads Playboy.[25]

The enemies of the South include liberals, neo-conservatives, internationalists, unionists, integrationists, socialists, capitalists, public educationists, and egalitarians.

William Workman offers this description of the hypocrisy of those who seek to destroy the South: “. . . the very individuals who evidence the greatest willingness to compel Southern submission to Northern domination are the very ones who scream loudest about ‘dictatorship’ in the South when Southern whites seek to retain control of their own affairs.”[26]

In contrast to the enemy, Allen Tate describes the dream for which true Southerners fight as “the classical-Christian world, based upon the regional consciousness, which held that honor, truth, imagination, human dignity, and limited acquisitiveness could alone justify a social order however rich and efficient it may be; and could do much to redeem an order dilapidated and corrupt, like the South today, if a few people passionately hold those beliefs.”[27] Unreconstructed Southerners must continue the struggle against the Leviathan of Yankeedom until these truths and beliefs burn in the heart of every Southerner throughout the South.

While this struggle continues, Southerners need to keep in mind the words of John Crowe Ransom:

The Southerner must know, and in fact he does very well know, that his antique conservatism does not exert a great influence against the American progressivist doctrine. The Southern idea today is down, and the progressive or American idea is up. But the historian and the philosopher, who take views that are thought to be respectively longer and deeper than most, may very well reverse this order and find that the Southern idea rather than the American has in its favor the authority of example and the approval of theory. And some prophet may even find it possible to expect that it will yet rise again.The future belongs to the unreconstructed South.[28]

While the struggle continues, unreconstructed Southerners should look to their forefathers and draw council from their experience, which General Basil Duke of Kentucky expressed, “that safety is never consulted by giving heed to the suggestions of timidity, and that the manliest and most consistent course, is also the most truly expedient, and that the interest and honor of a people go hand-in-hand, and are inseparable.”[29]

Edward Lawton observes that:

. . . most Northerners are content to continue indefinitely with many — perhaps most — Southerners considering themselves a sort of Free World captive satellite, somewhat like Ireland before its independence or like Alsace before the German defeat in 1918. This is not good enough for people who claim Liberty is the cornerstone of their national unity. For the truth is that Southerners, along with the Katangese, are the only people in the past century for whom the United States has opposed the right of self-determination.[30]

He adds:

American patriotism has tended to strengthen the ideological argument that preservation of the Union justified extreme measures. But this emotional view does not stand up unless a preponderance of the material and spiritual facts support it. From our survey of the evolution of American society in the past century it is evident that such is not the case. There is good reason to believe that most Southerners would be better off materially, culturally and spiritually if they had been allowed to establish their own republic.[31]

With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, there is now even less excuse for maintaining the American Empire. Only through independence will the South be able to survive.

In their struggle for independence, Southerners must continue to contend with what Thomas R. Waring, editor of the Charleston News and Courier, termed the “Paper Curtain.” The Paper Curtain is a ban on pro-South views. This ban has been extremely effective during much of the Second Reconstruction. According to Mr. Waring, “A frank statement of the Southern viewpoint is simply unacceptable for publication in the North.”[32] He had first hand experience with the Paper Curtain. His pro-South manuscripts were rejected more than once by Northern publishers.

Andrew Grayson provides an excellent, precise, and accurate summary of the Second Reconstruction:

Instead, all that these two post-World War II Southern generations have ever known is an “America,” a “Union,” a “North”’ a “Federal government” that hates, despises and contemptuously look down on the South; that slanders and defames their ancestors; that mocks and ridicules living Southerners as ignorant, stupid, backward rednecks; that passes laws specifically against them and the white South; that sends in Federal marshals and U. S. combat troops to herd them at bayonet point like animals and criminals; that has intentionally destroyed every Southern institutions and nullified almost every right they ever had; that gloats over grinding down white people while uplifting Negroes; that has racially discriminated against them in every way imaginable; that has racially discriminated for Negroes in every way possible; that has allowed the Negro to run loose as a wilder and more rampaging savage than any other civilization has ever known; that has in many ways placed the Negro above the law; that has confiscated a large portion of their wages in order to elevate the Negro to a position of a nonworking welfare-aristocracy; that has made it economically impossible for whites to have more than two or three children while making it economically profitable for Negroes to breed and breed and breed; that has created an economic system that makes it mandatory for most white mothers to work while black mothers are paid not to work; that has created an economic system that causes working whites to scrimp and do without while nonworking blacks never have to worry about anything; that has robbed them of educational, economic, occupational, cultural and other opportunities and given these opportunities to unqualified Negroes who have not earned them and never could earn them; that treats the South as an economic colony and exploits its resources and labor; that has in countless other ways made plain that, to “America,” Southerners are the scum of the earth and Dixie is the cesspool in which they live.[33]

Grayson concludes:

Just as America may never again produce a group of men equal to the founding fathers (the best and brightest of whom were Southern), the South may never again produce a group of men equal to the Confederates. But by God we deserved better than what we had a century after the war. We can do betters than that; we can produce better sons than they.[34]

The War will end and the cause for which it was fought will die when the last unreconstructed Southerner is liquidated — hence, when the South finally dies as a distinct entity — or when the South is freed from the shackles of Yankeedom. When the South returns to its heritage, when the South unashamedly embraces Christianity, when the South cleanses itself of all the alien doctrines of Yankeedom, i.e., when the last vestige of egalitarianism, socialism and fascism, democracy, miscegenation and integration, unisexism, statism, and secular humanism in all its denominations vanish from the South, and when the South becomes a free and independent confederation of free and independent Southern States, then the War will end. The South will once again enjoy a free market agrarian economy with all the wealth and freedom such an economy entails. The South will once again become a Christian land where the word of God is revered and is supreme. The South will once again become a land where the family is respected, promoted, and protected, where children honor their parents and where men are gentlemen and women are ladies. The South will once again become a land where racial purity and integrity are important, desired, and protected. The South will once again be a land where old times are not forgotten. Until then Southerners must remember John C. Calhoun’s admonishment, “I hold concession or compromise to be fatal.”[35]

Until the South gains its freedom, the political leaders need to do as Ross Barnett, Governor of Mississippi, exhorted public officials to do three years before the United States invaded Mississippi:

We will not surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny. We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them, “Never!” Every public official, including myself, should be prepared to make the choice tonight whether he is willing to go to jail, if necessary, to keep faith with the people who have place their welfare in his hands. We will not drink from the cup of genocide. Hold fast against this grave threat to our liberties. Stand together, hand in hand, mind to mind, unyielding and unafraid.[36]

In the end no one followed Barnett’s sage advice, not even Barnett. In the end they all chose to “drink from the cup of genocide.” Southerners need to remove from office and forever ostracize all political leaders who follow Barnett’s actions and drink from the cup of genocide instead of following Barnett’s words and hold fast against tyranny!

Endnotes
1. William D. Workman, Jr., The Case for the South (New York, 1960), p. 65.

2. Roy E. Aycock, “Partisan Letters,” Southern Partisan (Second Quarter, 1994), pp. 3-4.

3. Thomas Allen, Southern Manifesto, p. 2.

4. James O. Branch, Sermons (Oxford, 1909), p. 118.

5. Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, ed. George M. Curtis III and James J. Thompson Jr. (Indianapolis, 1987), Southern Essays, p. 30.

6. Hunter McGuire and George L. Christian, The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War Between the States, Addendum (Richmond, 1907), pp. 10-11.

7. Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (Chapel Hill, 1938), p. 299.

8. Albert H. Baxendale, Jr., “Campaign on to Destroy Southern Heritage,” Citizen Informer (Spring, 1994), p. 9.

9. Edward P. Lawton, The South and the Nation (Fort Myers Beach, 1963), pp. 14-15.

10. Holmes Alexander, “Living with a Lost Cause,” Southern Partisan (Winter, 1986), p. 43.

11. Stephen Cain, “The Question Still Lives,” The Freeman (May, 1993), p. 195.

12. McGuire and Christian, p. 3.

13. Sheldon Vanauken, “Warning Symbol,” Southern Partisan, XIV, (Third Quarter, 1994), p. 13.

14. Weaver, p. 243.

15. Ibid., p. 202.

16. Workman, p. 10.

17. John Peale Bishop, The Collected Essays of John Bishop Peale, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York, 1948), p. 13.

18. Ibid., p. 447.

19. William Freehoff, “Southern Sampler,” Southern Partisan, VIII (Fall, 1988), p. 9.

20. Maurice Muret, The Twilight of the White Race (Westport, 1926, reprinted 1970), p. 37.

21. William F. Freehoff, “Southern Sampler,” Southern Partisan, V (Spring, 1985), p. 33.

22. M. E. Bradford, “Conclusion: Not in Memoriam, But in Affirmation” in Why the South Will Survive (Athens, 1981), p. 223.

23. Donald Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World, (Athens, 1958), p. 59.

24. Ibid., p. 59.

25. Samuel T. Francis, “Message from Marx,” in The New Right Papers, ed. Robert W. Whitaker (New York, 1982), p. 69.

26. Workman, p. 16.

27. Ibid., p. 59.

28. John Crowe Ransom, “Reconstructed But Unregenerate,” in I'll Take My Stand: The Southern and Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge, 1958), p 3.

29. Weaver, Southern Tradition, 194.

30. Lawton, p. 18.

31. Ibid., p. 207.

32. Ibid., p. 66.

33. Andrew Grayson, The Black Death: Reconstruction I and II, p. 50.

34. Ibid., p. 91.

35. John C. Calhoun, Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lence (Indianapolis, 1992), p. 470.

36. Grayson, p. 96.

Copyright © 1995 by Thomas Coley Allen.