KITH AND KIN OR A PROPOSITION NATION?
The League of the South, unlike the America of the New World Order, is wedded not to a universal proposition: equality, democracy, or the rights of man, but to a real historical order based on place and kin. If we are to survive as a distinct people with a physical place to live, work, and worship, then we must never waver from this commitment.
The late M. E. Bradford in his Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative (University of Georgia Press, 1985) deals at length, as the title suggests, with cultural identity and historical memory. He cites the following lines by the protagonist of Stark Young’s So Red The Rose, Hugh McGehee, as he sends his son off to join the Confederate Army: “It’s not to our credit to think we began today and it’s not to our glory to think we end today. All through time, we keep coming in to the shore like waves, like waves. You stick to your blood, son; there’s a fierceness in blood that can bind you up with a long community of life.” The most eloquent of Anti-Federalists, Patrick Henry, chided those who thought that “All things should be made new” by reminding them that “we are descended from a people whose government was founded on liberty; our glorious grandfathers of Great Britain made liberty the foundation of everything. . . . We draw that spirit of liberty from our British ancestors.” Bradford, Young, and Henry all caution us that it is from our Fathers, and not from universal (or even particular) abstractions, that we draw our sustenance as a separate, distinct, God-ordained people.
But for the past half-century, liberals and neo-conservatives alike have been seeking to discredit the idea that a man’s first temporal allegiance is to kith and kin. It is the self-appointed task of social engineers to reshape Creation according to their own ideas of good and evil. They are, as it were, attempting to rebuild the Tower of Babel and, in the bargain, are seeking to nullify the Biblical and historical reality of true nationhood. The cult of equality (both of individuals and cultures), according to Bradford, is the new “opiate of the masses.” Totalitarians of all stripes today champion equality by pushing for an “open door” immigration policy that favors the Third World. They care not whether the massive influx of Muslims, Latinos, and other non-Western peoples poses a threat to the racial, ethnic, and cultural balance of our country. Rather, since the left holds sacred the “rights of man,” they view America as the world’s first universal nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men and cultures are created equal.
If the idea that America is indeed a mere proposition nation is to be realized, then the narrowly defined “posterity” of our forefathers must be broadened to include the whole of Emma Lazarus’s “wretched refuse.” The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and subsequent legislation and judicial edicts have turned America’s immigration policy inside out by allowing for the influx of millions upon millions of non-Europeans while largely closing the “Golden Door” to European immigrants. Both Third World legals and illegals are encouraged to maintain their own cultures and languages while partaking of the largesse available to them at the expense of taxpaying citizens.
Our situation is reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire when the frontiers were overrun by Germanic tribes who wished to avail themselves of Roman lands and produce. But there was no deep-rooted racial or cultural antagonism between Roman and German. In fact, the German tribesmen had great respect and admiration for Roman civilization, as far as they understood it. They did not wish to destroy Rome; however, they did not know how to save it for the simple reason that they had not created it and thus did not understand what made it work.
Even under the best of circumstances, a huge influx of aliens who merely wish to enjoy our material benefits will eventually weaken and destroy our civilization. Simply put, they will lack the desire and understanding to preserve our vital institutions. More importantly, they will physically displace the descendants of the founding stock and we will cease to control the homeland bequeathed us by generations of noble and honorable men and women-our ancestors. We will suffer a fate perhaps worse than that of Rome itself. Already, radical Latinos have launched a Reconquista of our southern borders, and federal judges are thwarting the efforts of Americans of Western European ancestry to turn back the tide. It is abundantly clear with whom the Establishment elites side on this crucial issue.
If we Southerners are to survive and prosper on the lands given us by our forebears, then we would do well to adopt the attitude of historian Frank L. Owsley (one of the Twelve Southerners who contributed to I’ll Take My Stand). Owsley, in his seminal work Plain Folk of the Old South (LSU Press, 1949), writes: “The term ‘folk’ has for its primary meaning a group of kindred people, forming a tribe or nation [in the truest sense of the word]; a people bound together by ties of race, language, religion, custom, tradition, and history. . . . A folk thus possesses a sense of solidarity and is quite different from a conglomerate mass of people. It has most if not all of the characteristics of nationalism [again, properly defined]. Indeed, it may be contended with much force that there can be no true nationalism where the population does not constitute a folk.” Owsley contends that the “Southern people, according to these several characteristics, were a genuine folk long before the Civil War [sic].” Moreover, he tells us that the “greatest single factor, perhaps, in developing the Southern population into a genuine American folk was the common national origin of the bulk of the people. . . . [T]he Southern people prior to 1860 were predominantly British. . . . Appearance, the indefinable qualities of personality, and their manners and customs, particularly their distinctive speech, set them apart from the inhabitants of the other sections of the United States, and in this way strengthened their sense of kinship.”
The League of the South should have as it primary objective the preservation of our people-kith and kin-on their ancestral lands. All else pales in comparison to this. Independence will do the South little good if we fail to preserve ourselves as a distinct people group inhabiting a certain piece of Creation. Once we secure our future as “the Southern people,” then, and only then, can we be about the business of bringing back States Rights and gaining our independence. Therefore, we support a return to a society and civilization based on allegiance to kith and kin rather than to an impersonal state wedded to multiculturalism, diversity, the rights of man, and other similar abstractions. The leaders and the rank-and-file of our organization must be hardliners who insist that quite apart from political ideals, we take our stand in the historic South and for the people who made the historic South what it is. The South is not a universal idea anymore than, say, Scotland, France, or Serbia. Instead, the South was and is a true nation built on the realities of place and kinship that we must revitalize if we are to survive and prosper.
At its core, the South is British-Western European and Christian. Should this change, then the South, as we know it shall be no more. As the late Russell Kirk wrote in America’s British Culture: “If somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.” He continues with a salient warning: “We Americans live . . . in an era when the general outlines and institutions of our inherited culture still are recognizable; yet it does not follow that our children or our grandchildren, in the twenty-first century, will retain a great part of that old culture. . . . The defence of inherited culture [and, I might add, the people who create and sustain that culture] must be conducted here and now, with what weapons may be snatched from the walls here on the darkling plain at the end of the twentieth century.” When we do endeavor to defend our own people and culture, both liberals and neo-conservatives hurl at us the usual invectives: “racists,” “xenophobes,” “reactionaries.” It is past time that we turn a deaf ear to these bogus charges and set about resisting any attempts to reconstruct a modern Tower of Babel on the rubble of our Southern civilization. Victory goes to the bold.
The League of the South wants to see a South where our borders are sealed against massive immigration; a South where the interests of the Southern people are protected from the ravages of multiculturalism and so-called diversity; a South where a prosperous, self-confident, and distinct people can welcome into its ranks by its own choice and on its own terms productive and sympathetic immigrants; a South that will be a beacon to those nations that wish to defend a traditional way of life against the purveyors of abstract ideologies and a new world order; and a South where Southerners shall know beyond doubt that the fundamental question to be answered, as M. E. Bradford insists, is not the Federalists’ “What shall we do?” but Patrick Henry’s “Who are we?” Indeed, when we know who we are and are willing to defend ourselves and our posterity, then we shall be a truly free people with a bright future. If we fail to grasp the gravity of this basic question, we shall end up in the proverbial “dustbin of history,” and deservedly so.
|
