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Manifesto: Why A Southern National Congress?
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To be sure, the South has its collective and individual failings, and we don’t claim to be better than other peoples, but we are different. We respect the rights and existence of other national, linguistic, and ethnic communities. We understand -- even applaud – the assertion of their history, heritage, and folkways. But we expect the same rights and the same respect, and we take offence when the world celebrates every other nation while insulting, vilifying, and ridiculing us for celebrating ours. We believe the South is not only an authentic nation, but also the last authentic Western civilization in the historic sense of the word, especially in contrast to today’s America, with its militant secularism, tawdry commercialism, and infantile celebrity worship that pass for civilization. We have little in common with the people of Boston, New York, San Francisco, or Seattle. If these States want homosexual “marriage,” if they want to turn their children over to the government to raise, if they want to sink into socialist dependency, if they want to submerge their communities in aliens from the Third World, if they want to disarm and render themselves helpless before criminals or a predatory state (assuming they can tell the difference), that’s their choice. But it’s not what we Southerners choose, or would choose if we had the chance. We see and feel things differently, based on our shared customs, beliefs, and experience. We have a right to live by our own lights rather than sacrifice our traditional wisdom on the altars of commercial expediency and Political Correctness.
An Occupied People.
130 years ago the last occupying Federal troops left the South after Reconstruction. (“Reconstruction” was the Yankee word for looting what they missed stealing or destroying during the War). Yet today we’re still occupied; not by foreign troops, but by an alien and hostile ideology, and by all the commercial and political power it commands.
Like any people under occupation, Southerners have shown the usual varied responses. Many of us resist the best we can, keeping the spirit of liberty alive. For every Confederate flag or monument that comes down, we raise a dozen new ones in our hearts. Others are crushed in spirit; and when the conqueror, having taken their goods, then tries to rob them of their dignity, telling them they’re worthless, lazy, depraved, bigoted, and ignorant, they believe it and willingly accept second-class status in the Empire. Still others ape the conduct of the oppressor, internalizing his values in the vain hope of being accepted by their supposed betters. Sunk deep in denial, these collaborators are the first to tell us all is well, and we have no problems that can’t be fixed by redoubling our devotion to the Regime.
But no matter what our response, the American political process, mass education, including the university, the mass media, and even to an extent the legal process, are closed to Southerners as Southerners. We’ve been effectively disenfranchised. We are allowed to participate only as obedient subjects of the Regime, but not as Southerners. How do we know? Well, for one thing, look at what happens to any Southern politician who dares to speak kindly, even in an unplanned, offhand manner, about any Southern icon. He will be pilloried unmercifully until he repudiates his heritage and apologizes. And his apologies can never be too craven, abject, and repeated to still the condemnation. (Sad to say, most such Southern politicians are cowardly enough to comply). We’ve all been disenfranchised, not just politicians, by the relentless campaign of hatred and elimination of all things uniquely Southern from the public sphere. This campaign is not an inconsequential matter. It tells us our culture, and subsequently our liberties, are marked for extinction. The attempt to exterminate our history, symbols, and heritage gives us a clear warning of the nature of the Regime and its cohorts of professional South-haters. A truly free and open republic would feel no need to engage in such acts. It would respect the undeniable virtues enshrined in our symbols and embodied in our heroes. The buzzwords of today’s Regime are tolerance, diversity, and multi-culturalism. If these were true sentiments instead of lies, they would include us. He who controls the past, controls the future. http://www.southernnationalcongress.org |
Through the “long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion,” in M. Renan’s words, liberty and independence were born in us; they are our legacy. We Southerners have both inherited and bequeathed a spirit of liberty and self-government – the ethos of Jefferson, a Southerner, as opposed to the centralizing and authoritarian ethos of Alexander Hamilton, a Yankee. But that liberty was not a gift. Our forefathers had to fight to win it. If what is left of that liberty is to be preserved, and if there is to be a rebirth of liberty in the South, we Southerners of today will have to fight to win it as well. It was in this realization that the SNC was born.