Manifesto: Why A Southern National Congress?
To Our Fellow Southerners:
From The Executive Council of the Southern National Congress Committee
This is an invitation to all Southerners of good will and good character, who love their country and who seek to preserve our liberty, prosperity, and identity, to join with us in organizing a Southern National Congress (SNC).
We start with the proposition that the South and its inhabitants are a separate, distinct, and worthy people rooted in soil, kinship, shared history and customs. If you reject this notion or find it pointless or irrelevant, then you needn’t bother to read further. But if you do accept it, you probably also understand how significantly we Southerners have contributed to America’s founding and her subsequent history, and you believe we deserve to prosper and flourish. You probably also understand that our identity, culture, liberty, and well-being are threatened as never since 1865. These threats are subtle and insidious, yet potentially more destructive than the outright invasion, military force, and occupation used against us in the Second War of Independence.
What then are we to do? What can we do? Of course, we of the SNC Committee don’t profess to have the final answers to such deep, complex, far-reaching questions. But we may have a partial solution. Moreover, we believe it’s foolish to refrain from doing anything simply because we can’t do everything. The mighty oak springs from a single acorn. The longest journey begins with but a single step.
“A Separate and Distinct People”
In other words, the South is a nation. But just what is a nation? Is it merely a geographic subdivision on the map? An area ruled by a particular government? A collection of abstract political propositions? Or is it something deeper and more lasting?
Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a French political philosopher, provides a definition that fits the South like a glove. In a lecture given at The Sorbonne in 1882, called “What Is a Nation?” he said:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I mean genuine glory); this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more -- these are the essential conditions for being a people. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices to which one has consented, and in proportion to the ills that one has suffered. One loves the house that one has built and handed down. The Spartan song, "We are what you were; we will be what you are," is, in its simplicity, the abridged hymn of every patrie.
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