The South Was Right

by James Ronald Kennedy

  Modern liberals are driven by a sense of guilt. When they see starving blacks in Marxist Africa, they feel guilty. They feel that somehow African poverty and suffering is their fault or, to be more exact, that it is the fault of Western Civilization of which they are a part; therefore they feel responsible for that starvation half a world away. Thus every social inequity or accident of nature is somehow translated in their minds as another indictment of Western Civilization and therefore an indictment of themselves. To atone for their sins, liberals are compelled to engage in various attempts to resolve the problems of humanity. Now this in and of itself—while bizarre—is not bad as long as the liberals are using their liberty, time, and money to further their personal need for social atonement. But another tenet of liberal philosophy is that one cannot trust the individual to respond correctly to social needs, but must rely on an overseer in the form of a large government to enforce the needs of society. In other words, liberals have very conveniently removed the necessity of using their liberty, time, and money to atone for their perceived sins and have transferred that responsibility to the middle-class taxpayer. Using the police power of the government, liberals can rob the middle class of its rightful property and transfer it to the so-called oppressed people of the world.

  The liberals make use of the sense of guilt to convince weak politicians to transfer the property of the middle class to the under privileged. This is done in much the same way that the Radical Republicans would rouse public opinion against the South by waving the “bloody shirt” and reminding Northern voters that Southerners (and therefore Democrats) killed their sons during the war. If justification is needed for racial quotas and affirmative action, all the liberals need to do is to invoke this sense of guilt by reminding us Southerners that (according to liberal doctrine) it is our fault that “they” (whatever minority that is in vogue at that time) are so far behind. We must, therefore, accept this new piece of social engineering as part of our atonement for the sins of our past.

  Today, the world has a new breed of Southerners to deal with. They are different from those who have gone before. They do not yet make up a majority or even a numerically large segment of our society. However, their potential to do mischief to the ruling Yankee order is tremendous. These new unreconstructed Southerners are better described as Southern Nationalists. This is not to say, however, that they have as yet progressed as far as the Baltic people who are demanding independence for their countries. The Southern Nationalists have rejected the conqueror’s myth that the South was wrong and that we are better off as a result of the South’s defeat. The new unreconstructed Southerners, or more appropriately Southern Nationalists, are not defined by their membership in a splinter political party. They may be Republicans, Democrats, or Independents. The important distinction is that their loyalty is to their peoples’ rights not to a political party. Southern Nationalists cover the entire spectrum of pro-South political thought.

  There are those who merely want to improve the standing of the middle-class Southerners in the accepted political parties as well as those who have declared “a plague on both your houses” as far as either of the political parties is concerned. There is a new militancy evident in the South. Southerners are beginning to question their second-class status. They are starting to re-examine with a critical eye the Yankee myth of history and are comparing it to the writings of their own people. The Southern Nationalists are challenging this ever-weakening, ever-decaying Northern liberal dominated nation to assure us our equality within the nation or to face a new demand for the freedom and independence of the Southern nation!

  Silas M. Bunn, Company E, Sixty-Second Alabama Volunteer Infantry, Talladega, Alabama. Bunn entered Confederate service just seven months after his older brother, Marcus, was killed in action. (Image courtesy of Roy Bunn, Roanoke, Alabama)

  CHAPTER 11

  Equality of Opportunity

  They [the people of a Democracy] want equality in freedom, and if they cannot have that, they still want equality in slavery.1

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

  Strange as it may seem, some people would rather live in a slave like condition of equality rather than live free in a condition of inequality! In the late 1980s, while watching a newscast from the Soviet Union, we heard a Soviet citizen complaining that, even though she liked the new goods that free market workers were providing and she acknowledged that the old system was failing to provide such goods, she still complained that the free market workers were “getting rich.” Her solution was that “everyone should be paid equally.” Somehow she never realized that it is the inequality in a free society that provides the goods and services we enjoy.

  The Northern liberals are now demanding that the central government provide equality of results. No longer satisfied with the concept of equality of opportunity, modern liberals, like the citizen of the former Soviet Union, are now preparing to reduce all to the equality of slavery. This concept, equality of results, is in direct opposition to the traditional individualistic belief of our Southern heritage. This concept has given us racial quotas, affirmative action, minority set-asides, busing, ad nauseam.

  In the following chapter we will outline the Southern attitude toward the concept of “equality” as it relates to the individual and to the government. In a phrase, our attitude can be summed up as “equality for all—privilege for none.”

  Equality of Opportunity

  “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are createdequal.”2 No single phrase in American history contains as much hope and promise and, at the same time, has caused so much anger, frustration, and despair! To promise an entire population that all will be equal (i.e., enjoy equal wealth, influence, services received, etc.) is to guarantee a communal existence. Such a thought has always been and continues to be anathema to the individualistic heritage of the South. What then did Thomas Jefferson mean when he penned this “self-evident” phrase?

  In the early days of the American Republic, the term referred to equality before God and the law. It was an open attack against the then-prevalent concept of the divine right of kings. Later in the American setting, it came to mean equality of opportunity (i.e., that no one should be arbitrarily barred from the rights protected by law or from access to public services). In short, it was and still is good public policy to encourage all to compete in the market place because such free enterprise leads to lower prices and to better quality of goods and services.3

  Jefferson did not mean that all people were endowed with the same qualities, characteristics, and talents. As part of the American aristocracy, he knew that some people possessed skills and talents superior to others. But this fact did not change their standing before God or the law. The concept of equality encourages and protects liberty.

  Our modern-day liberals have perverted the original concept of equality of opportunity into their current doctrine of equality of result (i.e., absolute equality similar to that found in a communal setting). Contrast the liberal’s view with Milton Friedman’s:

  Neither equality before God nor equality of opportunity presented any conflict with liberty. … Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty.4

  Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, noted the danger posed to liberty by the uncontrolled lust for equality:

  The passion for equality seeps into every corner of the human heart,… It is no use telling them that by this blind surrender to an exclusive passion [equality] they are compromising their dearest interest. It is no use pointing out that freedom is slipping from their grasp. …5

  Modern liberals have plagued Southern society with innumerable sociological schemes and experiments to achieve their goal of human equality. The rights and liberties of the Southern people have been the preferred sacrifice to appease the wrath of the gods of liberalism. We have been forced to endure such insults as busing, racial quotas, minority set-asides, affirmative action plans, reverse discrimin
ation, and a discriminatory South-only Voting Rights Act, just to name a few. All this (and so much more that space does not allow its printing) in the name of human equality, and still we are no closer to appeasing the gods of Yankee liberalism than when our political leaders first began their groveling. Do you suppose it is time we try something a little more forceful?

  To understand why equality of results is such a strong tenet of the religion of liberalism, we must first understand the chief motivating spiritual force of liberalism—guilt! Liberals are driven by an illogical sense of guilt that will not allow them to leave well enough alone, to mind their own business, or even to realize that, although evil exists and they are right to feel sympathy for its victims, they don’t understand everything about it, and that even if they did they do not have the means to correct it. How often have we heard Southerners bitterly and vainly complaining to the Yankee press that all they want is to be “left alone.” Yet, to liberal minds this is unacceptable; if they perceive a social problem, then they are guilt-ridden until a solution acceptable to the Yankee mind has been found and enforced. During the War for Southern Independence, Adm. Raphael Semmes of the CSS Alabama noted that the Yankee is obsessed with the compulsion to “toil to make the world go around.” If liberals see that blacks are per capita poorer than whites, then they feel guilty. If more blacks than whites are on death row, then liberals are overcome by guilt. If people in the underdeveloped parts of the world are starving, liberals assume that surely “we” are to blame. When viewing the reality of the human experience, they realize that life is not fair. They feel guilty and determine that it is “our” fault, and therefore “we owe it to these people” to attempt to relieve the suffering they feel “we” have caused. Some authors have considered this sense of guilt to be a typically Anglo/Saxon (English—and therefore Yankee) attitude as opposed to a Celtic (Welsh, Scottish, and Irish—and therefore Southern) attitude. These authors treat this as a characteristic transmitted via the predominant culture.6 Guilt is the motivating factor of liberalism. To abate their sense of guilt, liberals can justify any amount of taxes, court orders, affirmative action programs, busing, ad nauseam! American liberals are willing to spend the last dollar belonging to the middle class to abate their sense of guilt. From their world view, the middle class is the universal cause of humanity’s woes, so why should liberals concern themselves when the villain (the middle class, especially the Southern middle class) begins to groan under the heavy burden laid upon them by their liberal taskmasters? After all, according to the liberals, those responsible are only repaying the underprivileged for all the crimes they and their ancestors have committed against them.

  Ever since the end of the military phase of the War for Southern Independence, the South has been made to feel the stern rod in the hand of its liberal taskmasters. To add insult to injury, the Southern economy, which has never recovered from the war and Reconstruction, has been heavily taxed to maintain these inefficient, pork-barrel, bureaucratic boondoggles.

  When the sovereign communities in each of the Southern states regain control of their destiny and begin once again to assert and exercise their legitimate political authority, they must be guided by the principle of equality of opportunity. They shall jealously guard the free entry into the market place and maintain strict scrutiny of equality before the law. But they shall never again allow the force of government to enforce equality of results to the detriment of individual liberty and property rights.

  When Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, was pressed by certain Moslems to reserve a specific number of jobs for minorities regardless of their qualifications, he objected. Gandhi, who was probably this century’s purest (if not only) humanitarian spirit, declared his stand on quotas thusly:

  For administration to be efficient it must be in the hands of the fittest. There should certainly be no favoritism. If we want five engineers we must not take one from each community but we must take the fittest five even if they were all Mussulmans or all Parsis. … those who aspire to occupy responsible posts in the government of the country can only do so if they pass the required test.7

  Gandhi made this decision based not just on pure utility but out of deep insight. He knew what too many liberals refuse torecognize—arbitrary and capricious discrimination (even in the name of good) leads to resentment as better qualified (or for that matter less qualified) members are barred from entry into the market place. When people are denied the opportunity to compete, resentment builds, and hatred encourages strife. Instead of improving relations between two divergent elements of society, government has made matters worse, even to the point of causing open violence! The South will not make this mistake. Equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and especially a realization that all people stand as equals before God are all important aspects of the Southern National political philosophy. (The latter is not meant as a theological statement but only to stress the point that all people are equally valuable and therefore not “expendable” from an ethical perspective). Results in each person’s life must depend upon the individual’s personal talents, skill, motivation, and intelligence.

  The Southern people, who have a long tradition of individual responsibility, also have a tradition of opposition to governmentally enforced equality of results. John C. Calhoun declared:

  But to go further, and make equality of condition essential to liberty, would be to destroy both liberty and progress. … It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files. This gives to progress its greatest impulse. To force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward the rear into line with the front, by the interposition of the government, would put an end to the impulse, and effectually arrest the march of progress.8

  Legitimate Voting Qualifications

  The liberal concept of one man-one vote, or universal franchise, is so deeply entrenched in the liberal dogma of the Yankee government that very few are willing to challenge its legitimacy. This is especially true in the South. Here we are faced with the danger of being labeled as a society attempting to deny the franchise permanently on the basis of race. Where will anyone find a popular politician who is willing to confront charges of racism and bigotry just to promote an improvement in the quality of the electorate? So here, in our beloved South, the past holds the present hostage to the detriment of the future!

  The necessity of ethical government, led by the most able representatives chosen from society, demands an honest and courageous assessment of voting qualifications. We have no doubt that this issue will be the one point most aggressively attacked by the enemies of our country, all hysterically waving the bloody shirt of racism, as if this scare tactic will frighten off yet another generation of Southerners; but this time we are not running!

  John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), an English defender of civil liberties, an early (1865) champion of women’s suffrage, and author of On Liberty (1859) and Representative Government (1861), is as far removed from “racism” as the North is from the South. Yet, in Mill we find a vocal proponent of requiring specific qualifications prior to the granting of the franchise. Mill believed that voting was a privilege to be earned and to be held as opposed to being a natural right devolving upon all humanity regardless of condition. Mill drew an implied contrast between representative governments and mob rule that results within an unqualified democracy. Bread and circuses were not Mill’s idea of “good government.”

  The current generation of Southerners has witnessed a continuing reduction of voting qualifications, a concurrent decrease in the percentage of qualified voters who actually cast ballots, and a decline of the quality and ethical standards of government. Should any thinking person find this unusual? The officeholders in a democracy represent the average plus one of the electorate. If the majority of the voters have an eighth-grade education, then the average offic
eholder will represent the interest, social values, and aspirations of that majority. The purpose of the electoral system is to force officeholders to answer to the public. This has always been essential in a free society, but its importance has dramatically increased in our modern technological society. Since it requires little or no qualifications for voting, the Southern electoral process has been relegated to virtual organized mob rule whereby the election is guaranteed to the politician who can promise the “mostest to the mostest.” We must move away from blind faith in the liberal theology of one man-one vote. Voting is the means by which citizens control their elected officials. Those who exercise this privilege must first earn it.

  First Qualification for Voting

  What then are the reasonable qualifications for voting that we shall adopt for our country? The first requirement is that all who would seek the privilege must be able to read, to write, and to demonstrate certain elementary knowledge of history, geography, and mathematics. Quoting from a non-Southern and non-racist source, we see that Mill would require

  … it as wholly inadmissible that any person should participate in the suffrage without being able to read, write, and I will add, perform the common operations of arithmetic. … people would no more think of giving the suffrage to a man who could not read, than of giving it to a child who could not speak; and it would not be society that would exclude him, but his own laziness. When society has not performed its duty, by rendering this amount of instruction accessible to all, there is some hardship in the case, but this is a hardship that ought to be borne. … No one but those in whom an a priori theory has silenced common sense will maintain that power over others, over the whole community, should be imparted to people who have not acquired the commonest and most essential requisites for taking care of themselves. … It would be eminently desirable that other things besides reading, writing and arithmetic could be made necessary to the suffrage; that some knowledge of the conformation of the earth, its natural and political divisions, the elements of general history and of the history and institutions of their own country, could be required from all electors. … [A]fter a few years it would exclude none but those who cared so little for the privilege, that their vote, if given, would not in general be an indication of any real political opinion.9