American Thinker on The Tragic City

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Hunter Wallace

Alabama

American Thinker has an unusually candid article on what Paul Kersey has labeled The Tragic City:

“Birmingham, Alabama is considered by many to be the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Today, African-Americans in Birmingham benefit from a numerical majority in the population, corresponding majorities in government jobs, and political control of the city. But civil rights won’t address what ails the city now.

Birmingham is recognized as one of the most violent and poorly-run cities in the nation. The city runs a massive deficit, and is county seat of Jefferson County, which recently cut a deal with a European bank as part of the largest government bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Underlying this fiasco is a mixture of problems, none of which can be solved by the civil rights agenda, or by liberalism in any form. This is not to suggest that those rights should be rolled back, but to point out that today’s solutions will not come from civil rights.

Blacks in Birmingham have now obtained equal rights, special protection for those rights, preferential enforcement of those rights, a demographic majority, and a near monopoly on government employment. Moreover, that panoply of rights and benefits is funded by the nation’s highest sales tax. The results should be a progressive success story. Instead, Jefferson County’s bankruptcy stems in part from an epic and at times grimly amusing corruption scandal that resulted in the conviction of at least 22 people. Those convicted officials include the former mayor of Birmingham, Larry Langford. …”

Like South Africa, Zimbabwe, or Detroit and Atlanta 2013, Birmingham as it has existed since it was “redeemed” by MLK and the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 is not a subject of polite discussion in the United States.

Even this American Thinker article, which is about as far as a mainstream conservative article can go on race, skates around the edges of the truth about Birmingham with obvious disclaimers like “this is not to suggest that those rights should be rolled back” and “Birmingham is simply past the point where legal, structural, or policy changes will ameliorate cultural pathology.”

The immediate cause of this “sorry state of affairs” was the demonization of Bull Connor and White Birmingham by the MSM in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which destroyed the Jim Crow system in Birmingham and which empowered the black political machine that captured power with the election of Richard Arrington, Jr. as mayor in 1979.

There is also a simple legal and political remedy which could fix Birmingham’s problems with a majority vote: if Alabama seceded from the United States, all the federal civil rights laws and federal court decisions which pertain to blacks, which are the foundation of the black political machine’s power, and which were imposed on Birmingham as a direct consequence of a shift in Northern public opinion caused by television coverage of the 1963 Children’s Crusade, would be wiped out in a single stroke.

The same legal and political solution to Birmingham’s woes could similarly be used to fix New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Richmond, Little Rock and other Southern cities where black empowerment at the hands of the U.S. federal government, which always defers to Northern public opinion, has foolishly imposed what had previously been the cultural pathologies of negro ghettos and schools onto entire metro areas.

If we were to examine what happened to Birmingham on a more philosophical level, we would be forced to admit that it was really Americanism, or the cherished liberal abstractions that Northern Whites hold about liberty, equality, and democracy, and their universal application to all of mankind that brought about the cultural conditions in which Birmingham 2013 was even conceivable.

We tolerate these pockets of barbarism in our midst because White Americans have been sold on the idea that the blacks should be free, that they are our equals, that black dysfunction is a product of their history rather than their heredity, that “one man, one vote” democracy is superior to any other conceivable system of policy, and that the most immoral thing a White person can do is think in racial terms.

All these alien ideas that were imposed on us by the federal government inspired violent resistance because they run against the grain of the traditional culture of the Deep South. Somehow we will have to purge our culture of this “civil rights” poison or every Southern city will end up as broke, corrupt, and dysfunctional as Birmingham in 2013.

Note: H/T to SNN for the apropos Rhett graphic.

Rhett-on-the-Souths-enemies

Posted in Alabama, American South, Civil Rights, Dixie, History, Liberalism, Negroes, Race Relations | 9 Comments

How The South Will Rise Again

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Hunter Wallace

Dixie

In Forbes, demographer Joel Kotkin sees the Sunbelt South becoming even more dominant in economic power as the “new breed of carpetbaggers” flee the high tax, sluggish growth Blue States of the North and West:

“Perhaps the most persuasive evidence is the strong and persistent inflow of Americans to the South. The South still attracts the most domestic migrants of any U.S. region. Last year, it boasted six of the top eight states in terms of net domestic migration — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. Texas and Florida alone gained 250,000 net migrants. The top four losers were deep blue New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California….

These trends suggest that the South will expand its dominance as the nation’s most populous region. In the 1950s, the South, the Northeast and the Midwest each had about the same number of people. Today the region is almost as populous as the Northeast and the Midwest combined.

Why are people moving to what the media tends to see as a backwater? In part, it’s because economic growth in the South has outpaced the rest of the country for a generation and the area now constitutes by far the largest economic region in the country …”

Note: In my view, this raises the obvious question: why not independence? Why should the South be governed by a non-Southern majority of declining Blue States that are hostile toward our cultural values and economic development?

I can’t see this being a fortuitous development either if the influx of transplants just ends up recreating Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina in the image of Blue States like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Maybe their children will grow up as Southerners though like the children of European immigrants who assimilated into the dominant Yankee culture of the Northeast?

Posted in American South, Dixie, Economy, Southern Agriculture, Southern Industry | 25 Comments

Amurrica Series: Boy Scouts Reconsidering Ban on Gays

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Hunter Wallace

BRA

“The disease, which preys on the vitals of the Federal Union, does not emanate from any defect in the Federal Constitution – but from a deeper source – the hearts, heads, and consciences of the Northern people.”
- William Lowndes Yancey

Amurrica, a state of becoming … open homosexuals in the military, women in combat roles, and now openly gay Boy Scouts:

Note: We live a country where a trashy pop star like Beyoncé lip sync the national anthem and where the president claims “equality is the star that guides us still” from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.”

Posted in Homosexuals, Politics | 2 Comments

Amurrica Series: Obama’s Full Amnesty Speech

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Hunter Wallace

Nevada

Here’s the highlight of Obama’s big amnesty speech:

“They all came here knowing that what makes someone an American is not just blood, or birth, but allegiance to our founding principles, and the faith that the idea that anyone, from anywhere, can write the next great chapter of our story. And that is still true today.”

If that is true, then being a “Southerner” or a “Dixian” has always been about your racial and ethnic ancestry, your culture, and especially your place of birth (in the South, we always ask where you are from), and explicitly rejecting the “founding principles” of Americanism (i.e., the abstract Judeo-Yankee concept of the Proposition Nation) in favor of a traditional European-style ethnic identity rooted in the above.

Note: Marco Rubio lied to conservative voters on immigration to get elected in the Florida Senate race against Charlie Crist. The same is true of Rand Paul who is now pledging allegiance to Israel and who wants to ban selling F-16s to Egypt.

John McCain has returned to pure amnesty form after lying about his credentials on border security to defeat J.D. Hayworth in 2010. Jeff Flake, who replaced Jon Kyl in the Senate, has at least always been a consistently pro-amnesty Republican.

Posted in Hispanics, Immigration, Nevada, Politics, Race Relations | 3 Comments

Senate Reaches “Bipartisan” Amnesty Deal

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Hunter Wallace

District of Corruption

John McCain and Marco Rubio joined Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin this morning to unveil the latest version of comprehensive amnesty:

Note: It is worth noting here that the Tea Party is responsible for saddling us with Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, who endorsed amnesty after the election and who recently claimed that an attack Israel would be treated like an attack on the United States, both of whom turned out to be nothing more than sleazy politicians who are willing to do the bidding of the Republican establishment to prep for their 2016 presidential campaigns.

The only political candidates worth supporting in this country are those which are willing to formally commit themselves to secession. Anything less than secession, as the Tea Party has demonstrated by putting Rand Paul and Marco Rubio in the Senate, and by listening to Sarah Palin who endorsed John McCain’s reelection, will just be co-opted by the Republican establishment after arriving in Washington.

Posted in Hispanics, Immigration, Politics, Race Relations | 3 Comments

Secede, or Die

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Hunter Wallace
Dissolve the Union or sink with the ship

Dissolve the Union or sink with the ship

Dixie

H/T Blood and Soil

After an hour or so of browsing the news, I see that the GOP is gearing up to surrender on amnesty for illegal aliens and capitulate to the Left on immigration in general.

There is even more nonsense than usual from Republicans this weekend about redoubling their efforts to push more Tim Scotts, Marco Rubios, and Bobby Jindals (a formula which never worked, the Left is just emboldened by weakness and keeps accusing them of “racism”) as “the new face of the party” in order to not come across as “a bunch of angry white men.”

These people allowed themselves to get rolled. They are absolutely incapable of “conserving” anything. As long as the Union exists and keeps filling up with millions of welfare dependent and/or permanently aggrieved non-Whites who align themselves with insufferable White Northeastern liberals, the GOP will perpetually shift to the Left on every issue in an increasingly desperate attempt to “reach out to minorities” and to be competitive “out in California, on the West Coast, or in New England.”

The existence of the Union is the core of the problem. The Union is the only reason this is even happening. It is because of the Union that we are eventually saddled with everything we despise because of the unrelenting political and cultural pressure that emanates from the Northeast and which is imposed on us whenever they capture control the federal government.

The whole edifice of the Union was built on the monstrous lies and deceptions in The Federalist Papers. At some point later this year, I will probably review The Federalist Papers just to show how “federalism” in practice turned out to be a consolidated, meddlesome government of unlimited powers which interferes in our daily lives more than the “tyranny” of any premodern monarchy.

Posted in Hispanics, Immigration, Politics, Republicans | 2 Comments

Review: America Aflame

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Hunter Wallace
David Goldfield's, "America Aflame: How The Civil War Created a Nation"

David Goldfield’s, “America Aflame: How The Civil War Created a Nation”

United States, 1834-1876

David Goldfield’s America Aflame: How The Civil War Created a Nation is a sweeping antiwar take on the Civil War era and a throwback to Avery Craven’s “blundering generation” thesis.

Goldfield sets the “Civil War” with the Confederacy in the context of other perceived threats to mid-nineteenth century America: Roman Catholics, Mexicans, Indians, and labor unions. The preferred solution by Yankees to each of these threats was the use of violence.

Far from being an “Irrepressible Conflict,” Goldfield pins the blame for the War Between the States on the intolerance and fanaticism that was injected into the political process by the rise of evangelical Christianity during the Second Great Awakening.

Northern evangelicals like Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison transformed “political issues into moral causes” which “poisoned the political process,” undermined the political center inhabited by moderates like Stephen Douglas and Alexander Stephens, created an atmosphere of moral certitude in which compromise was impossible, and finally alienated the South to the point of destroying the Union.

Confident of their personal relationship with the Almighty, the Saints of New England tragically marched off to wage their crusade to “save the Union” against the wicked “Slave Power” which had thwarted them for so long. Southern evangelicals were no less certain that God was on their side. Somewhere in the midst of the carnage of battles like Cold Harbor, Northerners were chastened by Confederate guns and their religious fervor began to subside.

The “Civil War” created a “nation”: Goldfield argues that this nation, modern America, a consolidated activist government supervising an industrialized economy in which national citizenship in the sacred Union has replaced state citizenship in a loose confederation of sovereign states, was synonymous with the Republican Party and the victorious Northern states, which dominated the country until the Great Depression.

The North, or postbellum “America,” lost its religious enthusiasm and embraced the gospel of science and material progress. Northerners moved on into the Industrial Revolution of the 1870s and lost themselves in the consumer cornucopia that emerged in its wake. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the incendiary antebellum anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, moved to Florida, converted to Episcopalianism, and spent her elderly years writing books about interior design.

The South became an internal colony of the United States, a much larger version of Cuba or Puerto Rico, in everything but name. 1 out of every 4 White men between 20 and 40 had died in the war. Two thirds of Southern wealth was wiped out during the War Between the States. The South was reduced to political, cultural, and economic irrelevance within the Northern-dominated Union and wouldn’t even return to the level of per capita income it had in 1860 until the 1920s.

Like the Irish or the Poles, Southerners did not move on from the war. Evangelical Christianity wasn’t discredited in the South. It became synonymous with an emerging Southern folk culture, the Redemption movement, and the Lost Cause. The years between the end of Reconstruction and World War I was a period of intense nation building in “Dixie” in which the South developed a sense of national consciousness that had barely existed at the outset of the Confederacy.

The North quickly lost its zeal for imposing Reconstruction on the South. In particular, the emerging “Celtocracy” of Irish Catholic immigrants in Northeastern cities such Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City created a new sense of sympathy among Northern Protestants for White Southerners whose intelligence and property was also being swamped by the misrule of inferior races.

In the Western states, the energies of William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Armstrong Custer were redirected from Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley and turned toward the pacification and annihilation of the Plains Indians. The Sioux and the buffalo that sustained their savage way of life were exterminated and the vast Midwestern agricultural empire which is dominated today by agribusiness was created in the Plains from the Dakotas to Kansas.

Goldfield closes America Aflame with a look at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia which closed the first century of America’s existence: a continent had been conquered, the Union had been preserved, slavery had been overthrown, and America seemed to be on a dizzying upward trajectory with everything from steel to electricity to the telephone to Heinz’s ketchup making its appearance.

Somehow that “Civil War” had made it all possible. But at what cost?

Posted in American South, Dixie, History, Negroes, Race Relations, Southern Nationalism, Whiteness | 1 Comment