Byzantine Blog

Dear Svetlana,

It is not unusual for people, abused beyond endurance, to strike back in mistaken and harmful ways. The U.S., the Vatican and Germany have promoted anti-Serb racism and anti-orthodox religious intolerance, and have instigated secessionism to shatter the Serbs as a people and to destroy and then pulverize Yugoslavia. This has gone on for twenty years and is continuing. I assume it was in reaction to this nightmare attack, in the spirit of "see how you like it," that you posted an article which appears to be a veiled 'puff piece' for the U.S. pro-confederacy group, the League of the South, and even posted a picture of the southern confederacy’s battle flag, mentioning that it can be purchased on the internet, as if to promote its sale.

From what I understand you were born in Yugoslavia and live in Canada, so I guess you might be unaware that the confederate flag is the U.S. equivalent of the Croatian fascist checkerboard flag. The League of the South is the equivalent of a Croatian group celebrating the Ustashe, supposedly ‘not because we are fascists but to celebrate our Christian traditions and our heroic past.’

Rather than getting back at those who are behind the destruction of Yugoslavia, the post has the unfortunate effect of encouraging tolerance of - and tolerance is always the precondition for support for - the League and its beliefs, which happen to be similar to the fascist beliefs inspiring the foot soldiers used to destroy Yugoslavia and to attack Serbs and Roma in the Balkans today.

The League of the South rails against the US government; similarly, the fascists in Kosovo rail against the UN and NATO, even though their every move is programmed by NATO intelligence services. And just like Kosovo fascists, the real victims of American fascists are ordinary people among the targets of their hate – in the Balkans, it’s ordinary Serbs and Roma, in the US, non-whites or whatever/whomever their racist pseudo-science labels ‘non-whites’ (for now) – and always, anyone who thinks. Never the powerful.

Just as some Croatian fascists use doubletalk to avoid censure, so do some of the American strain. In this spirit, the League of the South claims it is not racist, it’s only Christians defending their homes, just like Croatian rock star Marko Perkovic Thompson. http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/times1.htm

As with Croatian fascist rock star Thompson, the disguise is half-hearted; they always give themselves away. The League’s web site administrator posted a speech by one Rev. Dick Jones, which includes the following:

"Very few will be for us in the foreseeable future, but in the words of our only President, Jefferson Davis, ‘The principle for which we (the Confederacy) contended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.’ The principle for which we contend is nothing less than Christendom – it is God’s own truth – controlling and informing our culture - it is our homes and families – living and dead – it is the lives and proven character of truly heroic men and women that the moral pygmies of our day can’t even begin to comprehend – it is for Dixie!"
-- “‘Who Is For Us?’ A speech delivered for the Sons of Confederate Veterans at a meeting on March 31, 2005 by the Rev. Dick Jones”
Website of the League of the South, http://tinyurl.com/yqz7zb

What was the key principle for which Jefferson Davis, leader of the southern side in the U.S. civil war, actually fought? Consider what he told his political subordinates in 1861, at the outbreak of the war, reminding them why they had to fight. He did not limit himself to defending some vaguely romantic ‘southern way of life.’ He said the issue was slavery.

[Davis’s apologia starts here. Notes in brackets from me, Jared Israel]

Document 117 - Message of Jefferson Davis, April, 29, 1861

Gentlemen of [secessionist] Congress:

[...]

[Davis gives his version of north-south relations leading up to the civil war. He says these relations had deteriorated because the North started trying various ways to destroy slavery:]

As soon, however, as the Northern states, that prohibited African slavery within their limits, had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling vote in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern states was inaugurated and gradually extended. A series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves.

[Davis describes various anti-slavery measures by abolitionists and politicians, and then says, talking about the period just before the outbreak of the civil war, says the North, led by Republican Party, started trying to prevent new states from adopting slave labor:]

Finally, a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave states from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the states in common, whether by conquest or purchases, surrounded them entirely by states in which slavery should be prohibited, thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and therefore annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars [i.e., $$trillions in today’s money – J.I.].

This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last [i.e., 1860] in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States
[...]

[After much verbiage, Jefferson gets back to the point, explaining that:]

…the productions of the south in cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of the African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the export of the whole United States...

[And therefore:]

With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were drive by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avoid the dangers with which they were openly menaced.

[Hence, the south seceded.]

-- The full text of Davis’s speech can be read online or downloaded from the book of documents, “The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives,” by Frank Moore, Edward Everett, at http://tinyurl.com/33sqky

[Davis’s apologia ends here. Notes in brackets from me, Jared Israel]

- Given the politics of the confederacy;

- given the meaning of support for the confederate flag - illustrated with historical accuracy at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching2.jpg - which is for America essentially what the checkerboard flag is for the Balkans, just substitute “blacks” for “Serbs and Roma”;

- given the Vatican's historical support for the southern slave owners’ rebellion, as expressed in the fact that Pope Pius IX sent slavocracy leader Jefferson Davis a gift of a crown of thorns, which the pope supposedly made with his own hands, to console Davis when he was jailed following the defeat of the confederacy in the U.S. Civil War. The crown of thorns is on display at the Confederate Memorial Hall Museum in New Orleans http://www.confederatemuseum.com/html/body_exhibits.html

- given all this, is it any wonder that tooling around google I found that a leading Croatian Ustasha, Tomislav Sunic, perhaps the top propagandist in the Croatian foreign ministry during in the first half of the 1990s
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/sunic.htm#head and who today appeals to all whites (including Serbs) to join in ‘protecting’ the ‘European’ (meaning white) so-called race – is it any wonder that this high level Ustasha told an interviewer:

“by my sense of the tragic and [by virtue of] geographic proximity I am German; by my destiny a Croat; by my legal super-ego and Confederate-Southern sympathies, and my historic choice, I am a European-American”
--- “Interview with Tomislav Sunic,” at http://foster.20megsfree.com/401.htm

Even though he now claims to believe that all whites should get together as equals in one happy racist family, Sunic can’t shed the habits of Croatian racist propaganda. Asked what he thought of World War II Croatian Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic, Sunic could not bring himself to attack him. Instead he gave the interviewer the following roundabout but revealing answer:

“The English historian Edward Carr wrote that, before one studies history, one must study a historian. Failure to look at different, i.e., revisionist historical accounts, leads to misperceptions, paranoia, and, eventually, armed conflicts. The former Yugoslav propaganda had committed a mistake by hyper-inflating Croatian fascist crimes of WWII. Tudjman in 1990, dared to demolish this antifascist victimology. His public speeches, given the widespread foreign media prone "historical linkages," soon earned him a bad reputation among liberal pressure groups, both in the USA and Europe. Moreover, his speeches were a big enough reason to alter the mindset of the local, largely rural, Serbs in Croatia, who were already whipped into a frenzy by Milosevic's communist propaganda.”
Ibid.

In other words, the problem was a) socialist Yugoslavia grossly inflated the Croatian Ustasha victim count, which happens to be a lie, and b) the Serbs living in Krajina and Croatia proper, supposedly fooled by their own mentality of ‘victimology’ and by contemporary commie propaganda, viewed Mr. Tudjman as a fascist, which resulted in all Serbs getting driven from Croatia and surrounding territory, or being killed. Which happens to be exactly the same line as the German foreign ministry; so much for Croatian ‘independence.’

To sum up: If we even tolerate the politics of the Confederate flag and its promoters - even if we do so out of anger or bitterness - we are tolerating the politics of fascist Croatia. The politics that drove the Serbs from their homes in Krajina. The politics from which no mistreated person, including Serbs, Jews and Roma, is immune by virtue of ethnicity.

It was against those politics, which are today, in the U.S., represented by the confederate flag, that the people of Serbia and Montenegro rose up in the last two weeks of March, 1941, doing what nobody had dared to do: threatening to overthrow and then overthrowing a government that was in bed with the Nazis and demanding war against the German Nazi juggernaut. See:
http://emperors-clothes.com/archive/times410326.htm

Best regards,
Jared Israel
Editor, Emperor's Clothes

My dear Jared, thank you for taking time to post this detailed, thorough explanation of why this particular movement should not be tolerated. I sincerely appreciate your valuable guidance and input, and you know I think the world of you, because the Righteous will save the world and you are one of the truly Righteous ones I know of.

From the little I knew about this, one of the darkest chapters in American history, I certainly understood that this is not something to promote or advertise. And those images and the captions to go along the article were not meant as advertisement, just like the Ustashi pictures, flags and fascist greetings were never meant as promotion. Just like I showed the Croat fascist flag from 1943 here, giving even the link to the place on the internet where it is being sold, pointing out that these items are freely available for purchase on the web is meant as a warning, to show that this is not exactly an imaginary threat. We may want to close our eyes and refuse to acknowledge this, but the fact is that all forms of racism and nazism are alive and well, and returning closer to the mainstream than ever before, with the vengeance. These are the undead we are speaking of, in Croatia and in America likewise, and mainstream treatment of this as a long-gone fossil is, in my opinion, wrong.

Yes, there is a lot of anger, there has been a lot of abuse (thank you for being among the very few to see through it in time and for soothing our wounds for so many years with the truth), unimaginable insults and offenses Serbs have been taking for the past two decades grinding their teeth in silence. But this post is not for spite, for I fully agree with Neil Clark cited above, that the hounds unleashed by the Western powers over Yugoslavia in the 1990s are coming back to bite their faces off.

For a country that fought one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history against secession, with over 600,000 lives lost, American officials should know better than to support the butchery of other people's countries. Because if any of those comforting messages like "the south will rise again" available on all sorts of household items and trinkets does come true in any way, shape or form, they will have their own KosovA right where they never wanted it. They should be aware of that.

Dear Svetlana,

Thank you for you kind words, and even more, thank you for so sharply rejecting the new style 'European race' fascism, as represented in the US by the League of the South and their brothers in the Conservative Citizens Councils and the like.

Regarding your second-to-last paragraph, I have to disagree with Neil Clark. Contrary to what he and many others now say, "the hounds unleashed by the Western powers over Yugoslavia in the 1990s" are NOT "coming back to bite their faces off." In other words, we are not witnessing what used to be called "blowback."

First, the hounds were never 'unleashed.' They were recruited, hired, groomed, encouraged in a hundred ways (including planned media support) and they were given detailed instructions, and they still are.

One of the best insights into how this was done was given by Cedomir Prlincevic, the Serbian Jewish historian expelled by the KLA and NATO from Kosovo in 1999. He described his expulsion in an interview with Emperor’s Clothes that can be read at
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/Prlinčević.htm

In a second interview, "Why Albanians Fled Kosovo During the 1999 NATO Bombing," Prlincevic explained that the OSCE used its inspectors in Kosovo in the fall of 1998 to train and prepare the KLA to manipulate Albanian blood feud traditions in order to drive thousands of Albanians from the province, allowing the media to create the false impression of a Serbian reign of terror, and then for the KLA to act as NATO's eyes and enforcers on the ground during the spring 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. It can be read at
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/keys.htm

After the bombing Western military intelligence made Ceku - not a so-called jihadist, but one of the top Generals from Catholic, not Muslim, Croatia – Western intelligence made him head of the KLA. Modern terror is a weapon of foreign policy establishments, to influence and control public opinion, and its targets are ordinary people. The rich and powerful rarely get hurt. (Thus when Pentagon intelligence worked with Iran to bring Muslim terrorists into Bosnia, they knew exactly what they were doing.)

Regarding your last paragraph, you say that -

"For a country that fought one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history against secession, with over 600,000 lives lost, American officials should know better than to support the butchery of other people's countries."

- and you suggest that these 'southern secession' racists are a threat to the establishment.

But the people that run America today did not fight the war against slavery – it was not fundamentally a war against secession, it was a war against slavery fought to determine whether slavery or free labor would be the dominant method of production in North America. The war against slavery was fought by a US establishment - the radical republicans – which has been gone for over a hundred years. Groups like the League of the South, which, as you say "should not be tolerated," are no threat to today's establishment. Today's establishment loves it when ordinary people fight each other, and, as history shows, they quietly encourage and even sponsor groups that turn so-called whites against so-called blacks, even though the same establishment sometimes publicly decries racism. So, yes, the people at the top are hypocrites, but then, what else is new?

YES, they are bloody hypocrites, that's exactly what they are! Blowback or not, the secession bug is biting. Every Tom, Dick and Harry among the Europe's separatists and in the Caucasus region has already confirmed they are "closely watching Kosovo developments", despite all the US State Dept. "assurances" that creating second Albania in Serbia is somehow unique. The very fact that Belgium with Brussels, the seat of both NATO and the EU, is on the verge of falling apart is something that sounds like a morbid joke.

And as much as we can argue if the core reason for the start of the American civil war was the issue of slavery, or initiated by the secession of Southern states (Wikipedia has secession cited as the key issue: "The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a major war between the United States [the "Union"] and eleven Southern slave states which declared that they had a right to secession and formed the Confederate States of America, led by President Jefferson Davis"), the fact remains that secession, precisely the kind of thing both the previous and the current US Administrations are supporting in the Balkans was at least one of the problems that initiated an extremely bloody civil war, which took over three or four times more lives than all the Yugoslav secession wars of the 1990s put together.

Besides, these contemporary American secessionists, as Washington Times article lays it out, are not fighting to reinstate slavery, but to secede from United States. Also, aside from the White Supremacist branch that seeks severing of southern states, there is the state of Vermont, led by liberals who, apparently, want to secede so they can have abortions galore.

Everybody has their reasons and "reasons", and can invent as many as they feel they need, but the point that ties all of them together remains: contagious secession bug knows no borders, and no state is inoculated against it. Unfortunately, it is not tied exclusively to Balkans and, obviously, it can flourish just about anywhere. Wherever there are ethnic minorities, various religious groups, even more or less homogeneous groups of people with extreme (left or right) political views, there is a danger of the same infection. Thus, the issue of the Serbian Kosovo province should be treated with due care and some forethought, keeping in mind that no state in the world is so monolithic in every conceivable way that it is immune to this nasty virus - including the U.S. That was my reason for posting those two articles here.

P.S. Plus, I really like Neil Clark :-))

The claim that the Confederate flag is equivalent to the faschist flag of Croatia is nonsense. There was no such thing as faschism when the South seceded from the American union. Also, Lincoln filled the U.S. army full of European exiles who had fled Europe after the failure of their socialist revolutions of 1848. These were the scum of Europe, and they were the progenitors of both Communism and Faschism. Lincoln had a love affair with such nasty types. The ranks of the Radical Republicans were full of homegrown socialists as well.

The reasons for the South's secession were far more complex than just slavery, and the South had many valid reasons for wishing to become an independent country, not the least of which was unfair taxation that benefited the North at the expence of the South. There was also the arrogant cultural imperialsim of the North, which sought to destroy the unique culture of the Southern people and force Northern culture, dialect, and mentality upon them, in much the same way that the so-called 'international community' is doing to Serbia now. Mr Israel's claim that the cause of the South was to preserve slavery is ridiculous. Even many of the firebrand secessionists of the South had predicted as early as the 1830's that slavery in thre South would disappear by the 1870's or 1880's, because it was in fact a moribund institution that would have died out of it's own accord. Jefferson Davis himself was an emancipantionist, who said publicly, before secession happened, that Southern secession would mean the end of slavery in the South. No one in the South wanted to preserve that burdensome institution forever, not even most slaveowners.

Then there is the case of the North's efforts to keep slavery out of the western territories, the so-called 'free soil' movement. This was far from being any kind of a moral stance against slavery. It was in fact a thinly disguised effort to keep new Southern states from being founded in the frontier areas, so that only Northern states would be established there, thus the North would gain a majority of representation in the U.S. house and Senate and be able to control the politics of the country. But there was another reason why the Yankees wanted to keep slavery out of the western territories. They didn't want any negroes to be brought into that region, because they wanted it to be all white. This was racism.

As for Mr Israel's quotation of Tomislav Sunic, Southerners couldn't care less what that dirtbag thinks about anything. The nature of faschsim is such that modern Southerners would scarcely tolerate a faschist regime in their homeland, nor would the founders of the Confedreracy have tolerated faschism. It flies in the face of everyrhing they believed. If Mr Israel wants to play that slanderous game, he needs to be informed about what Adoph Hitler's personal view of the American war was. Hitler was glad that the North had won, because he believed that a strong centralised national state was better for America than State's rights and decentralised, local government. Remember that he also was a great centraliser like Lincoln, who stole power away from the German states and centralised it in Berlin, just as Lincoln had done here in America. Also, Karl Marx, another Northern sympathiser, openly admitted that the war was not being fought by the North for any moral principle, but was being waged for domination and empire.

The idea that war was necessary to eliminate slavery in the South is unfounded. Slavery was never more legally secure in the U.S. than it was in 1860. Abraham Lincoln himself said that his primary goal was to 'preserve the union' and he said he would do so regardless of whether slavery was eliminated. He even proposed an amendment to the constitution that would have guaranteed the existence of slavery in the South forever in order to keep his union together, yet the South still seceded. Futhermore, slavery was eliminated everywhere else in the western hemisphere peacefully, yet the war started as soon as the Southern states declared their independence.

Did you know that all free black men in the Confederacy were subject to the military draft just like all white men were? Did you know that they had a higher volunteerism rate than Southen whites? They served in the same ranks with white soldiers and got the same pay and same treatment. When blacks were recruited for service in the Union army, they had to be segregated into their own regiments because racist Yankee whites would never have served along side them in battle. What about the fact that virtually all the Jewish men in the South served in the Confederate military, many as officers? That didn't happen in the Northern army. The secretary of state of the Confederacy, the man charged with handling the Confederacy's foregn relations, was Judah Benjamin, a jew. Then there is the fact htat Jefferson Davis formally adopted an orphan black boy named Jim Limber into his family while he was president, and treated him as part of his own family. Davis did this in the open, he didn't have to hide it from the Southern public. Imagine what the outcry would have been in the North if Lincoln had done this.

Today, Southeners are an oppressed people who are treated with ridicule by their Yankee 'countrymen'. I myself have experienced Yankee bigotry first hand more than once. There is in Yankee society an endemic bigotry against Southerners, their culture and identity, that runs very deep and is similar in character to the antisemitsm of many gentiles. We are constantly slandered, our heroes denigrated, our homeland colonised by Yankees who treat us as their inferiors.

The claim that slavery was the reason for the North's invasion of the South is nothing but an excuse for their attack against us. This excuse was issued rather late in the war, three years after it had started. This is a pattern in the behaviour of the Washington regime: attack a country that is no threat to you, and find some excuse that makes you look like a great liberator and makes your victim look evil. That's what they did to Serbia, and that's what they did to Dixie. It's strange that people who can see through this deceit when the U.S. uses it abroad today are so blind that they cant see that it was used against the South as well.

Lincoln's so-called 'emancipation proclamation' was nothing but a slick piece of propaganda, a cleverly crafted piece of lawyer work that, of itself, never actually freed a single slave. Read it, and tell me how it actually freed anybody.

Twenty percent of the black population of the South died within five years of the end of that war, from starvation and disease caused by malnutrition. Did the Yankee government do anything to ease their plight? No, it did nothing. A peaceful elimination of slavery, done in an ordered manner, would have been better for all, and that would have happened in an independent Confederacy. Now, why did so many former slaves, and untold numbers of white civilians in the South, perish in this manner? Because the U.S. military waged total war against the civilian population of the South, destroying all infrastructure, all food supplies, all means of food production, etc., in order to completely reduce the South to poverty and starvation. In other words, the South was the first victim of what Serbia has now experienced at the hands of the Yankee Empire.

As a Southerner, I am tired and fed up with hateful bigots like Mr Israel, who dismiss out of hand the legitimate concerns of my people just as the legitimate concerns of Serbians have been dismissed out of hand by the U.S. Mr Israel's claim that the Confederate flag, the national synbol of my people and homeland, and Southerners who stand up for themselves against Yankee cultural and political domination and exploitation, shouldn't be tolerated, is nothing but an expression of hateful anti-Southern bigotry. His claim that the politics of League of the South is the same as that of Croatian faschists is so ridiculous that it threatens his credibility. The South and Croatia are so different from each other, with such different historical development, as to be almost like comparing the colours black and white.

Anyone who wishes to learn more about the events of that era in American history can, once thay have done so, go back and look at the quotes and references given in Mr Israel's post and see that they are all either taken out of context, misrepresented, or come from one-sided and dishonest sources who have an axe to grind.

After the war, Confederate general Robert E Lee said that because of the Northern victory in the war and the resultant centralisation of power in the U.S. federal government, the United States was bound to become, as he put it, 'despotic at home and aggressive abroad'. Serbia and Iraq (also invaded on false pretenses by mad imperialists) are the latest victims of the evil that began with the conquest of my homeland, the South. I have been opened minded enough concerning Balkan affairs that I can see through the mendacity of the Yankee government and understand that what they have done to Serbia is a great crime. That has been partly because I recognise that the pattern of mendacity, false moralism, and mass murder used againt my people is being repeated against others. Anyone who wishes to understand more about the whole philosophical background of the Southern political tradition and Southern secessionism may wish to visit http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/Lectures.htm Listen to the audio available there, and you will learn a lot more than you will from Mr Israel's misleading references.

Secession, of itself, is neither good nor evil. Whether any given secession is right or wrong depends on the situation and the motives behind it. Kosovo secession is a criminal conspiracy backed by evil international forces. Southern secession was legal and morally justified, and Lincoln's war against the South was as much a criminal act as what is being done to Serbia.

Thank you, Allen. I certainly need to learn more about this, and I will follow the link you kindly provided.

But, speaking in general terms, I must say that I have lost every shred of earlier naive belief that any of the things American administration does is done for the reasons they cite: while absolutely always justified with some higher-moral-ground explanations, the real reasons are, in fact, most often purely selfish and based on sheer interest or perceived interest.

This is why, to me, slavery as the reason for war sounds as an excuse and I suspect that secession was indeed the main cause of American Civil War. But being that the American constitution basically allows for secession, another, moral issue, had to be put forth, to cover up the fact they would not allow the South to secede, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. If it wasn't for the fact that eleven southern states have declared independence, the issue of slavery wouldn't have bothered them as much, I'm sure. After all, they've supported much worse things all over the globe, so going to war to free the blacks or Albanians or Kurds or Arab women would be the last thing they'd ever do.

I'm sorry if that sounds crude or offensive, but that is what I've learned during the past 17 years.

Regarding the issue of secession in general, I agree that it is neither good nor evil in and of itself and that, in order to be qualified as one or the other, one needs to look at each case separately. While I do think that one big country in place of ten little ones is generally stronger, contrary to what most people think about Serbs being desperate over the breakup of Yugoslavia, a number of us are happy to have Serbia as an independent country once again, partly because we've realized with whom we were put to bed to begin with.

The problem with Croat and Bosnian Muslim secessions was not simply the fact they wanted to secede from Yugoslavia, or the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but that the large population of Croatian Serbs and Bosnian Serbs didn't want to be (once again) ruled by the pro-Ustashi Croats and Sharia-driven Muslims.

If the West (Washington first and foremost) offered support to those politicians who were seeking to sit at the table with those who want to leave the common state and agree about the borders, the property that was owned by the common (socialist) state and not by the Croats or Bosnian Muslims exclusively, so that they can take it with them along with communist-drawn republic borders as if they owned that land for centuries (and they didn't), and about the rights of their large Serbian population (constitutive nation in both those republics before the wars), I'm certain that there would've been no wars - Yugoslavia would have dissolved peacefully.

Serbia did not argue their right to secede, the problem was the way they did it - unilaterally and overnight, by taking it all, part and parcel, as if Tito was a deity and could've given them all that and, on top of everything, under the leaderships that were clearly a continuation of Hitler's puppet state, openly and violently anti-Serbian (Croatia even erased Serbs as the constitutive nation from their constitution and turned them into minority, along with handful of Italians, Hungarians etc; while Izetbegovic announced his intention to create a purely-Muslim state, run by Sharia and Islamic laws, even though 70% of Bosnian land was legally owned by the Christian Serbs).

But the West always wanted to destroy the Serbs (since it couldn't make them kneel before the pope and Hapsburgs) and that's why it supported both the pro-Ustasha Tudjman and the radical islamist Izetbegovic against the Serbs. And that's why it supports a minority in Serbia that wishes to create another Albania on Serbian soil, and will continue to support anyone in Serbia itself who seeks to destroy Serbia too.

While Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro were republics that formed a common state with Serbia, province of Kosovo-Metohija was always an integral part of Serbia itself and the heart of Serbian Kingdom from medieval times and, as such, it never was up for grabs, nor it ever had a right to secede, according to either Yugoslav or Serbian constitution, or according to any international law.

Dear Svetlana,

A few thoughts.

1) Regarding Neil Clark’s article, while I happen not to agree with his views, those views are not the reason I wrote you. I wrote you about the Washington Times article, which I feel represents a danger. It is a puff piece, a public relations handout in the form of staged ‘news’ - in this case, an irrelevant meeting between the League of the South and a Vermont group that appears to be a creation of people associated with the League http://vermontsecession.blogspot.com/

This puff piece uses its staged ‘news’ as an excuse to prettify the so-called neo-confederates in the League of the South, picturing them as supposedly harmless populist rebels. By posting the Times article as an argument against Kosovo ‘independence,’ one gives it legs. Other people, also unaware of the League’s nature, may also repost it, creating sympathy for the neo-confederates, pictured as standing up to the US government, and also, among those who know what the neo-confederates represent, creating the unfortunate impression that those defending the Serbs are tolerant (or worse) of violent anti-black racism. .

As you wrote, the League of the South is white supremacist. They try to mobilize whites against so-called non-white immigrants and against black Americans and other targets of bigotry.

It is incumbent on us, especially because a) we are defending the Serbs, who are themselves victims of racism and b) because we are smeared as racists for defending the Serbs - it is incumbent on us to be especially sharp in rejecting racists who are trying to sell the teachings of Nazism in U.S. (or southern U.S.) dress. The racists would like nothing more than to divert the justified anger of Serbian Americans into support for the neo-confederates’ quote unquote protest movement.

2) Regarding secession, I understand that the Yugoslav wars of the ‘90s and the US Civil War started when a section of the country controlled by arch-racists seceded. But just as divorce is not the REASON feuding couples end in court, secession usually – and in these two cases, definitely - constitutes the escalation of existing political conflict to the level of war.

In Yugoslavia in 1991 and the US in 1861, racists organized secession movement in order to provoke what they hoped would be successful wars to conquer and remake their respective regions. They withdrew in order to return as master.

In the US the underlying issue was - as the slavocracy's own ‘president’ Jefferson Davis clearly stated in the text I quoted in my first comment – the issue was whether the immense territories in North America would be annexed to a union based on slave labor or one based on free labor. Slavery and free labor had become incompatible modes of capitalism. One had to die.

In Yugoslavia, the issue was whether the Vatican and Germany (supported in the 1990s by the US) would reinstitute the regimes of 1941-1945, involving clerical fascism in a greater Croatia including Dalmatia, the Krajina and Bosnia, Albanian anti-Serb racism in Kosovo, and a puppet regime in the rest of Serbia.

In the U.S., the slavocracy lost. In Yugoslavia, the anti-Ustasha side has had many serious setbacks; but the war is not over.

The reason that dark forces created the League of the South was not to achieve southern secession. Southern secession is not a serious possibility in today's US. Rather, the idea was that by affirming the virtue of the most extreme racism of the past – black slavery is after all a total affirmation of racism - they would take a firm stance in defense of extreme racism today. (Just as Tudjman defended the Ustashe and belittled Jasenovac in order to justify re-instituting clerical-fascist rule, albeit in modern form.)

It is ironic that the League of the South and other modern fascists try to appeal to Serbs and other justifiably angry Slavs with the ideas of an ‘all-European’ racism – ironic because a) European racism is precisely what devastated the Serbian people and other Slavs in the 1940s, and the Serbs as well as ethnic Russians in the Baltic states once again since the early 1990s. And b) the racism of the neo-confederates has common roots with that of the Croatian Ustashe.

In the 1940s and 1990s, the Ustashe combined anti-Serb racism with Catholic and (as long as they were willing to be junior partners) Muslim holy war. Their anti-Serb racism was and is a marriage of the pre-Nazi ideas of Ante Starcevic with Nazi German race politics. It is chilling to discover that the neo-confederates are at least half-brothers of the Ustashe: they share a German father.

The League is modest about the evidence of their lineage, but with persistence, I found it. In a speech, Michael Hill exalts the American historian and apologist for southern racism, Frank L. Owsley, endorsing Owsley’s re-definition of the commonly used term, ‘folk.”

As employed in the US, the term ‘folk’ is accurately described by the Oxford dictionary as either a plural noun, or a noun used as an adjective meaning:

"1. people in general" [as in 'any of you folks got a match?'] "2. one’s family, especially one's parents" [as in I'm a good son, I call my folks once a week’]."3. traditional music of unknown authorship, transmitted orally" and "4. originating from the beliefs, culture, and customs of ordinary people: folk wisdom."

But according to Hill, Frank Owsley, writing in 1949, turned this all around, treating 'folk' as a semi-mystical entity, "a people bound together by ties of race, language, religion, custom, tradition, and history. . . ."

Thus defined, this 'folk' thing possesses "a sense of solidarity and is quite different from a conglomerate mass of people." To which a folksy southerner might remark, "Well, you don’t say."

Quoting Owsley, Hill says "the Southern people, according to these several characteristics, were a genuine folk long before the Civil War." (All quotes from Hill’s text at http://www.conservativetimes.org/?p=548 )

The obvious question is 'from where did Owsley get this weirdo definition?' which might be obscure in 2007 but not when Owsley penned it in 1949, four years after the defeat of the Nazis, with whom many pro-slavery southerners had sympathized. Owsley's 'folk' is nothing more than an American translation of the Nazi German concept 'Völk' (also pronounced 'folk'), a term used to indoctrinate ordinary people with a 'feeling' of being part of a mystically defined master race. It's what the Nazi Croatian rock star Thompson sings about.

For the neo-confederates, this 'southern folk’ is not sprung from all the people who worked AND SLAVED in the pre civil war south. Quite the contrary. It is defined in opposition to the former slaves and it includes only a select part of the current so-called ‘white’ population – the so-called ‘Celts,’ a recently minted racial term now used by fascists from Celtic Croatia to Celtic Spain and which, in the southern case, is defined as descendents of Scotch, Irish and English immigrants. Races are wondrous things; you can define one whenever you want to put together a prejudice. By the way, one of the supposed traits of this supposed southern race is their culture of leisure, dating back to slave times. Now I wonder who made that possible?

Owsley-Hill is Nazi-talk. The ‘Celts’ are just whites from Northern Europe, the same ‘race’ in whose name the Ku Klux Klan lynched black people and some European immigrants, plus some native Jews, and terrorized the rest. You know, to maintain the natural order. Does nothing change?

In my view, the U.S. south no more belongs to some mystical, exclusionary southern race than than Greater Croatia (including the Krajina) ever ‘belonged’ to some self-defined Croatian race. The counter view leads to Jasenovac.

PS: REPLY TO POST BY ALLEN WILSON

I wrote the above in response to your earlier comment, Svetlana, before reading Mr. Wilson's comment. The quality of his thinking is revealed in his argument that:

"The claim that the Confederate flag is equivalent to the faschist [sic!] flag of Croatia is nonsense. There was no such thing as faschism [sic!] when the South seceded from the American union. Also, Lincoln filled the U.S. army full of European exiles who had fled Europe after the failure of their socialist revolutions of 1848. These were the scum of Europe, and they were the progenitors of both Communism and Faschism [sic!]. Lincoln had a love affair with such nasty types. The ranks of the Radical Republicans were full of homegrown socialists as well."

To which 1) obviously my point is that in contemporary American politics the confederate flag means what the checkerboard means in Croatian politics - today. 2) Yes, the past does precede the present. And therefore, while the Slavocracy long preceded "faschism," so did the Croatian racist writer-politician, Ante Starcevic. Fascism embraces the worst features of a region's past; in the case of the U.S. south, it tries to glorify one of the ugliest features of modern history, the society built on slavery. 3) The revolutions of 1848 were not socialist, although they included a small number of socialists; they were anti-absolutist, directed largely against the Hapsburg Empire, home of absolutism, suppression of free speech, anti-peasant abuses, Catholic church hegemony, and so on. This fellow's historical analysis coincides precisely with that of the Vatican, one of the main beneficiaries of the Hapsburg Empire, which should be no surprise since, as noted, the Pope was a huge fan of the slave side in the US civil war. And from what I have seen, the right wing of the Catholic church in the U.S. is a big fan of the neo-confederates.

As for Wilson’s second comment:

"Mr Israel's claim that the cause of the South was to preserve slavery is ridiculous... Jefferson Davis himself was an emancipantionist [sic!], who said publicly, before secession happened, that Southern secession would mean the end of slavery in the South. No one in the South wanted to preserve that burdensome institution forever, not even most slaveowners."

-- as for this, there is a little problem: the massively documented public fights, e.g. in the US House of Representatives, for many years, over slavery, and many texts, such as ‘President’ Jefferson Davis’s remarks justifying secession, as quoted in my first comment, and available in full online, at
http://tinyurl.com/33sqky
in which Davis attacks the North for trying to destroy the South's property in slaves, an issue that involved, he says – he, not I – that this meant destroying the equivalent of trillions of dollars. Slavery was VERY profitable. But sure, Davis was a great "emancipantionist."

The rest is much the same. Wilson just rants, saying whatever he likes, regardless of facts. Typical of Wilson’s 'history': he states with an air of absolute certainty – as with everything he says - that Karl Marx, and this is a quote, “openly admitted that the war was not being fought by the North for any moral principle, but was being waged for domination and empire.’

One can learn that this is either a lie or simply a notion invented without interest in truth in two minutes of research concerning Marx’s writings, for example at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/10/25.htm
where you can read Karl Marx’s words, as if in reply to Wilson’s hot air, in an article that Marx wrote for the periodical “Die Presse” in 1861.

Here is Marx. Not the imaginary Marx, but the inferior, but real, one+: "The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognized as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?"
Can be read in full at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/10/25.htm

Since we know Mr. Wilson speaks in complete ignorance, or lies, or both, how and why should one take seriously anything he says?

Jared Israel
Emperor's Clothes http://tenc.net

Svetlana, I agree with everything you have said in your post in response to mine.

If my first post looks like a screed, that's because it was hurriedly written. I didn't have the time to polish it off, nor do I really have time to get involved in a continued argument with anyone.

Mr Israel, on the other hand, instead of calling me a lier and accusing me of ignorance - a common trait of people who are careless with the facts themselves, dont really care about the truth, cite quotes and facts out of context in order to misinform or in order to satisfy their own prejudices, and who only wish to propagandise, and to slander those whom they hate - perhaps should do a lot more research with an open mind, free of judgementalism. His baseless depiction of the modern Southern secessionist movement as 'faschist' show his dishonesty. His willful ignorance is manifest by his resorting to an ad-hominem attack, instead of looking into some of my statements and trying to learn something from them. Open minded research was how I, who once thought Lincoln to be a great man, found out that he was nothing but a mass murderer and a war criminal. However, that path of research began when I first heard a criticism of Lincoln that at first offended me, but then made me curious. Of course, evil men always have their cults of worship, Lincoln has his here, and in Russia, they still have a Stalin cult.

Three Misleading Posts from (My Friend) Jared Israel

How dare you post Jared Israel’s inaccurate comments about the
League of the South! My wife and I are Orthodox Christian, Jared Israel is
not. My family is currently a member of the South Carolina League of
the South. My friend, Jared Israel obviously has no first-hand
knowledge of the League of the South. I have been a member of the League even
before the bombs began to fall and can tell you the following from
personal experience:

1. That the League of the South whole-heartedly supported the Serbs
during the Kosovo War.
2. That the League of the South opposed the break up of Yugoslavia.
3. That the League has a police of “zero-tolerance” on racism. I know
of several individuals who are barred from membership in the South
Carolina League of the South for merely making racist remarks.
4. That the League of the South membership is open to those of any race
and there are African-American members. (There are also, Jews and
Serbs with the ranks of the League!)
5. That a number of Orthodox Christians are League members, especially
in South Carolina.
6. That during the 1999 Kosovo War, the pastor of the largest Serbian
Orthodox Church, in the most Serbian city in American, Chicago, was a
card-carrying member of the League of the South.

It is hard to believe that Jared Israel can turn on his allies so
quickly!

The First Post

My friend, Jared Israel knows very well who I am, who my wife is,
and also knows that the things that he is saying about the history of the
War for Southern Independence are out and out lies. Let’s take those
lies one at a time.


The issue in the War was not slavery! That is the equivalent of
saying the purpose of the Kosovo War was to stop the Serbs from “ethnic
cleansing.” The War was about high taxes and repelling federal tyranny.
At the time, four Southern states were paying 75% of the federal
taxes. Lincoln and his new tax-and-spend Republican Party were planning on
burdening the South with even higher taxes. The South left, which it
had every right to do and Lincoln invaded rather than lose his source
of tax revenue.


I cannot imagine anyone in right mind to believe that the South
fought so valiantly for four years so that a few of their rich citizens
could continue to own slaves. Nor can I imagine anyone is his right mind
believing that an army of Northerners fighting to liberate slaves. If
you still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth
Fairy, you might be able to see the War as a referendum on slavery. If not,
use some common sense.


Jared Israel will point to the wording of various Secession
Resolutions to support his slavery theory, but it just doesn’t hold water.
After all, Lincoln offered to guarantee southern slavery via
constitutional amendment. He did so right up to the Hampton Roads Conference, and
various comments that he dropped near the end of the War suggested that
he would even have been willing to rescind the Emancipation
Proclamation.


It is a fairly well known fact that Jefferson Davis, General Robert
E. Lee, General James Longstreet and many other Confederate leaders
were pro-emancipation. Lee even freed the slaves that he inherited.


The Confederate Flag is NOT a racist symbol any more than the
Chetnik Flag is a racist symbol. Both are symbols of great efforts made to
combat tyranny.


Jared Israel’s reference to Jefferson Davis’ speech is astounding.
Did he actually read the speech or just those words because someone
told him there were there? Yes, Jefferson Davis does speak of these
things, but NOT in support of slavery! Read the text! He is speaking of
the violence that the Abolitionist movement spawned. We have, as we had
in the 1860s, the power to change things by peaceful means. Jefferson
Davis was for emancipation by peaceful means. He harbored no ill-will
towards African-Americans and even adopted an African-American
boy—while he was President of the Confederacy. Get it straight, Jared!


Jared Israel posted a photo of what appears to be a lynching with a
comment that implies that the Confederate Flag had something to do with
the lynching, and further asserts that Serbs and Roma (a/k/a Gypsies)
could be substituted for “blacks” as he likes to call them. I say,
“appears to be a lynching” as it is a very poor photo. I cannot tell if
there is a dead man hanging from a tree, which would imply that the
crowd may have come after the fact, or if it is a man standing near a tree
with a line in the photo that can easily be mistaken for a rope. Even
if it is a lynching, there is no Confederate Flag in the photo at all.


Next Jared Israel tries to make some hay out of the fact that the
Pope at the time supported the Confederacy. Jared Israel
mischaracterizes the struggle as a “slave owners’ rebellion.” That is ridiculous.
Such a small percentage of the Southern population owned slaves that such
a rebellion would not have lasted three months, much less four years.
I am no fan of the Papacy, but even broken clocks are right twice a
day. The Pope, like most civilized European people of the time,
supported the South during the war. Of course, Karl Marx supported Lincoln,
but who considers him civilized? Some European nations considered
joining the South in the War.


A number of Serbs even came to fight for Confederacy; just ask
Father Dennis Pavichevich, who has done considerable research on the
subject. Of course, a number of Jewish Americans fought for the Confederacy,
see Rosen’s book, the Jewish Confederates. Maybe, with a little
genealogical research, Jared Israel could find his way into the Sons of the
Confederate Veterans?


From there, Jared Israel looks to Croatian Ustasha, Tomislav Sunic’s
misuse of the Confederacy to justify his racism. I am sorry, but that
does not pass the straight-face test. Sunic is not a Southerner, is
he? Does he have an ancestor who fought in the war? Was the reason for
the War handed down to him from generation to generation? I think
not. Real Southerners know what the War was about. Just because the
Ustasha is clever enough to drive such a wedge doesn’t mean we need to fall
for it. I don’t know of any Croats who fought for the Confederacy.


It is unbelievable that a learned man, such as Jared Israel could
possible consider the Confederate Flag the ultimate symbol of
decentralization and resistance to tyranny to have any thing to do with the
ultimate centralized systems of tyranny, the Nazis and Ustasha. I would
expect such nonsense from the half-witted neo-Nazis of rural Idaho and
downstate Illinois who display the swastika - and misuse the Confederate
Flag and often the U.S. flag as well - and spew racial hatred. The
popular Southern folk group, Basic Grey, laments, “Oh those Nazi boys down
in Illinois . . .” and goes on to describe those who make inappropriate
use of the Confederate Flag.

Jared Israel’s Second Post


In his next post, Jared Israel employs a tactic of Nazi-style
propaganda calling the League of the South and Conservative Citizen’s Council
“brothers.” That reminds me of the statement that “Zionism is a form
of racism.” As far as I know, the CCC could well be the KKK. True,
there are people who might attend—note that I said attend—both meetings,
as they are generally open to the public. However, the League will not
tolerate their members belonging to, or participating in, racist
organizations.


At the end, Jared Israel continues his rant about this “war against
slavery.” Where in the historical record is there anything to suggest
that the actually war was a referendum on slavery? Read the leaders
from the Confederate soldiers; do you find references to fighting a war
to perpetuate slavery? Surely, not! Read the post-war works of those
who fought for the Confederacy, do they claim they were fighting for
slavery? No way! Read Lincoln’s early War comments about freeing slaves
and you will find it was not very high on his priority list. In fact,
he reversed the actions of a field commander who did free slaves. Read
what the pleas from Abolitionist to make the War a crusade against
slavery and you will see that was not what the war was about.


The slavery issue was only raised to justify the vicious invasion of
the South after the fact. It doesn’t hold water and would be
considered a joke except for one little fact of life: The winner of the war
gets to write the history books. It is amazing that someone who was able
to see though the anti-Serbian propaganda during the Kosovo War is
unable to see through the 140-year-old propaganda about the War.

Jared Israel’s Third Post

In a third post, Jared Israel asserts that some people are unaware
of the League’s nature. From what he has written so far, Jared Israel
has distinguished himself as the king of those who are unaware of the
League’s nature. When Jared Israel can produce a membership card with
his name on from the League, we might be able to take him seriously.
However, I have my membership card, as does my wife and my daughter. I
have been in the League long before Jared Israel ever heard of it. I
know that for a fact, as when I referred to the League during a phone call
with Jared Israel, he said “What’s that?”


It is a shame to see Jared Israel refer to the Nazi concentration
camp, Jasenovac, in a post where he is mischaracterizing the Confederacy.
What about Camp Fort Douglas, in Chicago, where Confederate
prisoners of war were kept in Nazi-style concentration-camp conditions – and
died in great numbers? Unlike the South, the North had more than enough
food to go around, but chose to let the POWs starve anyway. Even the
super-pro-Republican newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, criticized the camp
for its brutal conditions. (Of course, I am being a bit redundant
when I say the Tribune was pro-Republican, as the Lincoln administration
was even more hostile to non-supportive newspapers than the likes of
Juan Peron.)


It is especially sad to read my friend Jared Israel besmirching my
friend Michael Hill. I doubt that the two have ever met. Michael Hill
is very proud of his Scottish heritage. In similar fashion, Jared
Israel is proud of his Jewish heritage and rightly so; what is there not be
proud about being one of God’s chosen people?


However, there is a difference between the two. Michael Hill is NOT
a racist, as Jared Israel unfortunately reveals himself to be. Jared
Israel makes it clear that he harbors racial hatred for the Southern
people – including, of course, Michael Hill. Just read Jared Israel’s
words, “the so-called ‘Celts,’ a recently minted racial term . . .” The
word “Celt” has been around for a bit. What else did they call the
people that were the Britons, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh? How
pejorative to refer to Michael Hill’s heritage in that manner!


Now, I can accept the fact that my friend, Jared Israel harbors
racial hatred towards Southerners of Celtic stock. Although I bear no such
enmity, I do not feel compelled to launch a firestorm of criticism to
distance myself from Jared Israel in that regard! A lot of people have
various degrees of negative feelings and opinions about other ethnic
groups. With the rather interesting exception of those who hate Serbs or
Southerners, most people try to hide it. It is unfortunate in this
day of political correctness that we cannot be honest about who we like
and who we dislike, and why! A little more truthfulness could go far
toward resolving those differences and clearing the air. As it stands
now, our freedom of association is all but gone—which increases the
likelihood of a future backlash. But, Jared, please don’t be the pot calling
the kettle black. Michael Hill is no Nazi. He is no Klansman. Quite
the contrary! Don’t try to besmirch Michael Hill with those
characteristics just because of his ethnic heritage and his desire to preserve all
that is good and noble in the traditions that he has inherited.


Jared Israel repeats his efforts from post to characterize Jefferson
Davis as a racist. He posts the same speech and expects us to take the
same comments out of context a second time. Why doesn’t he read the
about the life of Jefferson Davis instead of trying to find something
that can be misconstrued in a political speech? For example, his first
letter home to his wife, Varna, after being elected President of the
Confederacy, in which he cheerfully tells her that, no matter what the
outcome of the new Confederate government, emancipation will follow soon.


Finally, Jared Israel takes a lunge at Allen Wilson’s comments about
Marx. I am having a lot of trouble understanding Jared Israel’s point
in that regard. I can only say that Jared Israel would do well to try
to learn from people like Allen Wilson rather than trying to debate
him. To the best of my knowledge, Marx was the only contemporary
English-language journalist, anywhere in Europe and the UK, who supported the
Lincoln government. (I know; some people have suggested that Marx’s
writings were translated into English before he sold the articles to the
newspapers, or that someone helped him with the English language, but
that is irrelevant to this discussion. At any rate, Marx’s writings were
published in two different publications in Europe.)


The important take-home lesson here is that Marx was a Lincolnist.
Therefore, many people believe that Lincoln was a Marxist. I have a
lot of trouble finding any valid arguments to counter that position!

Setting the Record Straight about the League of the South

The reason that secession groups like the League of the South have
gained so much popularity is the general failure of the US government.
Does anybody remember Katrina? What about “connecting the dots” prior to
9-11? Pathetic and disgraceful!

The US government has far too much power and is putting it to far
too much ill use. Secession is the only way—shot of a violent
revolution—that we can undo damage. Personally, I am too old and tired to
live through a violent revolution, so I prefer peaceful secession. This
should not even require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even
though that would be one way to accomplish it. Think of the “velvet divorce”
between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in which not a drop of blood
was spilled!

The Kosovo War is a perfect example of why we need to break the
US into its individual component States. As long as one
rapist-in-chief, like Clinton, can use an unjustified war to throw the spotlight off
himself and on to another part of the world with no consequences
whatsoever, the U.S. and the world are in sad shape! Who knows what Hillary
might do if she gets the change to dispatch the “arsenal of democracy”?
One day, we may find that one of these little insignificant countries
that we attack has quietly joined the nuclear club.


There are a number of secessionist organizations, most of them
fairly insignificant. However, southern secession makes a lot of sense
for many reasons. Anyone who has lived in the Deep South knows that
what Michael Hill speaks of is true. Southern people are different.
Contrary to what Jared Israel says, the Southern blacks and Southern whites
have far more in common that most Southerners have with Northerners!
The term that most Southerners use for Northerners who won’t mind there
own business, and who insist on telling the South that it is wrong, is
“Yankee.”


Most Southerners believe that each State is, and always has been,
a sovereign institution, and that the federal government has only
those powers that the States have delegated to it. That was the same
belief that our Founding Fathers had. They believe that each State should
be able to govern its affairs on its own, if need be. The idea of a
confederacy is to delegate only a limited number of powers to a larger
institution that could be handled more effectively at that level.


While most League members would prefer secession for their State,
many of us would be satisfied if we could get the federal government
to back off a bit—provided that this retreat would be permanent. Taxes
are simply too high. Most of us work nearly half the year to pay for
our, federal, State and local taxes. (Of course, there are more taxes
than just the visible taxes such as income taxes and sales taxes.) The
federal government should not be prying into our lives so much. We
should not have such strong federal controls on our medications. We
should not have a federal standard that micromanages such issues as how much
water we can have in our toilets—or should I say commodes? We should
not be worrying whether the next war will see our children and
grandchildren caught up in a draft. Strong State governments with a much
weaker federal (or confederate) government would address all of these
problems, and more.


True those who cling to the nanny state, mama government in
Washington, D.C., have a problem with that. It is a sign of total moral
bankruptcy that those groundless charges of racism are being leveled
against the League. (In this regard, I doubt that Jared Israel is speaking
for himself, but merely parroting the ravings of some of his liberal
friend on the lunatic fringe. All of us got to meet some interesting
people during the Kosovo War.)


To me, the most amazing thing is to see how the Orthodox Church
has been growing here in the South. The Orthodox Christian Church
condemns racism and ethnic bigotry not only as a sin, but also as a heresy!
Of course, the Orthodox Church seems to be growing the most in the
Southern movement. So much so, that someone in the South Carolina League
of the South expressed concern that might seem to outsiders that we were
mostly Orthodox Christians!

CzechRebel, I'm sorry if you feel offended by the fact that Mr. Israel's comments were published, but he has the right to his opinion, and I will not disrespect him by censoring his views out, even if I personally disagree with his assessment.

Jared Israel runs a web site Emperor's Clothes and has been, for the past ten years, one of the leading voices in North America that valiantly stood up against the ferocious demonization and orchestrated dehumanization of Serbian nation - at the very time when most American intellectuals (of any faith) wouldn't let a peep out in the public, for fear of being ridiculed and ostracized.

But regardless of that, he has the right to say what he thinks, you have the right to respond and so does everybody else who thinks differently.

P.S. Being that this particular issue — which is not the main subject of this site — evokes strong feelings and reactions, I will have to ask all those interested in discussions about American South, past and present, to find a more appropriate venue for exchange of arguments - a forum that examines the issue in detail would perhaps be a better format.

I'm closing the comments under this entry. If anyone wishes to discuss this further with Mr. Israel, you can write to his email address at his web site, and if Mr. Israel wishes to share more of his views on the issue, perhaps he can elaborate further in an article on his own site and open the debate there.