Neo-confederacy movement in the US

[nino_savatte]

I don't know whether it's all accurate but there's some info about cultural and historical battles here: http://www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/
and here: http://templeofdemocracy.com/resume.htm

What are the class dynamics behind Neo-confederacy/independence for the South?

Ah, Temple of Democracy and Edward Sebesta..c'est bon. From what I've seen the movement is led by mainly middle class types. It is led from the top, like so many other so-called grassroots movements in the US. Insofar as this being a class war, there is no indication of this: there is simply a desire on the part of neo-confederalists to secede from the Union and re-establish the Confederacy. There doesn't even seem to be an truly economic argument for this either: it is based primarily upon an emotional attachment to a legend.

From your link

Tracing the theological war thesis from its origins to the turn of the twenty-first century, we show how the belief that the Confederacy was an orthodox Christian nation has gained increasing circulation and acceptance. Once a marginal revisionist reading of the Civil War, we contend that groups as diverse as the Sons of Confederate Veterans heritage organization, Christian Reconstructionist bodies such as the Chalcedon Foundation, and the League of the South now generally accept the theological war thesis. Reaching a broad audience at conferences, through publications and on web sites, one of the League’s founding directors, Steven Wilkins, continues to develop theological interpretations of the Civil War. Operating within this historical trajectory, therefore, the League of the South has utilized the theological war thesis to promote a Christian nationalist commitment to constructing a new Confederate States of America.

It is often portrayed as many things but mainly the Civil War has been latterly seen as a struggle between Celts and Anglo-Saxons and Presbyterianism versus Episcopalianism. One wonders what else they'll claim it is.

 

[nino_savatte]

Interesting article from The Nation. It fingers Richard T Hines, a lobbyist and friend of the disgraced Tom DeLay.

The leader of Jefferson Davis Camp 305's lunchtime meetings was its former commander, Richard T. Hines, a high-rolling lobbyist who is one of the unheralded success stories of Bush's Washington. The youngest Republican ever elected to the state legislature in South Carolina, Hines first arrived in Washington to work in a variety of midlevel posts during the Reagan Administration. Now he operates through RTH Consulting Inc., a lobbying firm that boasts of having "an active voice in the current Bush Administration." In addition to securing a nice little appointment to the national libraries board for his wife, Hines has earned more than $150 million in Defense Department contracts for his weapons manufacturing clients and rakes in a large fee for his work on behalf of an African tyrant. It's a good life.

It gets better!

Hines's squalid lobbying is hardly reason for special notice. Washington's boulevard of lobbyists, K Street, does not suffer from a dearth of flamboyantly amoral players. Edward von Kloberg III made millions from tyrannical clients like Saddam Hussein and Mobutu Sese Seko, and blew his cash on elaborate galas where he would appear festooned in furs, medallions and his trademark cape. (In May von Kloberg leaped from atop a Roman castle to his death after a young man rejected his romantic entreaties.) Then there's Jack Abramoff, a close associate of House majority leader Tom DeLay, recently indicted for wire fraud and conspiracy, and under investigation by the Justice Department and Senate Indian Affairs Committee for defrauding Indian tribes--whom he casually referred to as "troglodytes"--out of millions of dollars. Hines, as it happens, has picked up one of von Kloberg's clients, the dictator of Gambia, and, like Abramoff, he is well connected to the political machine run out of the White House by Karl Rove. But it is Hines's devotion to the Lost Cause that makes him a rarity in a predatory world with little time for the mythology of magnolia and moonlight.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050829&s=blumenthal

Did I just see the name Karl Rove? Hmmmmmm......

 

[nino_savatte]

The Southern Legal Resource Center has links to what is described as the "radical" elements of the Sons Of Confederate Veterans. It could be described as the respectable face of the movement.

Check their site. You even get a chance to hear "Dixie".
http://www.slrc-csa.org/site/

On this particular page, they make a point of promoting what they see as the best asset to their cause: H. K. Edgerton.

 

[tollbar]

What I read is that highland chiefs would summon their men by sending a runner with a burning cross, or two bits of charred wood through the glens.

it was the signal used by the presbytarian covenenters in 17th Century Scotland to raise their forces in rebellion. If I remember rightly, many southerners are descended from Covenenters who were transported to the colonies.

 

[nino_savatte]

That sounds about right. ^^^

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Too bad dilute micro isn't around to take the other side in this discussion.

I sure as hell ain't gonna do it.

 

[nino_savatte]

Here's an interesting write up on the Council of Conservative Citizens

CCC vigorously defends the public display of the Confederate flag as a symbol of white identity, and has the flag prominently displayed on its web pages. CCC warns of the coming "massacre of the White population" in South Africa, posting grim photos of mutilated white cadavers, implying that they were victims of hate crimes by black South Africans. Below these gruesome but uncredited photos, CCC warns: "Today South Africa is less than 10% White. Someday, American Whites will be a minority. IT CAN HAPPEN HERE." (5)
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/cofcc.php

Now where have I heard this sort of thing before?

 

[nino_savatte]

The CCC and the BNP also have links. Griffin addressed a meeting a few years
ago.

Panorama has discovered that Nick Griffin was a guest speaker at the start of November at a private meeting organised by the CCC (Council of Conservative Citizens) in America.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/st...p_special/friends_abroad/american_friends.stm

It is not an American fight or a British fight or a German fight. It is a white fight, and we have got to win it."

To pave the path to victory, Cotterill has managed to bring in racists of almost every stripe, clearly helped by the primordial attraction to American white supremacists of his British background.

Besides the National Alliance and the League of the South, AFBNP meetings have featured Steven Barry, editor of the neo-Nazi Resister magazine, and white supremacist lawyer — and neo-Confederate enthusiast — Kirk Lyons.

Speakers have been as varied as Internet hate guru and former Klansman Don Black and Richard Kelly Hoskins, a long-time ideologue of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology.

Meetings of the AFBNP also have drawn race-obsessed American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor and various activists of the racist — but supposedly "mainstream" — Council of Conservative Citizens.

Cotterill is especially close to Klansman-turned-politican-turned-expatriate David Duke and his racist European-American Rights Organization.

In all, Cotterill claims to have 100 dues-paying members in 40 states, with 1,000 people receiving his E-mail newsletter — people who are among the most active on the American white supremacist right.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=177&printable=1

I wonder how dilute would defend this?

 

[nino_savatte]

Too bad dilute micro isn't around to take the other side in this discussion.

I sure as hell ain't gonna do it.

Which rather proves my point about you particulairement.

 

[nino_savatte]

You're a gutless wonder, Johnny.

 

[nino_savatte]

A timely thread resurrection.

Some say that everything good in the South is vanishing and everything bad is spreading nationwide. One growing trend in America is neo-Confederate culture, which encompasses history, literature, museums, reenactments, monuments, battlefields, and organizations dedicated to the principles and founders of the Confederate States of America. Neo-Confederacy intersects with white supremacy, the Christian Right, the Populist Party, and the states' rights movement. To an increasingly diverse set of Americans, neo-Confederate culture supplies a regionally- and historically-grounded message of right-wing righteousness and urgency.

Neo-Confederate culture presents two faces to the world: one of heritage and another of hate. Heritage bespeaks the mythical past of the antebellum South and its valiant defenders, but this gentility often adjoins angry right-wing extremism. There are many history buffs, collectors, genealogists, and fans of the Ken Burns PBS Civil War series whose interest in the Confederacy is casual and innocuous. But there is also a hard core of politically-motivated, right-wing neo-Confederates from the North as well as the South. According to Al Benson, Jr., of Arlington Heights, IL (a wealthy Chicago suburb), "There are a lot more of us Northern Confederates out there than most people realize. We are the worst nightmare of the politically correct--people that grew up under their brain washing [sic] in their public schools, and still, by God's grace, rejected their abolitionist propaganda!" Benson, who edits the Christian Educator, a home-schooling newspaper, also belongs to a secessionist group called the Confederate States of America and circulates a crudely-reproduced pamphlet called "The Communist Revision of Reconstruction (Paving the Way for Civil Rights)."
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec96britt.htm

 

[nino_savatte]

I guess the lynchings weren't enough. The CCC wants its revenge. This is the CCC's take on the recent story of a black woman who was kidnapped by White Supremacists, tortured and killed.
http://www.cofcc.org/

From the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6992739.stm

Huffington
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/why-the-feds-wont-prosec_b_64414.html

 

[nino_savatte]

Trent Lott, who once claimed that Strom Thurman was "right".

But his policy record is only part of the story. The Senate leader of the party of Lincoln is also deeply involved in the neo-Confederate movement, a motley collection of nostalgists, racists and extreme rightists. This is reflected in Lott's longtime support of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a neo-Confederate outfit that grew from the white Citizens Councils, but he is also a friend and backer of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a source of increasingly virulent pro-Confederate, radical right propaganda. (These people hate Lincoln. Many of them uphold the Confederate view of the Civil War and of slavery as a God-given institution. It is remarkable that a modern Republican leader would associate with them in any way.)
http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/conason/2002/12/12/lott/index.html

 

[likesfish]

eo-Confederate movement, a motley collection of nostalgists, racists and extreme rightists.

sums them up really like our home grown nutters who think the English are the lost tribe of israel wibble
except race politics are a bit nastier in the south