The South–And the Kennedy Brothers–Is Still Right, Conclusion
These were the beginnings of a blooming Southern “radical.” There was a mixture of emotions boiling inside me when reading The South Was Right. This was sort of like a boy learning that his dead father was not the monster portrayed by some disgruntled family member all his life. There was joy at learning that my ancestors were not the pigs I had been told they were. The very title of the Kennedys work emphasized not only that our Southern ancestors were not wrong, and not that they thought they were right — they were right. The South Was Right.
They were correct in asserting their right to govern themselves. They were right that they had constitutional grounds to secede. They were right in appealing to God to have a name and place among the nations of the world. They were right that a constitutional republic is incompatible with the centralized empire the Yankees were hell bent on establishing and controlling.
Alongside that joy brewed an intense anger. Through the indoctrination of the Yankee “education” machine, I had been molded into a compliant, servile subject. For extra credit in the fourth grade I memorized and recited word for word the Gettysburg Address. We were taught that “Honest Abe” was “The Great Emancipator,” and a true paternalistic father to the benighted South, who had to be shown the error of their ways at the point of a bayonet.
For a Southern teenager in the mid-nineties, The South Was Right was an exhilarating welcome after years of darkness. The truth is empowering and emboldening. Seeing people speak it and reading people write it inspires the marginalized among us.
A second and larger edition of The South Was Right was published in 1994. I immediately procured a copy, read it, studied it, and applied it.
And now a new generation may be introduced to this work with the publication of the 21st-Century edition. This covers the emergence of the BLM, “woke,” Antifa crowd of the Neo-Marxist left of whom we were blissfully unaware in 1994. This new left is comprised of godless communists, socialists, and “progressives” who dominate our national government and their propaganda arms — the mainline and digital media, as well as popular culture.
The cultural genocide warned of in 1994 has arrived. The Kennedys write, “Today, Southerners are the only minority who are forced to allow our enemies to define our culture.”
The new edition has eight new or renamed chapters. It takes issue with the pacified Southerners languishing in the malaise of current times, some of whom try to hide under the guise of false sophistry. “Such men are not old and wise, they are just tired and defeated.”
To anyone truly awake, the persistent attacks against Southern heritage is part of a broader campaign by the Neo-Marxists against the remnants of Western Civilization, which they plan to replace with their vision of a godless, socialist utopia based on government-enforced equality of outcome, accomplished through massive wealth redistribution. We see in the final analysis that this has always been, at its root, a spiritual battle.
I have a friend who has told me for years he would like to write a book entitled A Compact Broken. He is now echoed by the Kennedy brothers, who write in this new edition of a “bargain broken.” The post-war “bargain” was that the South would cease all the nullification and secession talk and become “good Americans” in exchange for being left alone. That bargain has been broken, and the Kennedys assert it is time for a “new game.” Aside from reclaiming the constitutional rights of nullification and secession, we must explore new avenues. “Sanctuary counties” or even the creation of new States consisting of the “red” counties of the country are now in play in the “new game.” New avenues must be available to meet the changing situations.
The new game is much more complicated. For this fight can no longer be summed up as North vs. South. It is now Red vs. Blue, Christian vs. godless, urban vs. rural, “woke” vs. traditional, law-and order vs. chaotic anarchists, and Unreconstructed Southerner vs. snotty-nosed, self-hating, ignorant white liberals.
The “election” of 2020 should be an eye-opener for the Christian Southerner. You cannot wave the flag more intensely or “vote harder” to preserve our culture and our people. True, Trump escaped a conviction upon a second impeachment. But if he truly won the vote in 2020 and was denied by election fraud, what makes anyone think that this corrupt system will allow him (or anyone like him) a chance to win in 2024 and beyond? The deck is stacked against you, Southerner, and you must discontinue participating in a rigged game.
Nothing less than our survival as a people is at stake.
Mr Doggrell,
Although “The South Was Right” was not my first introduction to such things, I remember feeling the exact same mixture of emotions upon reading that book. I clarified a lot and brought to the fore things I had never heard of.
This was the cassette tape era, and I spent a lot on lecture tapes back then in order to get a thorough education in what may be called Southron apologetics.
Addendum: It clarified a lot.
The emotions still feel fresh thinking back on it today. I graduated high school and entered into college at The University of Alabama in 1995. It was not long after I read an article entitled “The New Dixie Manifesto” by someone named Thomas Fleming and, soon thereafter, heard Clyde Wilson speak. The inspiration was phenomenal.
I too, as a Southern lad growing up in small town Tennessee during the early ’60’s, memorized the “Gettysburg Address” in the fourth grade, not for extra credit but under compulsion by the school. The whip of the Yankee schoolmarm hung high over the heads of the unsuspecting young in my grade school. If we failed to memorize this speech, we failed to graduate from the fourth grade. I memorized it but I didn’t understand it for years; however, it stuck in my crawl for a lifetime. Once I understood it, I realized that almost every thought expressed in that speech was ahistorical and, as H. L. Mencken said, the Address was just poetry…but what dangerous poetry it was. It toppled our Republic and still shakes our foundations today with its eternal call for births of new freedom…. like, for example, the new birth just delivered this week when the NCAA decreed that trans genders are free to compete in all college athletic programs and that all States that prohibit such participation will be denied the “privilege” of hosting NCAA championship events. Old Abe’s rewriting of our founding documents makes me proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free!
Ha, yes. To many good ‘Murikans today, if you don’t love all this “freedom,” it just means you’re not listening to Lee Greenwood, Toby Keith, et al. loud enough.
It seems a good portion of our countrymen fail to see the rich irony that the Gettysburg Address appeals to a document used by a group of individual States seceding from a mother country with which they no longer wanted to be associated.
I enjoyed reading your article Josh, as this book is refreshing for any Southerner who loves his people. The book should be in the hands of every Southern student. BLM is a fruit of the civil rights movement, and as long as Southerners allow themselves to be beat over the head by progressive accounts of the 1860’s and 1960’s we cannot move forward. Republicans are big government, and worship the civil rights movement, just as imperialistic as the democrats it looks to me. Without understanding the way American government was supposed to work and how the war effectively brought the government the founders created to an end, Southerners can’t even see where they stand, much less where to go. The book is awesome for that purpose.