Confederate Quote of the Day: How Democratic Societies Tyrannize Dissenters

Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.

Alexis De Tocqueville

Confederate Quote of the Day: Allistair Cooke on the Right of Secession

Alistair Cooke, British Author & Historian

The monumental serenity and gentleness of Lee have provoked many sentimental plays and reams of idolatrous prose.  But there might be a fine play in the second moral – and political – conflict he had to resolve:  that of never drawing his sword ‘save in defense’ and yet accepting the command of the Southern forces.  In any case, he went back to Virginia to fight for a principle that, ironically, Lincoln himself had enunciated better than anyone, thirteen years before Secession.  “Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.’

The nub of the conflict between North and South was the definition of ‘any people, anywhere’ (how about the people of Virginia?).  To Lincoln, it came to mean exclusively ‘the people’ of the United States.  The South took him at his earlier word and presumed that any region as closely knit by culture and economics as the South could claim to be a ‘people’ free to assert the right of self-determination.  But Lincoln, in his first proclamation of the war, had declared the ‘combination’ of the Southern states to be illegal.  And to this day, the historians and popular sentiment have overwhelmingly agreed with him.  Yet, it seems to me, we have all been bedazzled by the Gettysburg Address, a small masterpiece of rhetoric of very dubious logic.  Its most famous phrase is very close to political nonsense.  Quite apart from the anarchy implied in any government ‘by the People,’ there remains the ticklish question of how many people or states or ethnic minorities constitute a ‘people’ who may justly wish to govern themselves.  Woodrow Wilson held no such bland assumptions about the whole being more sovereign than its parts when he created nations out of ethnic minorities yearning to be free of government by the Austro-Hungarian empire.  I’m afraid we must conclude, with Justice Holmes, that the winner is always right.

--Alistair Cooke, Alistair Cooke's America

Confederate Quote of the Day: H.L. Mencken on The Gettysburg Address

H.L. Mencken
1880 - 1956

H.L. Mencken, the famous muckraker and journalist, discussed the Lincoln myth and the Gettysburg Address back in 1922, in an essay called “Five Men at Random,” Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 171-76.

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost child-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to one graceful and irresistible gesture. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. 

 I love H.L. Mencken.  The man had guts, and was irreverent enough to tell the unvarnished truth.

Confederate Quote of the Day: Milan Kundera

The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Note:  Kundera was writing about the Communist takeover of his country, Czechoslovakia.  However, the principle describes what is happening to America today, and particularly to the American South.