It strikes me that the thing about the South that most irritates the cultural elite is not their overt cultural manifestations per se – you know, things like NASCAR racing, country-western music, and moonshine – and nor is it any residual racism or unwillingness to sign on to the liberal social agenda. It is, rather, their unwillingness to participate or collaborate in their own deracination – you know, that process described so ably by E. Michael Jones, that involves selling one’s cultural birthright for a mess of globalist pottage.
You see, the trend of our time – despite occasional setbacks in places like the Islamic world – is for the entire planet to eventually look like the United States, and for all of its inhabitants to think like Americans. This is why world travel is so depressing these days – no matter where one goes, it’s nothing but McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Nikes. The most isolated fastnesses of the Amazon or the New Guinea highlands are contaminated with American commercialism and superficiality. And this, of course, is all part of the softening-up process that is a prelude to total cultural takeover and genocide, i.e. the total annihilation of native or local cultures and their replacement by commercial/consumerist culture that impoverishes provincial regions and enriches the internationalists. The irony is that, whereas many Americans have learned to resist the siren song of commercialism and superficial “prosperity”, people in the Third World are buying our bill of goods with absolutely no hesitation. In this, I guess, it sort of resembles communism, which Europe has more or less had enough of, and the highly-developed parts of Asia are markedly skeptical, but it is alive and well – and vigorous – in Africa and Latin America.
So, given that commercialism, materialism, internationalism, globalism, and cultural genocide are all facets of the same thing, isn’t it ironic that one of the last redoubts of resistance happens to be a large swath of America itself? Now, this is not to say that the South didn’t go through a period of, basically, selling out – think: the TVA, and the transition from locally-grown food to supermarkets, and from horses to cars, and natural building materials to aluminum and plastic. Can you say “mobile home parks”, class? But at some point some people in the South realized that, whoa, they were rapidly becoming less like themselves and more like the hated Yankees – and even then, in only the most superficial way. They would never really be admitted to the club – only exploited until the money ran out, then abandoned (think: NAFTA). So Southern culture began to re-assert itself, starting perhaps with Fundamentalism, but followed soon after by Southern writers, agrarians, folk music revivals, crafts revivals, and so on. And in so doing, they managed to seduce a goodly number of Northerners who had, in effect, been born into an already-deracinated culture (the impoverished heritage of Puritanism) and brought up in a culturally arid environment, where everyone else (white ethnics, blacks, Southerners) seemed to be having fun but they weren’t. (Full disclosure: I’m a poster child for this phenomenon.)
Now, a Puritan – or a Puritan regime – always has a choice. It can adopt a “live and let live” attitude, recognizing that its neuroses are precisely that and are not a prescription for the way everyone else ought to live…. or it can reduce cognitive dissonance by deciding that everyone else is evil, permissive, oversexed, “too Catholic”, “too Southern”, “too black”, etc., and pass a thick code of laws designed to suppress those alternate cultures so that their dominance might be maintained. Well, when it’s a choice between doing the humanitarian thing and the judgmental, tight-assed, intolerant thing, which one usually happens? The latter, of course! So we not only have, as someone said, a country of Indians ruled by an elite of Swedes, but also a country of people who just want to have fun ruled by an elite of people who are suspicious of anything that even remotely resembles fun, or pleasure, or joy. And racial/ethnic/cultural manifestations are the most obvious threat to this regime – the thing they find most disturbing and annoying on an everyday basis, and the thing that they are the most anxious to suppress, or at least channel into totally harmless forms (think: Epcot). So all the force of the mainstream media and the education system is applied to suppress and discourage local culture, identity, and pride… and even areas one might not think of are included – things like medicine and nutrition, for example. And I don’t have to mention entertainment, music, TV, movies, and all the rest of it. The South is never taken seriously by any of these entities – Southerners are depicted as either racist buffoons or inbred degenerates, but at least as not having any valid opinions, or any legitimate claim as to their own history and traditions. Because they were soundly defeated in a “war fought to free the slaves” – another massive myth – they are considered to have given up, for time and eternity, all rights to have their opinions heard or their cultural offerings and needs given consideration. And yet, those annoying manifestations persist – and they persist not only in the face of total hostility by the Regime, but they constitute a silent accusation: “You gave up your heritage, and for what? But we kept ours, and proud of it.”
So any and all manifestations of “Southernism” are firmly in the face of the Regime, which wants to suppress and eventually exterminate all manifestations of pride in race, region, ethnicity, faith… and which is itself populated with people who sold out all that they inherited, and may be starting to suspect that they were massively ripped off. But hey, you join the Organization, there are benefits, and if you don’t like it you can leave at any time. That usually shuts up the complainers. But the South doesn’t worry about things like this – it has learned to get along without any voice, any power, any influence… it has learned that the answer to being hated and derided is not surrender, but a reawakening… because in the long run, what makes the Regime tick is soulless and sterile, and what makes the South tick is a real thing, with red blood, soul, and spirit.
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