I've noticed that a lot of people on the right-wing nationalist side of things have been greatly perturbed by the melting down of the Charlottesville statue of the semi-talented Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. It is widely seen by the Amren/Counter-Currents/ Southern Secessionist types as a symbol of the "Great Replacement," and as an act of the so-called "Anti-White" establishment rubbing in the fact that White people are now weak and marginalised losers, and that "diversity" has triumphed.
As usual this is a highly emotionally-driven and, therefore, massively mistaken analysis. It is also a dog-whistle to moronic anti-Semitic tropes.
Actually, what this act symbolises is the exact opposite of diversity triumphing. Instead, it is a symbol of the ongoing project of centralising and unifying American and Western identity.
As is well known, the American Civil War was a highly divisive episode in American history. The unexpected resistance that the South was able to generate led to the war being a much more brutal and polarising experience than it needed to be. Also, the war itself was undertaken to counter centrifugal forces and strengthen the unity of the American political entity. But, after four years of relatively intense warfare, much of the population of the South had been alienated from the rest of the country; a phenomenon that was then intensified by the excesses of the period of what is called "Reconstruction."
It was this that led to the ad hoc process of mollification that succeeded Reconstruction from the 1870s onwards. Essentially this allowed a revival of States' rights, segregation, the stealthy disenfranchisement of Blacks, and a guarded respect for "Southern identity" and the history of its short period of "glorious" Secession. Confederate flags and naming things after General Robert E. Lee and Stonewell Jackson all became markers of Southern identity.
But this identity was always at odds with the greater Gleichschaltung of the American state. This exists at a more subtle level than it does in states, where the need to create cultural and social unity are more pressing, but it exists nonetheless and almost as potently. This Gleichschaltung emphasised firstly ethnic unity amongst a diverse White population of immigrants from Europe, and then racial unity between the various races that found themselves enmeshed in the American political entity.
A separate Southern identity, with all its symbols of Secession, slavery, and racial hierarchy (implicit or otherwise), was always a potential threat and fault line, something that the inherent centralising tendencies of any powerful state cannot tolerate forever.
The most interesting point is that the establishment's move against this separate identity had to wait until the twenty-teens and 2020s to reach its full culmination.
Dukes of Hazard re-runs about to be cancelled
Sure, the 1960s saw the Civil Rights movement, which greatly perturbed Southern Whites. But that was motivated by the need to include America's relatively large African-American population in society, and prevent that becoming another fault line and sticking point with the non-aligned World, where America was competing for influence against the Soviet Union (Yes, almost none of the great "moral" reforms of America have been taken for actual moral reasons).
Following that, for around 50 years, Civil Rights, "integration," and "Black empowerment" existed side-by-side with the Secessionist subculture of Civil War America. That it was able to do so is testament to the strength and unchallenged position of America for most of that period. Only a hegemonic superpower, whose fault lines and internal contradictions were relatively unchallenged by its rivals, could carry such divisions within it.
The fact that this particular contradiction now has to be eradicated, symbolised most strikingly by the iconic image of General Lee sinking into the embers, is testament to the growing challenge and accumulating weaknesses of America in the rising multipolar order.
Following that, for around 50 years, Civil Rights, "integration," and "Black empowerment" existed side-by-side with the Secessionist subculture of Civil War America. That it was able to do so is testament to the strength and unchallenged position of America for most of that period. Only a hegemonic superpower, whose fault lines and internal contradictions were relatively unchallenged by its rivals, could carry such divisions within it.
The fact that this particular contradiction now has to be eradicated, symbolised most strikingly by the iconic image of General Lee sinking into the embers, is testament to the growing challenge and accumulating weaknesses of America in the rising multipolar order.
America is still the strongest dog in the pack and the major power that has the least necessity to engage in the 'Great Game' of global geopolitics, but the 2010s revealed unprecedented weaknesses in the system, and Charlottesville was right at the heart of that.
The unexpected geopolitical bitch-slap that was Charlottesville
Charlottesville was a symbol of the Alt-Right, and the Alt-Right, when all's said and done, was a symbol of the weakness of open liberal societies to foreign subversion.
The tremendous impact that this had on the American political ecosystem is something that continues to reverberate today, through America First, MAGA, QAnon, Groypers, Christian Nationalism, Elon Musk, and all their derivatives, memes, and narratives. These have gone on to colonise vast areas of the Republican Party, pointing it in an isolationist direction, while all across Europe and the West disruptive populist forces have also been unleashed.
The tremendous impact that this had on the American political ecosystem is something that continues to reverberate today, through America First, MAGA, QAnon, Groypers, Christian Nationalism, Elon Musk, and all their derivatives, memes, and narratives. These have gone on to colonise vast areas of the Republican Party, pointing it in an isolationist direction, while all across Europe and the West disruptive populist forces have also been unleashed.
This is the macro reason why we are seeing the melting down of this statue now. It is an act of strength and unification, addressing a growing challenge.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
I don't know which is worse: the fact that Collin Liddel is little more than weasely right wing shitlib, or the fact that I agree with him.
ReplyDeleteDescribing processes does not necessarily imply endorsement. What people should like or dislike is usually obvious enough.
DeleteThis sounds a bit too conspiratorial i.e. part of a grand plan for an anti conspiritard such as yourself Colin.
ReplyDeleteIf ‘unity’ is the goal why does the regime endorsed media insist on shoving the festering fecal matter of ‘woke’ ideology in the faces of America’s legacy white hinterland population? Surely that has been more successful on whipping up any regime sentiments than any foreign exploitation of those sentiments?
And America and other western regimes are increasingly reliant on seemingly not very loyal foreign populations to prop up their claim to democratic representation. If the current malaise of the West is the result of foreign subversion, we have made it very easy for them.
How many white children are willing to toil in fields picking fruit or in sweltering factories all day? Nobody is loyal to a regime that enslaves them, but citizens that don't toil don't deserve the comforts of civilization and will get replaced by those who will.
DeleteThe Left's big problem is that it is simultaneously pursuing the contradictory goals of diversity and centralized uniformity. Of course the Left will happily embrace symbolic anti-Confederate acts, because hatred of the Confederacy is one of the few instances where the normally contradictory goals of diversity and centralized uniformity happen to be aligned. Those dastardly Southerners were both racists and enemies of the glorious union's transcontinental manifest destiny! But one could see this as an act of desperation for the Left - they are running so low on unifying goals that they have to pretend the Confederacy still exists. They've also had to push homosexualism and interracial marriage propaganda to the point of absurdity, because the Left lacks any real unifying cultural forces.
ReplyDeleteThe Left will probably remain in control for as long as there is enough cash pumping through the system to prop it up, but I don't think the Left feels very secure, especially after the recent events in Gaza. They rely in hysteria because they know they are defending a very hollow and thus fragile social order.
The anti-Confederate actions of the modern left are America's equivalent of de-Stalinization. Both historical movements attacked a cult of personality and "bad" leftism in order to justify "good" leftism. The modern left, in particular, does not want anybody to connect the dots between the Confederacy's anti-American leftism/collectivism and revolution and the one the modern left wants.
ReplyDeleteDixieboos, in turn, don't like being reminded that their idols weren't libertarians, but rather inseparable from Woodrow Wilson.
How the fuck is the Confederacy, which was essentially a plantation aristocracy, could in any conception be left wing?
DeleteSimple: They were never an aristocracy to begin with. An oligarchy, sure, but rich ladies dancing in poofy dresses doesn't automatically equal "aristocracy."
DeleteIn the Ancien Regime in France, the sort of men who comprised the planter class were made fun of in a play called "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" (The middle-class gentleman). The term is an oxymoron, since a man couldn't be both middle-class and a gentlemen, and the play mocked rich merchants who thought that aristocrats were defined by their wealth.
The planters of the Old South were not descended from warrior castes, but came from peasant stock. Due to the Reformation and the laws which deprived the English peasantry of their property and social safety nets, their ancestors retained the bad habits of medieval peasantry and combined them with the downsides of a merchant-class culture. The fact that they were not as rich as actual merchants doesn't change the fact that their culture was no longer a true peasant culture; the Boertrekkers of South Africa were equally poor but correctly nicknamed "Burghers" (i.e., merchants) by other Europeans for the same reason.
Going deeper into the subject, the defining feature of leftism is collectivism (and feigned egalitarianism). What separates collectivism from right-wing ideologies that aren't individualist is that collectivism locks people into categories that they can't change; the left sees these categories as an unquestionable law of nature. Kulaks in the USSR couldn't not be oppressors, Jews in Nazi Germany who converted to Christianity were not considered separately from those who remained Jewish, and the Old South declared that slavery was the natural state of blacks. The Confederacy's collectivism stated that no matter how good a black was, he was equally inferior to the worst white man. And, like most collectivists, the Confederacy screwed over the poor southern whites while feigning egalitarianism, showing no sense of "Noblesse Oblige," and causing a brain drain as slave economics stagnated and choked off small farmers and businesses (much like in Communist countries). The blacks did not live a traditional peasant communal farming life, but worked on inefficient collectivized farms. Given that the planters held a political monopoly, the lines between private owner and state often became blurred in practice. Which leads to the next point:
Another leftist feature of the Confederacy was its centralization of power, before and during the war. Before the war, the Slave Lobby demanded a more-powerful central government and sneered at Free States' claims to "states rights," particularly vis-a-vis the Fugitive Slave Law. During the war, the Confederacy established a government with zero checks and balances. Lest you say that absolute monarchies also apply, those are left-wing compared to traditional/medieval monarchies specifically because they remove the Church as a check/balance to the secular state's power. Without checks and balances, the Confederate government was free to confiscate private property and centrally manage its limited resources; like most leftists, they had no clue how to do it and therefore ran their economy into the ground. Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian who played a big role in popularizing the "Lost Cause," did the same to the Federal government, doing everything Dixieboos claim Lincoln did, but for real this time.
The main reason so many people see the Confederacy as right-wing is because of a silly premise: the status quo is assumed to be right by default, and anything that tries to topple it is automatically leftist. If applied consistently to the Spanish Civil War, one would conclude that Franco's troops were leftists, and the Popular Front was right-wing. It's silly, but deeply ingrained. It also didn't help that, during the Cold War, the anticommunist Left was lumped together with true Right-wingers, and only after the USSR collapsed did anybody start noticing.
Let me start by saying that the genealogy of the upper class is immaterial and irrelevant because the root of all civilization is based on power, moral sentiments be damned. For all the left-wing tears about crimson profiteers and the right-wing spin on a ruling class being illegitimate, power does not give a damn about any moral principle than self-perpetuation and preservation.
DeleteThe treatment of black slaves is of no concern to me and the so-called "feigned egalitarianism" towards poor whites was a fig leaf to keep them form rebelling with the black slaves or breeding with them. The Confederacy had a clearly defined racial hierarchy (and bless them for that) and it was the closest thing to an unapologetic aristocracy had in the North American continent had.
The Confederate aristocracy strikes me as a concoction of weak privilege (with LARPy cultural reinforcement from European romanticism) and fragile economic power in place of a well worked out ideology of power maintenance. It strikes me as odd that some Americans continue to venerate such weakness.
Delete@Zarathustra's Eagle
DeleteYour first paragraph perfectly encapsulates the difference between leftists and aristocrats. True aristocracies place great weight upon genealogy and lineage, and do not regard the root of civilization as being power to the exclusion of morality. They regard the family, religion, and property as the root of civilization, and regard your morality of endless wars between collectives as anti-civilization.
You also have yet to show that the planter class had a single aristocratic attribute (wealth doesn't count, merchants had plenty of it). Not all oligarchies are aristocracies; the term has specific criteria.
Even if you don't care about the blacks, they still worked collectivized farms that resembles Soviet farms than fiefdoms.
Saying it was a fig leaf proves my point: it was fake, and the suckers swallowed it up hook, line, and sinker.
Racial hierarchies are not right-wing. Zimbabwe has a racial hierarchy; are you going to say Mugabe runs a conservative aristocracy?
No, the planter class was not the closest thing to an aristocracy on the North American Continent. The Spanish and French portions had real aristocracies running Mexico/Quebec for centuries.
@Colin Liddell
You are correct that it is LARPy and weak. The reason it's so appealing is because it requires no effort; it attracts men with big mouths, bigger egos, and small IQs. They can boast of their greatness and whine about their victimhood simultaneously without noticing any contradictions, and they don't have to ever do anything in life to feel proud of themselves.