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Praying for the Departed Holds a People Together

4/29/2023

The South has not surrendered completely to Yankee/globalist/atheist cultural domination, so one may still find respect for the dead among our people – folks stopping their vehicles on the side of the road when a funeral procession drives past; handing down old sayings, tools, letters, furniture, and other heirlooms to the newer generations; celebrating the Memorial Days of fallen Confederate soldiers, etc.

This continual act of remembering and honoring the foregoing generations helps keep a people from disintegrating and dying. Mr. Mark Atkins expressed this in a recent essay when he said,

We are who we are not just because of our own experiences, but also because of the experiences of our parents, grandparents, their great-great-great grandparents, their great-great-great-greats, and stretching on back into the mist of the forgotten past.

Likewise peoples may be thought of as a chain, each link representing a generation, each bearing strong resemblance to the previous one.

And like the individual, peoples set up like concrete too and change but slowly. And like individuals, peoples are inclined to take the path of least resistance. And as with individuals, this often leads to their degradation. And like individuals, if the people will not face their degradation, repent of it, and reform their ways, they can be assured that their descendants will eventually curse them, that is, unless they vanish and fall off the timeline altogether.

It is essential for Dixie’s survival to keep these intergenerational links strong, but more than a mental acknowledgment of that truth is necessary. It must be incarnated, lived, practiced year after year. And there is a day, the Day of Rejoicing, the second Tuesday after Easter, that pulls together these varying strands of individual and collective remembrance of the departed, and unites them in a beautiful way. The Orthodox archpriest Father Artemy Vladimirov describes some of the basic aspects for us:

Radonitsa [the Russian name for this day—W.G.]—so the day is called, is when we, according to ancient tradition, having prayed and communed of the Holy Mysteries of Christ in the church of God, go to the cemetery to visit those graves tender to our hearts, to tidy them up, and to see among the greenery the newly-sprouted and happy daisies, or to plant tulips or daffodils. Mentally, we exchange the triple kiss with the departed, receiving into our wide open and unveiled hearts, together with the breath of the spring breeze, their answer: “Indeed He is Risen!”

So, standing at the Panikhida with our red candle, we as if enter into mysterious communion with the reposed. Indeed, tidings are delivered heart to heart. After all, yet earlier, having communed of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, having tasted of the Most Pure Body and Blood of the Lord, we, as if little children, gather ourselves together at the Divine throne unseen, and both the heavenly and earthly branches of the Church interpenetrate one another—which is why at Radonitsa always “The soul believes, the tears break forth—And all is light, so light!” Because, devoting time to the remembrance of those who loved us, whom we loved, we as if meet their souls, which in Christ have the blessed means of seeing and hearing us, following us and before the Lord Jesus Christ interceding for timely help for those of us yet laboring in asceticism, in struggles, and in battles.

He speaks further of how this celebration ties the generations together:

But today, on this joyous day, let us recall that the great Russian poets, in particular Sergei Yesenin, have an entire early cycle of verse, “Radonitsa.” We, entering our humble Russian cemeteries, sitting for at least a while under the spreading crown of a willow or birch, can depart to the world of memories cherished in our hearts. All of you, of course, remember the Latin dictum, “De mortuis aut bene, aut nihil”—“Either speak well of the dead, or say nothing at all.” And on Radonitsa, dear friends, let us necessarily carve out some time and wrest but half an hour from the rapacious hands of this world, which turn the wheels of progress, carrying us away with tomorrow’s projects, and take a respite from the hustle and bustle and, in retrospective we will see and survey the thousand-year path traversed by our country, and spiritually meet and triply-kiss those through whom our beloved fatherland was created. Let us pray for the repose of princes, many of whom became victims of their own disunity, and for those who fell in battle at the Kalka River, or the Sit River, and let us pray for the heroes of the Russian spirit on Kulikovo Field, who against the godless hordes went out in white tunics, and Nepryadva, stained the color of red, which gave birth to the Russian people, consolidated and monolithic, as said our president about our thousand-year nation, composed of many tribes and peoples: “Monolithic and multi-faceted.”
. . .

Let us pray for the Russian peasantry, which endured the most severe, unprecedented genocide in the twenties of the twentieth century, for the unknown peasants, who, exiled to this same Archangelsk, froze and stood in stacks by the fences, because the local residents had no heart to give them alms.

Fulfilling this duty of ours, recalling our own Southern mothers and fathers, statesmen, soldiers, explorers, writers, Sunday School teachers, those who died during the Reconstruction occupation, and so forth and praying for them, we will receive a very precious gift – ‘the moral rebirth of the fatherland’:

Today we embrace in thought all of our compatriots, right down to the soldiers who fulfilled their duty in Syria, battling for the freedom of the Christian people as if defending their own cottage. We remember our ancestors, great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, those who gave us the baton of love, and by their prayers lit in our hearts the fire of faith and fidelity to Christ. May the Lord grant repose to our fathers, brothers, and sisters, forgive them their transgressions voluntary and involuntary, and hedge us in by their prayers today, at the beginning of the third millennium, from fears and timidity, help us be cleansed from every defilement of flesh and spirit, and give us the fortitude to resist public seductions and to invest our little mite into the moral rebirth of the fatherland.

But if we fail to honor our departed Southern forefathers and mothers, we will become depraved, demonic:

Today, on Radonitsa day, when we want to speak about the past and remember our grandmothers, and recall those who have contributed to our spiritual formation, I recall the thought of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, who said, “The measure of a people’s savagery corresponds to the extent of their forgetfulness and oblivion to which they consign the departed.” And when today you arrive to our city cemeteries, hearts ever painfully sinking upon sight of the ancient, pre-revolutionary tombs with crosses to date unrestored, earlier destroyed by the hands of godless people.

Whence comes such truly demonic hatred, poured out upon our departed? Whence memorials disfigured, and granite slabs crushed and broken to be used as building material? Why was it necessary to extract the remains of Michael Nikiforovich Katkov in the Alekseevsky Monastery necropolis, where I now fulfill the obedience of confessor, and shove a cigarette into his mouth? It was some crazy komsomols that did it. What is this infernal, Luciferian, irrational hatred? It seems that behind these terrible phenomena stands, of course, a mystical sense of the unity of generations, and to obstruct this unity, to dismember and rend us from one another, the present age and the prior age, is the ancient dream of the spirit of evil—the spirit of negation and destruction. Because the Christian who is rooted in the past in his heart, the Christian who preserves the loving, reverent, and respectful memory of his ancestors, kings and queens, princes, and soldiers who gave their lives on the field of battle for the faith, the king, and the fatherland, is truly an unshakable edifice— he will not be dislodged by the winds of change. A Christian will never be cannon fodder in the modern pseudo-democratic “Maidans,” will never become a plaything or toy in the hands of demagogues, who first and foremost brainwash this or that ethnic or social group, turning them into mankurts, depriving them of their historical memory, and using them to destroy the cultural life of the remaining peoples.

Knowing and loving our Christian ancestors, as Fr Artemy says, will extinguish the fires of Revolution; but denigrating and erasing their memory will most certainly ignite and feed it. Mr Rod Dreher is rather clear on this point:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

If we here in Dixie, we who still love her, will unite and celebrate this Day of Rejoicing, we may be assured that the Southern remnant will be strengthened and blessed by God. And we may also find that some of our wayward Southern brothers and sisters, those disappointed and disillusioned by Americanism, communism, BLMism, technological progress, or what have you, will rejoin us in Dixie’s gracious and welcoming Big House, for authentic Christian tradition, shining with the Light of Truth, will attract those to it who are no longer blinded by their devotion to idols.

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Philadelphia Is Where the Problems Started

4/8/2023

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Just as it did in 1865, Appomattox Day (the day when the South became a conquered colony of DC, a day that should be remembered by Southerners with mourning and fasting and prayer each year) will fall on Palm Sunday in 2023 – April 9th (following the Orthodox Church’s dating; the Protestants and Roman Catholics will be celebrating the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ on that day). Because of this conjunction of the days, it is fitting to reflect once again on the narrative surrounding this War – its causes, its effects, the people and issues involved.

Unfortunately, prominent conservatives continue to extol President Lincoln as the embodiment of a just and far-sighted political leader. Sohrab Ahmari, for instance, is in agreement with a new documentary ‘that Lincoln is the ideal thinker-practitioner of the American constitutional tradition’. The tradition in Mr. Ahmari’s and his fellow-travelers’ view is that the federal government is justified in trampling the sovereignty of the States to eradicate what it views as moral evils, constitutional limits and other niceties notwithstanding.

The Southern historian Rod O’Barr, who has written some excellent essays at the Abbeville Institute lately, sees lots of problems in the Lincoln-as-crusading-anti-slavery-hero narrative. In reviewing the work of Dr. James McPherson, he writes,

An example of this suppression of evidence in McPherson’s work is his discussion of Lincoln’s 1862 offer of compensated emancipation to the slave States. He mentions the July 12 meeting Lincoln held with the border slave State representatives where Lincoln attempted to convince them to accept his offer. It serves his “crusade against oppression” narrative. But McPherson conveniently omits in the discussion where Lincoln says it is a strategy to win the war and not a crusade to free slaves. And McPherson omits where those representatives tell Lincoln that the seceded States did NOT secede over slavery, and as a “fact, now become history,” were offering to end slavery if European powers would aid in the war to gain Southern independence. This is an obvious intentional sin of omission on the part of McPherson to spin a false narrative.

Such revelations make it possible to discern the real cause behind the North’s war against the South:

McPherson has to spin the narrative in this fashion to somehow make palatable a war that was in reality a crime against humanity. For if ending slavery was not the ultimate justification for the war, then all that is left is a war to “preserve the Union,” which certainly has no redeeming moral value. How could it, in a Union whose founding organic law was based on a Declaration of Independence that asserted the fundamental human right to a “government by consent of the governed?” Preserving the Union did not necessitate forcing the Southern States to remain in it. The Union could have continued minus those States. But the Northern section would have been economically famished without those Southern States. Preserving the Union” was nothing more than a euphemism for forcing the Southern people to remain under a government to which they no longer consented, and for what? So that the North could economically exploit the revenue generated by “King Cotton.”

The conquest of the South by the Yankees stripped the limited government façade from DC, destroyed the decentralizing inertia left from the era of the Articles of Confederation, with the devastating consequences still unfolding and compounding today:

“The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had. With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the Founding Fathers–a government of limited powers.” Professor James M. McPherson, Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism.

. . .

McPherson, while admitting the North was the section that abandoned the Founders, is a nationalist who approves of the Lincoln led revolution against the Founders. Of the war he applauds that Lincoln forced,

“the several states bound loosely in a federal union under a weak central government into a new nation forged by the fires of war…

…. the old decentralized federal republic became a new national polity that taxed the people directly, created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, established a national currency and a national banking structure. The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation. Before 1861 the two words “United States” were generally used as a plural noun: “The United States are a republic.” After 1865 the United States became a singular noun. The loose union of states became a nation.” James McPherson Battle cry of Freedom Oxford U Press.

What those like McPherson with nationalist sentiments cannot grasp is the loss of freedom and the creation of crony capitalist corruption that the Lincoln led North imposed on all Americans by force of bayonets. The Founders had carefully constructed a confederation in which power was intentionally decentralized and dispersed among the States as a means of avoiding centralized tyranny. Lincoln’s war created the very monster the Founders so rightly opposed.

Mr. O’Barr’s work here and elsewhere is generally beyond reproach, but he is wrong in one particular: It was not ‘Lincoln’s war [that] created the very monster the Founders so rightly opposed.’ That monster was birthed in 1787 during the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. The Anti-Federalist writer Federal Farmer explains (via TJ Martinell):

He observed many of the changes that would occur with the potential transition from the Articles of Confederation to the proposed federal government under the Constitution. Under the former, the states retained most of their authority, and there was no confusion over what powers the Articles of Confederation delegated and those it did not. Yet, the question of enumerated and unenumerated powers was one of the many issues driving a wedge between antifederalists and federalists over the proposed Constitution.

The Federal Farmer argued that the Constitution would represent a transformation of the roles the states and central government played – particularly regarding their necessity. Under the confederation, the states largely governed themselves, but the proposed general government would have enough power to rule with or without the states. Or, it could even rule against the will of the states.

. . .

He went on to explain the differing impacts of a federal republic and a consolidated government. (bold emphasis added)

“The first (a federal Republic) makes the existence of the state governments indispensable, and throws all the detail business of levying and collecting the taxes, &c. into the hands of those governments, and into the hands, of course, of many thousand officers solely created by, and dependent on the state. The last (consolidation) entirely excludes the agency of the respective states, and throws the whole business of levying and collecting taxes, &c. into the hands of many thousand officers solely created by, and dependent upon the union, and makes the existence of the state government of no consequence in the case.”

It is clear that what was birthed in Philadelphia and reached its maturity in the violence of Lincoln’s war is precisely a consolidated, and not a federal, government. Mr. O’Barr continues:

Politicians of the federal government along with centralized planners in agencies such as “the Fed” (our version of the old Soviet Politburo), now gainfully manipulate centralized power at the expense of the freedoms and bank accounts of the people whose States no longer defend their polities. The results of the Lincoln revolution, which McPherson spins as a revolution of social justice, was, in reality, a centralized sovereignty enabling corruption at the highest level. And that is what Lincoln and his Republican crony capitalist allies really wanted. It was all about leveraging the North’s population advantage for control of a now sovereign general government for the purpose of economic exploitation of the Union. Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham spoke in opposition to the reason for Lincolns war in 1863, and it cost him dearly because of Lincoln’s retribution:

“Overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized government in its stead…national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation . . . No more state lines, no more state governments, but a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism.”

Vallandigham had no idea the extremes to which the corruption could reach. We now are $30 trillion in debt, and the national banking structure so opposed by Thomas Jefferson as unconstitutional and potentially corrupt, has seen banking failures as politicians in bed with centralized planners enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayers who have to fund bailouts. Today five US Banks have risk exposure that is twice the amount of the GDP of the entire world!

Knowing this, the conservative/revivalist/traditionalist political strategy vis-à-vis DC going forward must include two goals. The short-term goal would be what it always has been: Elect the most capable and virtuous conservatives for federal office that we possibly can to limit the carnage of the DC leviathan (along with a liberal use of State and local nullification). But the long-term goal must be to refashion the consolidated government created by the Philadelphia constitution into one that is truly federal, one in which the States wield the bulk of the power again. That will mean no House of Representatives; senators appointed by the governors or State legislatures; no national bank; a federal budget that is dependent at least in part on money supplied voluntarily by each State; no national army (each State raising and maintaining her own); unanimous or near unanimous consent for measures to be passed; and so forth.

And this is assuming that all the States will want to remain together in a union, an assumption that is looking less and less tenable as the cultural divide between States and regions continues to widen.

Abortion-promoting, transgender-friendly, gun-free, carbon-neutral, covid-totalitarian States like California, Oregon, and Washington and States like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama that embrace traditional Christian teachings about marriage and family, child murder, and human sexual duality, maintain some respect for human free will in health care decisions, understand that people need a way to defend themselves from attackers, and can keep a reasonable balance between scientific innovation and care for the creation – why keep States so radically opposed in their beliefs and folkways yoked together?

Maybe we are not far removed, here at the South anyway, from being able to praise our heroes once again without the disapproving scowls and howls of the Woke in DC and the Blue States, praise that they likewise garnered from foreign countries, the poet Philip Stanhope Worsley of England among them, who concluded a poem with these lines:

An Angel’s heart, an angel’s mouth,
Not Homer’s, could alone for me
Hymn well the great Confederate South--
Virginia first, and LEE.

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Walt Garlington

Praying for the Departed Holds a People Together

Philadelphia Is Where the Problems Started

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