The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords. - Psalm 56:21



O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us!  - Burns



Those who have the most virtues in their mouths have the least in their bosoms.  - Oliver Goldsmith



Where will the Word be found, Where will the Word resound?
Not here, There is not enough silence.  - Shelley



I did not opposed to Obama as President because he is African. Just being from Illinois is enough for me. Besides, I am still not reconciled to John Quincy Adams. - Clyde Wilson



But capitalist society, which naturally does not know the meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of disgrace. - G.K. Chesterton



Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. – Alfred Hitchcock


Everything has a moral if only you can find it. - Lewis Carroll



Previous to the War between the States, political education was maintained by public discussions of great principles, by great men. Since the War, political education has been neglected; and the people who once knew that they were sovereigns... now act upon the idea that they are subjects, without the liberty of doing anything , except to pay taxes, and obey the orders of those in office. - Tom Watson of Georgia, 1917.



You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. - Lenin


Looking for Utopia you have to wade through rivers of blood and find out it’s not there. - Peter Hitchens



The North strove to remember the war during the remainder of the 19th century as one of valorous collective unity, rather than an unpopular struggle that held considerable dissent and resentment... Abraham Lincoln was despised by a sizable portion of the Northern populace. - Paul Taylor, ‘Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North (2024)

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. - Matthew 7:15


My view has always been that a state’s political system reflects the characteristics of its leaders. - Xenophon


Me seemes the world has runne quite out of squaare
​From the first point of his appointed sourse,
And being once amisse, grows daily wourse and wourse.
- Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queen


Nothing can more hurt a state than that cunning men pass for wise. - Francis Bacon


It is better to be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.  - Martin Luther


Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire


Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute. - Charles Cotesworth Pinckney


Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? - Thomas Jefferson


Alas! It is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
- Byron


Political words are the most indefinite, on account of the constant struggle of power to enlarge itself by tortured construction of terms.  - John Taylor of Caroline


The Confederates have gone out of this war with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN.  - Edward Pollard, The Lost Cause, 1866


Our sole object was the establishment of our independence and the attainment of an honourable peace. - R.E. Lee, 1866


. . . the government is in its essence the executive committee of great wealth.  - Frank Owsley, Southern Agrarian, 1936


Shine on, O perishing republic.  - Robinson Jeffers


To see what is in front of one’s nose, needs a constant struggle.  - Orwell


The spiritual life of a nation is more important than its territory, and more important, even, than its level of economic prosperity.  - Solzhenitsyn


American culture is an infinite regression to moronic vulgarity.  - Thomas Fleming


I find absolutely no ground for optimism, and I have every reason for hope. - Wilfred Sheed


Police protection is an oxymoron.  - Bernard Theursam


Have we no shame? No.  - Fred Reed


The foremost duty of a citizen, especially in dangerous times, is to think. - Charley Reece


It cannot be repeated too often that the purpose of Politically Correct censorship is to punish people who tell the truth. Rulers don’t care about falsehoods. - Clyde Wilson


History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. - Chalmers Johnson


You can’t go home again.  - Thomas Wolfe

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan running for President promised to cut federal spending and reduce federal interference in society. I personally heard Reagan at the South Carolina capitol promise to send people to scrutinise and eliminate federal waste and to appoint conservatives to office.


Nixon and Reagan lied. All they did was to pretend to support the issues that George Wallace had brought to national attention.

Understanding the short-sighted nature of the Republican party in Congress and the Supreme Court, I never expected anything else and suffered little disappointment.

With Trump it was different. Here was a man not a politician who seemed to speak out to the forgotten and powerless people. He was not afraid to stand on matters that the Democrats were too fanatical and the Republicans too cowardly to even mention. His character issues seemed unimportant given his eloquent courage.

His first term was underwhelming but we knew that confronting the federal beast and the Republican leadership was a hard battle.

He apparently did something on the immigration issue, but not nearly enough, and he seems to have backed away from that. Cut spending? Remember the “Big Beautiful Bill”? Reduce federal interference? Prosecuting “antisemitic” freedom of speech at universities?

What we all most hoped for was relief from a series of illegal, counterproductive, damaging wars.

Then we had the silliness about Greenland. We already had Greenland in our defense establishment. Why antagonise a peaceful and friendly European country? And then sheer colonialist force being applied to Venezuela. Was there not some quieter way to handle that?

The unprovoked and criminal attack on Iran destroyed Trump for good. It was not only bad it was stupid---a total miscalculation of the defense capacity of the large and historic Persian Empire, based on the false claims made by another government. He has deceitfully announced negotiations when he had nothing to discuss except complete surrender. He has contradicted himself continuously in his statements. He has very possibly left an unsolvable situation in which Israel will resort to nuclear war we have not seen since 1945. Will he be willing and able to prevent that?

The attack has damaged the world economy with possibly catastrophic results. Trump has so damaged American prestige that new power alignments are likely to emerge. He has guaranteed that he will go down in history as an awful President furthering the decline of his country.

Worst of all, he may have guaranteed that the increasingly authoritarian Democratic party will resume control. Without Trump the Republican leaders will run for cover and spout pablum as they always do.


No, I was wrong.  Even worse, Trump has  discarded  giving any help to the  chance for a real America to come home and work for spiritual renewal.  

We traditionally expect impartial neutrality from jurors deciding guilt or innocence. Historians should not be handing out verdicts of good and evil, although that is often what they do. Rather, they should properly be trying to help us understand past times. The past is like a foreign country. We can’t live there but it is interesting to visit.


You can study the personal writings of representatives of nearly every European country who were in America during the great bloodletting of 1861-1865. Nearly all of them described the war as an exercise in the Northern imperial conquest of the South. Nobody believed that freeing the slaves was motivated by benevolence.


Good European historians have approached that war with seemly neutrality. They have broader views of history than most Americans. Most importantly, they do not see a great moral crusade. They are free from the stance of Yankee self-righteousness.


A good example is the outstanding Italian historian Raimondo Luraghi. Three of his books are available in English: The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South, A History of the Confederate Navy, and Five Lectures on the American Civil War. These are very much worth the attention of any student of Southern or War between the States history. Luraghi has new and illuminating perspectives.


There are two books of the prolific and deeply insightful Frenchman Dominique Venner. Venner was a wide-ranging historian, and perhaps relevantly a veteran soldier. His work deserves translation.


First, Le Blanc Soleil des Vaincus, described as a study of the War of Secession, 1607-1865, the dates being a signal of superior insight. Second, Gettysburg. This work concerns more than the battle. It is a full history of the Confederacy.


Both of these books have Confederate battle flags on the covers of the quality paperback editions.

Know any good French translator?
​

At the University of South Carolina is a striking classical Greek building known as the South Caroliniana Library. It was built in 1840 by the outstanding architect Robert Mills and was said to be the first American college building for a separate library.


The building anchors one side of the open end of a “horseshoe” of sturdy dignified buildings all built before the War for Southern Independence. Antebellum South Carolina College was intended to be and was a strong, recognised institution with an internationally distinguished faculty. The Library contained rare materials, including a first edition Audubon.


The Library escaped Sherman’s fires but South Carolina College did not escape Reconstruction and suffered the same decline as its impoverished state. In the World War II era some insightful people who loved their State, led by Robert Meriwether, formed a South Caroliniana Society. The Society was allowed to take over the Library for the keeping of its assiduously collected historical materials.


The Library thus for decades became busy as a major research institution, drawing outstanding historians from around the world to its collections.


In the early 2020s it was decided that the Library need “renovation,” a project completed in 2023.


I am not surprised to see the Library “brought up to date,” but I am abysmally disappointed at the extent of the “renovation.” Everything reflecting South Carolina history and culture is gone.


I expected the removal of the stone plaque to Preston Brooks, who thrashed the cowardly Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who had refused a duel for his insults. But I did not expect to see the entire removal of anything reminiscent of South Carolina. The Library is now full of trivial “exhibits” that would not be out of place in an Ohio museum. It has also become something of a center for African American materials and meetings, which is fine.


The greatest loss is the removal of the gallery of fine paintings of outstanding South Carolinians, including women, that once was a striking feature.


A few years ago, for more than a decade, the University had a President who had left Michigan just ahead of the sheriff. His tenure finally was ended when an out-of-state newspaper dug up documents from a landfill and he went to his proper place in the penitentiary. I mention this because this fellow tried to remove the portraits to the president’s mansion. But they were the property of the South Caroliniana Society, which blocked his attempt.


But the times have changed. The “renovated” Library has replaced the portraits with exhibits and inferior paintings of unknown people. The precious art has been moved and hidden in a closed room in the big modern library. Insider information tells me that one of the portraits is damaged and another missing. This remarkable vision of old South Carolina history and culture can no longer be seen in public.


​I cannot really blame what has happened on increased African American influence or on the Woke ideology pervasive in academic institutions. The real cause is that the leaders of the State have abandoned their heritage and created a world of Babbitry. They have yearned for a university that resembles the American mainstream, a second string Ohio State.  

The 17-year-old Emma LeConte kept a full diary during the havoc reeked by Sherman’s uniformed arsonists and looters on the city of Columbia, South Carolina, which she saw up close.


Incomplete and distorted versions of the diary have been made into books in the past. The true and complete thing has now been provided by two outstanding Southern historians—Karen Stokes and James Kibler. Shotwell Publishing has just brought out their work as The Diary of Emma Leconte: A Story of War and Survival, 1864-1865.


Emma lived on the South Carolina College campus in what is now known as Lieber College, a place where I spent a good deal of time in earlier and better years. Lieber is at the open end of what is called The Horseshoe, two lines of wonderful antebellum buildings. It is directly across from the now de-Southernised South Caroliniana Library, where I also spent a lot of time.


Emma was the daughter of Joseph LeConte, an eminent scientist and professor. She saw and heard what was going on during the December night when Sherman was at work intimidating women and old folks, destroying their houses and other city institutions, and looting the property of the population. She also observed and recorded the aftereffects. The liberators in blue did not spare the black people from their atrocities. On the positive side, some of the Union soldiers were so drunk that they perished in their own fires.


The college remained relatively unscathed, though in the midst of a large devastated area. It had a wall around it made up of sturdy buildings and was considered not to have much useful loot. Union soldiers did manage to set fire to the roofs of two buildings where wounded Southern soldiers were, but the wounded men were able to put out the fires.


Emma felt deeply the sufferings of her family and friends and townspeople, but she recorded facts.


Those interested in this book should also look for Joseph LeConte’s ‘Ware Sherman: A Journal of Three Months’ Personal Experience in the Last Days of the Confederacy. The book was published in 1937 by another of LeConte’s daughters, Caroline, with interesting drawings. The LSU Press brought out a version in 1999, but the work is now rare and hard to find.


LeConte and his brother John were Confederate scientists. He vividly describes the weeks following the fire, during which he made trips to the country to bring back food to devastated Columbia while avoiding being made prisoner by the Union. This is relatively unnoticed history.


Among other insufficiently noticed history was the good will shown by some Northerners after the war. Joseph and his brother were among the first professors to be appointed to the newly-established University of California at Berkely in the late 1860s. They were already distinguished, versatile, and prolific scientists and they were recommended by many of the distinguished scientific men of the time.


Their careers in California were long and honoured. Joseph became the president of several national societies and was noted, among other things, as a conservationist. It was the University of California Press that first published ‘Ware Sherman.”


While refamiliarising yourself with the destruction of Columbia, also take a look at A City Laid Waste, the 2005 edition of the work of the great William Gilmore Siimms, also a firsthand witness to the event who wrote shortly thereafter. His newspaper report, later a pamphlet, is called The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia.


It is good to remember the destruction of Columbia which is greatly documented, although it was only one of hundreds of such happenings. There are people, including local carpetbaggers, who still retell Sherman’s lie that the fire was caused by Confederates.


Keep in mind what happened to our people, mine and yours, when their independence and self-rule was dishonourably suppressed by the invasion and conquest of their own government which they had founded and had until then supported with sacrifice.  

The U.S. government’s attack on Iran fails every rule of Christian “just war” theory. It trashes what little is left of the Constitution. And possibly worst of all, it is stupid.

Just war principles require action to be taken to protect the innocent or redress grave injury. They require that all peaceful alternatives are exhausted. The war initiated must have a reasonable chance of success. The rule of “proportionality” requires that the costs of action do not outweigh the intended benefit.

Churlishly, we attacked while negotiations were under way (like Japs at Pearl Harbor). We murdered the other country’s legitimate leaders, a gangsterism no honest government can justify. Iran offered no grave threat or injury to us. In fact, they sensibly avoided it. True, a half century ago, they violated our embassy in the midst of their revolution to overthrow the absurd “Shah” that we imposed on them. And they have a hostile-talking Islamic government. But they have accepted unjust sanctions and weapons inspections. They know it is not in their interest to provoke the U.S.

Incredibly, our Secretary of State said we had to go to war because our little client state was going to war whether we liked it or not. Such was the reason for sacrificing our blood and treasure. Our Founders would have considered this blatant TREASON against the American people.

The Israelis have been declaring for over 40 years that Iran will have nuclear weapons with a few weeks or so. This is a lie. The purpose of the lie is to make sure that Israel remains the only nuclear power in the region. President Kennedy was trying to prevent Israel getting nukes when he was killed.

Countries want nuclear weapons for defense, as a deterrent. They have not been used since 1945. It might be good if Iran had some, like a number of other countries. It would deter Israeli aggression and dominance.

And the U.S. undertook this attempt at regime change, apparently not having noticed that previous such attempts have been catastrophic failures. Our leaders learn nothing and are never held responsible for their mistakes. That is the opposite of government of, by, and for the people. Such leadership is a sign of decadent imperialism. New York thugs like Trump and pretty boys like Rubio cannot make statesmen. The top generals are not soldiers but have risen to the top as a— kissing and backstabbing bureaucrats.

Donald Trump promised to avoid such folly. But he has now joined George W. Bush as one of this century’s chief war criminals. How did that happen? We may never know.

We were told that once we murdered their leaders, the Iranians would rise up for democracy and peace. The media savants liked this because they see the Iranian dissidents as nice liberals like themselves. To them it seemed OK to bomb useless civilians for a higher good.

Are our political and military leaders too ignorant or too deluded by their power to notice facts that don’t fit their shallow view of the world? I doubt if any of our Congresspersons or generals actually know any relevant history. How many of them do you imagine can actually read an Iranian newspaper?

Iran is not Iraq. It is a big country of 90 million or so, with highly intelligent scientists, dedicated soldiers, and leaders who actually love and want to serve their people, unlike Western politicians. It is the heir of a once mighty Persian Empire. And, if Islamic extremists are a threat to us, why have our leaders been importing them in hundreds of thousands? For Diversity?


By following a sensible and moderate policy, Iran has managed to throw the American “cake walk” into a quagmire.

We are apparently expending our high ordinance at a serious rate. It cannot be replaced quickly because our “leaders” have shipped the factories overseas. It is reported that our billion dollar air craft carriers can’t get too close because they can easily be wiped out by enemy missiles. And the U.S.S. Gerald Ford had to be recalled because of sewage problems. Ironically appropriate for a warship named for the shallow man who was never elected and became President only by accident.

Sadly, Trump has destroyed all hope for the domestic reform that he promised. The Democrats will regain power and continue us into the Obama-Biden decadence that will finish of the dream of a free and honourable America.

The Last Half Century to the Present


Rather than continuing my detailed history of the Southern people I wish to comment on our situation at the moment, 2026, and prospects for the future.


We have never been in greater danger of losing our identity as of the South. The population has changed. There are rust belt refugees. Some of these are good people who have joined us for the right reasons, others not. Vast numbers of Mexicans, Asians of various sorts, and others populate our cities. It was on our former territory, Charlotte, that a depraved criminal immigrant murdered a legitimate immigrant. Such a thing would have been beyond imagining or comprehension 60 years ago when I was covering the Charlotte police beat for the local daily.


Our symbols have been subjected to malicious destruction, although that ridiculous campaign, an attempt to obliterate American as well as Southern history, has brought forth a good deal of opposition. A statue of Ceasar Rodney, a heroic signer of the Declaration of Independence, was removed because he, like almost all of the Founders, Northern and Southern, was the master of imported and native-born Africans.


A lot has been said about the South’s increasing prosperity in recent times. That is good, but I am of the impression that the rewards go disproportionately to bankers, developers, carpetbaggers, politicians, and bureaucrats. Working and middle class men and women are still enlisting in the imperial armed forces, real jobs being scarce in our looted economy.


Yet the South has a soul, unlike materialist mainstream America. We have always been able to absorb newcomers. A fourth of Confederate generals were Northern or foreign born. Many aspects of our culture and our history remain honoured by and attractive to civilised and intelligent people beyond our borders.


There were Southerners before there were “Americans.” Or to put it another way, Southerners were the first Americans. What we have known as the South existed more than two centuries before the U.S. government—now a bloated criminal empire unrecognisable to our Founders.


Even after our just and noble war for independence failed, we kept our identity. We were never quite acceptable as “Americans” and that did not bother us at all.


There are still millions of us. Beleaguered as our homeland has been, we have the truest connection to American origins of any of the motley groups now to be found in the United States.


It has been almost a century since Twelve Southerners issued I’ll Take My Stand. They hoped to provide a humane alternative to the standard American materialism, whether capitalist or collectivist. Their ideas are still true. Without Southern literature, music, humour, chivalric instincts, and manners “American” culture would be an impoverished thing of money and ideology.


We need to preserve the South in these difficult times because it is ours. But also, a Southerner is a good thing to be, a valuable contribution to waning Western civilisation.


I have been encouraged for some years now by the bright young people who have been reconnecting with their Southern roots in a society where no other real identity is to be found.


We need to remember who we are and promote and preserve our identity as a people in every way possible. Our people are sound in their hearts and some leaders have provided good direction in recent times. But we need a lot more leadership. History is not fixed and the future is to some extent ours to bring about.

​
James Warley Miles, South Carolina’s internationally recognised theologian, in 1863 said something we all should remember: “No people has ever wholly existed without a meaning.”

The U.S. government is not a government of, by, and for the people. It was a lie when Lincoln said it, and it is an even bigger lie now. 


There are many problems with that statement, but a major one is who are “the people”? Perhaps at the end of World War II Americans became almost one people, for the first and last time. Real national unity did not exist before that, and immigration and “diversity” ideology have destroyed any future hope for national unity. 


Even when it almost existed, national unity was mainly window dressing for the corporate state capitalism that Lincoln and his friends substituted for the honourable republicanism of the Southern founders. State capitalism is our ruling system - private ownership and profit with government support. Free markets don’t really exist wherever there is large -scale corporate power. Most of our wealth is now in the portfolios of billionaires, domestic and foreign, and most of our work shipped out to cheap labour places. 


How can “the people” rule when we no longer even know who the people are?Israelis and Palestinians protest and fight each other in our streets. Why are they even here with their problems irrelevant to the American “people”? 


A synagogue is attacked, it turns out by a Lebanese-born “citizen” angered by Israelis. Why were this citizen’s murdered children still in Lebanon or why was he here without them? And Iranian exiles are in our streets cheering on the war that is consuming our blood and treasure? Who are “the people”? 


How can the people rule when the unelected and untouchable Supreme Court has literally changed American society in major ways over the last three-quarters century - imposing “law” for ideological changes that “the people” never voted for or even approved of? How can “the people” rule when there are things we all know are true but are punished when we say them in public? When there is no real public debate and the agenda is controlled by very rich people who own the major media? When most Congresspersons answer to their supposed party interests rather than the interests of “the people”? 


Our rulers never feel punishment for their bad deeds. Bush the Lesser starts an illegal, dishonest, failed war and is re-elected. Joe Biden is suffering no embarrassment from having created vast unwanted demographic change in the American population. 


Foreign “regime change” has been a catastrophic failure, and Trump is doing it again despite all his promises. He is a betrayer of his people, almost the last remaining “Americans.” Just as we feared all along. Someone gave him good material to run on, but what we got was just another smart-aleck New Yorker who cannot resist the temptation of imperial power. 


We will probably never know all about the Epstein files. Some millionaire ought to hire a team to go through the vast collection and find the truth, but that will not happen. Has anyone explained why so much is redacted? What we do learn is that pedophilia is deep in our ruling class. They don’t feel the consequences of anything they do, so breaking a last taboo tempts them to show their power and superiority. 


Have you noticed that the people rioting against law enforcement in Minneapolis don’t seem to have jobs they need to go to? Have you noticed recently that when horrid savage crimes are committed the criminal has been arrested ten times previously but is somehow still out on the street? How does this happen? Do our courts provide justice for protected groups but not for us> 


Perhaps we are experiencing the inevitable decline of a society that makes the slick politician and war criminal Abe Lincoln its greatest hero and symbol. ​