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  • Features
    • Clyde Wilson CLASSICS
    • Book Bench
    • Charlottesville
    • COVID Commentary
    • Dixie These Days
    • Links
    • Magnolia Muse
    • Matters of Faith
    • Movie Room
    • Rekindling the Flame
    • Southern History
    • Writing Contest 2022
  • Contributors
    • Full List
    • Carolina Contrarian
    • Enoch Cade
    • Dissident Mama
    • Ted Ehmann
    • Walt Garlington
    • Caryl Johnston
    • Gene Kizer, Jr.
    • Perrin Lovett
    • Tom Riley
    • Joseph R. Stromberg
    • H.V. Traywick, Jr.
    • Clyde Wilson
    • Paul Yarbrough
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Dr. Clyde N. Wilson

Old Wisdom for Decaying America 4

12/29/2023

4 Comments

 
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When power feels bold enough to crush!
With, day by day, some birthright lost,
Some pride depress’d, some purpose cross’d,
Cursed with each thought that brings the past,
And utter slaves to knaves at last!

-William Gilmore Simms

The problem of truth is not necessarily a problem of fact. - John Lukacs

. . . liberalism runs the danger of taking civilization for granted . . . .The ongoing work of civilization is the lost term in the liberal syllogism. - Caryl Johnston

I am gratified that the two principles of compensation [of slave owners] and colonization [of black people] are both recognized and practically applied in the act. - Abraham Lincoln, 1861, signing a bill for compensated slave emancipation in the District of Columbia

How could we find a sense of history, or of tradition, or of legitimate authority in the programs of Big Government and Big Business. . . . The country had been hollowed out. All that was left was politics and commerce. - Caryl Johnston on the 60s

Yankees have developed a character so odious that death would be preferable to reunion with them. - Gov. John Milton of Florida

The same Yankees who blame the South for everything bad are anxious to move South, away from the mess they have made. Alas, by their very character they recreate what they ran away from. - Clyde Wilson

The decomposition of civilizations precedes their death. - Georges Bernanos

---rootless, lacking in solid historical identity of their own, and as a result grasping at the cant and ideological crusades of the day to supply them with an identity. What is the first impulse of such people? To destroy - whether statues and memorials, or college courses in Western art and philosophy, or lecture platforms for speakers they don’t like. Hardly what I have called a “moral deed.” - Caryl Johnston on “Social Justice Warriors”

God told me to fight Al Qaeda and I did, and then he instructed me to go after Saddam and I did. - Bush Minor (how did he know it was not Satan rather than a direct communication to him from God?)

Mass hypocrisy is a contagious disease. - M.E. Bradford on the race question

We could have pursued no other course without dishonour, and sad as the results have been, we should be compelled to act in precisely the same manner. - R.E. Lee

…in Western societies the state system and society itself are alienated from one another . . .  Order, peace, and citizens’ lives and property are low on the state’s list of priorities. - F.R. Ankersmit, Dutch scholar

Murder is not a threat to the corrupt political establishment, but Truth is. - Paul Craig Roberts

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. - Disraeli

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world of their times. - Thomas Jefferson

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. - George Washington, Farewell Address

Either nations will be governed by God, or they will be ruled by tyrants. - William Penn

I believe most travellers from afar would concur that the civilized way of life in America is now chiefly to be found in the South, which is speciously presented to the outer world as the enemy of civilized ways. - Douglas Reed, world-traveled British journalist after a visit in the 1950s.

Confederate flag:

Yet love, like truth, can never die,
And ‘graved on Time’s historic page,
The memory of our soldiers’ deeds
Shall live undimmed from age to age.

- Mary Bayard Devereux Clarke

Four stormy years we saw it gleam,
A people’s hope ---and then refurled
Even while its glory was the theme
Of half the world.
- Henry Linden Flash
4 Comments

More of the Way We Are Now

12/16/2023

8 Comments

 
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Opposing advocates of Israel and Palestine are demonstrating in our streets. Until fairly recently this would have seemed strange. Why should foreign countries be so important to American citizens? (Although I admit that decent people have sympathy for an occupied underdog.) This is simply a product of the mass immigration policies of the Republican and Democratic parties, carried out for the past half century or more.  

Why is it the same people who advocate mass immigration are now viewing Muslim protests against Israel as a dangerous rise of “anti-semitism”? They are even working to fire the black female president of Harvard because she has not suppressed Palestinian protests. ​

I knew it was all over for the U.S. a few years ago when the Japanese desk clerk in San Francisco thought my South Carolina palmetto cap was Islamic. 
Danny Quayle. Mike Pence. Why does the Republican party put on its national ticket mediocre, undistinguished politicians from the unimportant state of Indiana?  

Did you know that 95% of our antibiotics come from China? And 80% of all our drugs from China and India? 

Nikki Haley
: “We have to stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel.” Huh? You never know, but I don’t think I have any brothers or sisters in Israel.
 

Nikki Haley: “I have a positive vision for the future.” Huh? Typical Republican advertising comes back again
. Where is the substance? What is a “positive vision” for American people suffering from catastrophic foreign immigration, from catastrophic debt, from the declining living standards of the middle and working classes? A country that is involved in bankrolling war crimes in at least two places in the world, if not more? The Republican leadership have not figured out that the grassroots has changed and has caught on to their con game.
 

A cosmopolitan friend suggests that what we call the Deep State would more appropriately be labeled the Dark State.
 

Rioting mobs like Antifa and BLM are not spontaneous
. They are instigated by some conspiratorial organisation.
 

If a historian or intelligent alien of a future time views today’s television ads, they would conclude that U.S. society is two-thirds black and another 20% Asian and Mexican. However,
giving the ongoing deterioration of Western civilisation, a future historian is unlikely.
 

Keep in mind that America, created by intelligent and courageous settlers, has for some years been declining in IQ and testosterone
. You don’t need statistics---just look at our leaders. 
 

Maybe that
explains why your President is a plagiarist, a girl groper, a crook and a liar.
 

8 Comments

Old Wisdom for Decaying America 3

12/10/2023

3 Comments

 
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Our responsibility to history is clear---to rid the world of evil. - Bush minor: (Does he understand the meaning of words like responsibility, history, and evil?)

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

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate action: You liberate a city by destroying it. - Gore Vidal

Empires crumble. There are no exceptions. - Oscar Wilde

If you can’t do it with one shot, don’t do it at all. - H. Ryder Haggard

An American President can wreck his country and blow up the world, but he cannot recreate either of them. - Chilton Williamson

A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. - Solzhenitsyn

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. - Adam Smith

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. - Kundera

We Americans did first
Conceive the soul’s language as a commerce,
And we celebrated ever after that new learning,
. . . . . .
No, Calvin Coolidge,
The business of America is not business

- Caryl Johnston

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like. - George Macdonald Fraser

A thing cannot be other than it is. - Aristotle

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, independence, and enterprise to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks. - Thomas Jefferson. (After advising his nephew on hounorable behaviour and on a large program of classical and scientific studies, suggests two hours of exercise per day.)

How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive is all. - Union Gen. Joshua Chamberlain at Apomattox

The Southern Flag
Round the World bear the flag of our glory,
While the nations look on and admire,
And our struggle, immortal in story,
Shall the free of all ages inspire.
- Gen. Albert Pike

Freedom called and called in vain!
Furl that banner sadly, slowly,
Treat it gently, for ‘tis holy;
Till that day---yes, furl it sadly;
Then once more unfurl it gladly.
- Sir Henry Houghton, English Poet

Ah, realm of tombs! But let her bear
This blazon to the last of times:
No nation rose so white and fair,
Or fell so pure of crimes.
- Philip Stanhope Worsley, English Poet

3 Comments

New Observations on the Way We Are Now

12/2/2023

5 Comments

 
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​I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.


Thomas Jefferson 

Did you know that Buttigieg, the sodomite that Biden appointed to his Cabinet, and his “partner” have been allowed to adopt two babies?  And a pal of theirs has been indicted on 40 counts of child abuse? 


There have been steady rumours of pedophilia among our elites ever since the “pizza gate” business of a few years ago.  It has been suggested that Biden’s current open borders regime is a supply boon for child molesters.  I don’t know the facts and we probably never will know them, but there is usually fire where there is smoke.  We know that our elites revel in power and they are almost never brought to account for anything they do.  It is not hard to imagine some of them tempted to enjoy  breaking one of the last taboos that they have not already broken. 
 
Our leaders do not seem able to process two simple facts:  the Russia of today is NOT the Soviet Union and Ukraine is a criminal state.  Or maybe they know but don’t care. 
 
There are  people speculating that the Deep State was complicit in the Kennedy and King assassinations.   Some people are now speculating that the moon landing was a  staged fraud.  That is perhaps going a bit too far, but we know that our masters (mostly unelected) routinely lie to the people. 

I recently watched a 12-episode series on the Marines in the Korean War.  Three-fourths of the combat veterans had Southern accents.  They managed to get in a black commentator who had no obvious relation to the subject.  There were no black Marines in those days. 
 
We have lots of people condemning “white privilege,” proclaiming the evils of the American past.  Curiously, many of these people are quite privileged individuals.  They are too shallow and self-centered to understand:  if it were not for the security and freedom provided them by Western civilisation, they would not even exist. It is irresponsible, childish resentment. 
 
Did you know that the U.S. Navy  recently had to scrap three new-design warships that cost $27 billion? 
 
California used to be the dream destination for millions of Americans.  In 2022, some 840,000 people left California.  Does anybody wonder why?  
 
Did you know that your U.S. government is partnered with and supporting  al Qaeda in attempting to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria?  Fortunately, the Russians helped stop this “global democracy” fraud. 
 
One of the strangest things in political history is happening right now.  The leaders of the Republican party are pulling out all the stops to destroy their most popular candidate. They are funding mailings, TV advertising, and door-to-door canvassing to spread the word that Donald Trump cannot defeat Joe Biden in the next election.  Why would they do that when they have no candidate or program of their own? They are unable or unwilling to accept that the grassroots no longer cares for their comfortable, self-serving business as usual. They think the people will get quiet after a while and again support their routine deceptive appeal. 

5 Comments

    Author

    Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews

    Dr. Wilson is also is co-publisher of Shotwell Publishing, a source  for unreconstructed Southern books. 

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