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Dr. Clyde N. Wilson

Random Thoughts on the Way We Are Now

2/11/2023

12 Comments

 
Picture
Monument to the Angel of Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg, Virginia
I have always been in favour of capital punishment. There are just some people who need to be eliminated for the benefit of us all. And not all of them are politicians.

I just ran across the bit of reconciliation verse from the late 1800s by a Yankee poet,

Will Thompson:

FOLD THE BANNERS
Fold up the banners! Smelt the guns!
Love rules. Her gentle purpose runs.
A mighty mother turns in tears
The pages of her battle years,
Lamenting all her fallen sons.

Russell Kirk wrote that acquisitiveness, the desire to get and keep wealth, is often mistaken for conservatism. Vividly exhibited every day by the Republican Party.

The “conservatives” at National Review are advocating a Presidential ticket of Tim Scott and Nicki Haley. They are too ignorant of history and the Constitution to know that Electors can’t vote for two people from the same State.

At the Fredericksburg battlefield there is a moving monument by a famous sculptor to the “Angel of Marye’s Heights.” The Angel is the South Carolina Confederate soldier Richard Kirkland, who risked his life to give aid to the wounded Yankees left on the battlefield. I wonder if the federal government terrorists have destroyed this already or have targeted it for elimination.

Some time back I stumbled onto a movie in which Confederate soldiers rode into a town, shot women and children in the back, and burned people in a church. I have heard a hint that there is a new TV drama about federal agents tracking down Confederate criminals after the war. It seems established that our people were evil sinners against the righteous.

This stuff is a gigantic preposterous lie. Given the intensity of the war, Southern behaviour was in a large measure honourable and Christian. Lincoln’s massive invasions of the South were most certainly a War Crime by any known definition. Its intent was to conquer a people and deprive them of their self-government.

And tens of thousands, maybe more, Union soldiers were war criminals, deliberately stealing the property, burning the houses, and destroying the food of women and children, not to mention destroying churches and schools. And they were just as hard, maybe harder on the black population of the South as the white. The record of federal crimes against civilians can fill a dozen books. And the criminals were often promoted and enjoyed substantial lifetime pensions.

Does the American government need such falsehood to try to prove its righteousness? It is a BAD CAUSE that must be defended by lies.

The United States is showing every sign of being governed by a decadent ruling class. In the Ukraine business they are still living in a mental universe of 50 years ago. They are too self-centered, shallow, and in love with their own power to realise that the situation has changed and needs a new approach. To continue the Cold War under changed conditions is very stupid and dangerous. But our leaders can’t think of anything other than to pose and play with the immense military that was built up by a previous generation and are incapable of understanding a changed world. The U.S. leadership continuing the Cold War after Communism had collapsed will be seen in future as one of the great mistakes of history.

The Lee monument destroyed by the official hooligans in Richmond had only one word: “LEE.” That was all that was needed in a ciivilised country and time.
12 Comments
Walt Garlington
2/11/2023 09:57:40 pm

'The Lee monument destroyed by the official hooligans in Richmond had only one word: “LEE.” That was all that was needed in a ciivilised country and time.'

May it be so again, with God's help!

Reply
H. V. Traywick, Jr link
2/13/2023 05:52:02 am

Dr. Wilson,
I went to speak at several of the meetings on the monuments - one at the Richmond City Council, and one at Mayor Levar Stoney's "Monument Avenue Commission." My next endeavor will be to sing hymns to a fence post, where I feel I will have better success.
What I gathered from these Stalinist Show Trials were recollections of a few applicable quotations:

"Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain
To leave an equal baseness..."
-Tennyson (Idylls of the King)

"You are gibbeting the carcass while your house is the haunt of robbers."
- Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Keep yo' powder dry."
- H. V. Traywick, Jr.

Reply
Bill Yankovich
2/14/2023 10:32:50 am

The actions of the Virginia Flaggers can be seen as the biggest reason the monuments came down.

Reply
H. V. Traywick, Jr link
2/15/2023 04:20:41 am

In Memphis? In Charleston?

H. V. Traywick, Jr link
2/15/2023 05:41:59 am

The Virginia Flaggers were a REACTION to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts's removal of the Confederate Flag from the Confederate Memorial Chapel on the grounds. The young White Wokelings of Virginia Commonwealth University, thinking of themselves as attending college in order to protest something, and wishing to establish their virtue credentials in order that the Blacks in the housing projects nearby wouldn't beat and rob them, swarmed the city meetings on the monuments, then rioted and vandalized the monuments, and threw firebombs into the UDC headquarters and caused the sprinkler system to ruin the library. As I say, these were mostly righteous White students, with a smattering of BLM and ANTIFA "agents provocateur" mixed in, with pre-staged piles of brickbats around Monument Avenue. I don't think we need to blame the Virginia Flaggers for the "summer of love."

Billy P
2/13/2023 10:27:58 am

Well stated as usual. What the yanks (and the left) do so well is these days called projecting. They project what they did on others and make them take the blame for the sin. Truth is not a value trait of the Yankee or the far left. Projecting is all that is needed to make the drunkard and war criminal, Sherman into the good guy and an honorable man like General Lee into the "bad" guy. And I would say if they ever removed the monument of a man like Sgt Richard Kirkland, then this country officially has no soul left. He was a real honorable man with character traits that every southerner should emulate. Sadly, he lost his life at Chicamauga. I visited his grave site recently, where fellow reenactors still leave their canteens as a sign of respect for Sgt. Kirkland.

Reply
Wes Shofner
2/13/2023 11:03:59 am

I finished last night reading, for the second (or was it the third?) time, Charles Adams's insightful book "When in the Course of Human Events" (2000), which Dr. Wilson, I noticed, endorsed on the book's back cover. The book ends with these grave but truthful and profound words:

"The Civil war was not just a great national American tragedy, but even more so, a tragedy for civilization unmatched in history. In 1861, the world's first great democracy, which was going to show the world what great benefits and virtue the new form of government could bring, failed miserably, tragically and horribly.

Healing the wounds....can only begin by recognizing what Charles Dickens observed in December of 1861, that the "love of money" was the root of the North's war objective of preserving the Union."

Until the Yankees confess the crimes of their ancestors and denounce Lincoln as the tyrant he was, there will never be peace in these so-called united States. But, of course, don't hold your breath. The smoke, I fear, will never clear.

Reply
Bill Yankovich
2/14/2023 10:38:56 am

Please see the bottom of the following page.

https://www.jfepperson.org/dilorenz.htm

Reply
Clyde N Wilson
2/13/2023 01:54:18 pm

I have long thought that Northerners have to repudiate Lincoln and his brutal and corrupt war before we can have any hope of keeping civilisation. As Mr. Shofner says, it seems unlikely, even though some progress has been made in recent years.

Reply
Bill Yankovich
2/14/2023 10:39:32 am

https://www.jfepperson.org/dilorenz.htm

Reply
Perrin Lovett
2/13/2023 05:45:34 pm

One day, some day, in the name of "reconciliation" and "healing," just maybe we can have a war crimes tribunal for dear old Abe, complete with a posthumous execution and memorial blasting, er, improvement. As for the TeeVee and movie lies, I'm surprised there isn't a flick where young Hitler travels back in time to learn his trade from Davis, Lee, et al. I may have just jinxed us there...

Reply
Joe Johnson
2/14/2023 06:07:01 am

Of course, Dr. Wilson, any mainstream cristism of "Honest Abe" will come from a woke/social justice/minorty victimhood perpective. They will attack Lincoln because of his views on race but they will continue to attack the old south, the confederacy, the founders, Thomas Jefferson,etc.

Reply



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    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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