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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Southern Party ready to 'ride with Forrest'
By Sean Scully
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — It's not so much that Steven
Rogers wants to
see the United States break up. He just wants to return to an
older, more
limited form of government — and if a few states get left
behind, well, so
much the better.
"I'd love to take all 50 states with us, to get our
constitution back,"
says Mr. Rogers, a store owner from Clover, S.C. "But the
Northeast and some
other places, a lot of people think they are beyond saving."
Mr. Rogers and a handful of other Southerners — patriots,
they regard
themselves — have concluded that they are best off being
entirely separate
from the rest of the nation. They gathered over the weekend in
this suburb of
Charleston to write a platform for a new party, dedicated to the
proposition
that the South should rise again.
"Our nation is occupied, our culture and heritage are under
attack,"
says Ron Holland, finance director of the new Southern Party.
"The problem is
we have always been on the defensive against big government."
Now members of the Southern Party want to be on the
offensive. They hope
to organize in 17 Southern and mid-Atlantic states — perhaps a
few
pro-Southern states in the Southwest as well — and elect
pro-secession
candidates to the statehouses and governors' mansions wherever
they can.
Of course, the last such drive for secession didn't work
out very well.
The new Southern Party wants to make secession a legal,
ballot-driven
exercise and avoid the military unpleasantness, the invasion of
the South,
and all that.
"It will have to be peaceful or it will never happen," says
Herb
McMillan, a retired vending service company owner from Tega Cay,
S.C.
The party's principles are simple: limited government, low
taxes, and
self-determination for the South, which members see as a
distinct and unified
place, different from the North, the Pacific Northwest or the
upper Midwest.
Members concede that it will be a difficult battle. The
verdict of 1865
quieted talk of secession for more than a century, and the
majority of people
in the country seem to accept the notion of union as an
unalterable fact of
life.
But members also say historic change can come quickly.
Walter "Donnie"
Kennedy, author of "The South Was Right" and the reigning
philosopher of the
party, points out that nobody expected the reunification of
Germany in 1989
and almost everyone was astonished by the sudden demise of the
Soviet Union
in 1991.
"All we've got to do is tell the truth and let the chips
fall where they
may," he says.
Although the party is almost all white, it rejects any
notions of racial
segregation. All Southerners, black and white, members say,
share a common
cultural heritage and economic interest.
Party Chairman Jerry Baxley insists that a recent e-mail
letter, signed
by an official of the Georgia state party, should not be viewed
as a racial
document, though it called the National Association for the
Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), which has led a campaign to remove the
Confederate
battle flag from public places, "an odious blight on the
universe."
The e-mail message invited Southern patriots to "ride with
Forrest," an
obvious reference to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the
Confederate cavalry
wizard who founded the Ku Klux Klan after the war and later
disbanded it.
"You'd be surprised how many black folks think Nathan
Bedford Forrest is
a positive symbol" for his defense of the Southern homeland and
his later
rejection of the Klan, Mr. Baxley says.
The NAACP, however, said such talk masks the agenda of the
new party.
"This group, and some others as well, have gone to great
lengths to
reinvent their image, even to the point of forging
pseudo-relationships with
progressive groups, trying to legitimize what they do, while
underneath all
their efforts are the same white supremacist agenda," says
Dwight James,
executive director of the South Carolina conference of the
NAACP.
The only black person attending the Southern Party
convention says Mr.
James' remarks are typical of those he has heard when he talks
about his
ancestors' role in the Confederate cause.
"Backs have been turned, I have been labeled a race
traitor, told I was
trying to turn white," says Robert Harrison, a reference
librarian from
Summerville, S.C., who gave a rousing pro-Confederate speech at
the
convention. "But that's OK. That's understandable," given the
pro-Northern
spin of the politicians, media, and history texts.
The convention was sparsely attended, not even approaching
100 in a room
that was set up for 300. Not all of the states sent formal
delegations and
there was even some momentary confusion as organizers looked for
a flag from
Delaware — briefly mistaken for the flag of Canada's
separatist-minded
province of Quebec.
But the organizers were undaunted, noting that this is
merely the first
formal convention of a brand new party, established only last
summer at a
meeting in Asheville, N.C.
"We're today at the most neophyte stage," says Thomas
Brown, state
chairman for Maryland, surveying the tiny but vocal crowd. "For
every person
here, back home there are 200 or 300 people that feel the same
way."
The proceedings were overshadowed by events a two-hour
drive away at
Columbia, the state capital. By coincidence, South Carolina
formally lowered
the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse dome where it
has flown for
40 years. The flag came down after a bruising fight, with white
traditionalists arguing the flag is a symbol of pride and
heritage and black
leaders arguing it's a symbol of racism.
At noon, the appointed hour at which the flag was to be
removed from the
dome, conventioneers in North Charleston stopped for a moment of
silence.
In an emotional speech, Mr. Holland chided "Northerners and
Washington
bureaucrats" who fear the flag "because it is a symbol of
resistance to big
government, empire and federal power. They fear our flag, they
fear our
movement, they fear the hopes and dreams of our founding fathers
and our
Confederate ancestors. . . . Make no mistake about it, we are
small in
number, but they fear us today."
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A vote for Bush or Gore is a vote to continue Clinton policies!
A vote for Buchanan is a vote to continue America!
Therefore a vote for Gore or Bush is a wasted vote for America!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for Patrick Buchanan!
Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party
system is a
snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties
have become
nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey...
Patrick Buchanan
