Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Prattville Dragoons Commander's Column for November 2014

Commander's Column:  How Do We Respond To PC Run Amuck?
            I received an email recently presenting Thomas Fleming’s latest book, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.  The email article penned by Thomas DiLorenzo provided an analysis of the book and portrayed Fleming as a mainstream revisionist historian, darling of PBS and NPR.  But Fleming has “discovered historical truths” that Dr. Clyde Wilson, Distinguished Professor of History at South Carolina, SCV member and regular contributor to the Confederate Veteran magazine, has frequently written about for some time. In an essay entitled “The Yankee Problem in American History”, Wilson pointed out that “the term [Yankee] historically (was used) to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and lack of congeniality, [and] for ordering other people around . . . .  They are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.”  “Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Professor Wilson continues, “is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee – self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”  We know the Yankee abolitionists were certainly of this ilk and of course Lincoln himself.  Today, it seems anyone working inside the Washington DC beltway is of this sort, infringing on our personal liberties in the spirit of knowing better than those of us who cling to our Bibles and guns.
            I also received from Commander Rhodes of the Ft. Blakeley Camp an amazing photo of Bill Lundy, Florida’s last Confederate veteran, standing in front of a Super Sabre jet in 1955 with his beard and cane.  His life saw the world change in amazing ways, from Forrest’s cavalry and Pelham’s artillery to the nuclear age and supersonic aircraft.  Think about the nation’s moral foundation from the colonization in the 1600s to the establishment of the United States in the late 1700s, the evolution from the Salem witch trials and executions to a Constitution which, among core principles, provided freedom of religion.  From the late 1700s through the period of the WBTS, at least in the South, there was still a spirit of self-determination and liberty and a romanticism and chivalry in the social order.  Compare that to today, with the victimized welfare state, feminism, and the LGBT minority demanding marital rights--and getting them.  I read in the Confederate Veteran the article on Emancipation without the WBTS and noted that it stated unequivocally that slavery was a moral wrong, a blemish.  But again, the slave holders were a product of their time.  Two hundred years before the WBTS, slavery was quite literally embraced throughout the colonies and fortunes were made and the colonies in North America as well as in South America and the Caribbean were largely built with the assistance of slave labor.  Over the course of two hundred years though, those who espoused and embraced emancipation ran the gamut from the abolitionists in the North to the very leaders of the Confederacy like Lee and Davis.
            Now, just a relatively-short 150 years after the destruction of the antebellum South, the LGBT’s are equating their “struggle” to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and are making huge advances, from marital rights to altered church theologies and practices to total acceptance in mainstream media and corporate America boardrooms.  Atheists have removed prayer from the schools and the Ten Commandments from the courthouses.  Unborn children are slaughtered by the thousands as a form of birth control in “women’s health clinics”. The Common Core curriculum indoctrinates our children whilst the student’s basic education lags to ensure that the least common denominator is advanced and ultimately rewarded with affirmative action benefits.  Uncontrolled illegal immigration and rewarding unwed mothers with cradle-to-grave welfare checks and WIC cards for their lack of self-control and responsibility. Wall Street and corporate executives earn millions in annual bonuses practicing a bastardized capitalism, picking winners and losers through special-interest lobbying while regulations stifle neighborhood entrepreneurship.  But, rest assured, all these judicial fiats and social and economic programs have been constructed and decreed by those who know better than we do what’s best for us. 
            Shudder with me if you can imagine America in 150 or 200 years from now.  Where will technology carry us?  What will the progressives do to alter our communities, our culture, our families and our moral comprehension?  What will historical revisionists of that day and age condemn us for today--our Christianity, clinging to our Southern heritage and traditions?  What will become of us, Sons of Confederate Veterans?   What will become of our country?  What can we do?  I trust you exercised your right to vote in the elections on November 4th and participated in this democratic process.  Get involved to whatever extent you can in local political and social organizations where you can fellowship and work with people of like mind and help shape and direct the evolution of the issues and agenda affecting your family and community.   Correspond regularly with your elected representatives.  Renew your membership in the SCV.  Yes, your membership is the single most important thing you can do to support our organization and our efforts in community involvement and activities, public relations and education, to “ensure that the true history of the South is presented to future generations”.   The information I have says the Dragoons only lost one camp member during the recently completed renewal period.  I want to thank each and every one of you personally for your continued support of the SCV and the Dragoons.  Get involved in your camp and your community to make it better and a formidable force to oppose the politically-correct progressives and to “perpetuate those principles which (our Confederate ancestors) loved and which you love also, and those ideals which made him glorious”.
Stuart Waldo

Camp Commander

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