Cymru, Canadian Red Tories, and Dixie against the Globalists

The reaction against globalist liberalism has reached Dixie. Numerous individuals and organizations have sprung up, dedicated to preserving and renewing the centuries-old culture of the South: the Abbeville Institute, the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship, Identity Dixie, Dissident Mama, and others. But the South, like every other country seeking to escape the claws of the globalist Beast, cannot survive on her own – she will need friends to support her, whom she may likewise help. There are two that we will mention today: the Red Tories of Canada and the people of Wales, traditionally called Britons or Cymru.

The principles that guide the Red Tories are very much akin to those that undergird the traditional Southern way of life. Ron Dart enumerates several in his collection of essays The North American High Tory Tradition; here are some of the most relevant:

‘First, Tories are concerned about the wisdom of tradition, the insights of the past and the truths learned about the human condition by those who have gone before us. . . . The eagerness of Tories, indeed generous openness of Tories, to hear and heed the past stands in startling contrast to so many in the modern world who have clear-cut the past and lack any sense of direction in the present and for the future.

‘Second, Tories have a passion for both the commonweal and the commons. The good of the people, of the nation, of each and all is the foundation of Tory thought. The individual truly becomes a person as they find their place in the whole. . . .

‘Third Tories do not separate ethics from economics. When the ledger of profit and loss becomes the dominant criterion we use for evaluating the wealth, health, prosperity and development of a people, we become moral cripples. . . .

‘Seventh, education is about being grounded in the best that has been thought, said and done in the past. The classics and epics are read, digested and internalized as a means of alerting and attuning students to that which is worth living for and that which is to be avoided. Education is not, in its deepest and most significant sense, about teaching some skill or techne so that the naive and gullible will uncritically fit into a dehumanizing and, in many ways, dehumanized culture. The task of education is to awaken the conscience to the important things, to stir the will into action and to point to the wisdom that calls forth to be heard. . . .

‘Ninth, Tories are convinced that the foundation stones of a good state are built with bricks of ethical firmness and religious depth. The religious institutions that bear the ancient myths, memories and symbols of the community past and present are imperfect, but to negate, ignore or destroy such institutions is cut ourselves off from the deeper wisdom of the past. . . .’ (American Anglican Press, New York, 2016, pgs. xxv-xxvi, xxvii-xxviii)

Anyone who has studied the Southern tradition via major works like I’ll Take My Stand; the later writings of Southern Agrarians like Richard Weaver and M. E. Bradford; Southern fiction from Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms to Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Percy; etc., will find broad and deep agreement with those sentiments presented by Professor Dart.

But this is not all. Tories, interestingly, had their own traditional Canadian flag (the Red Ensign flag) ripped away from them (p. xvi), much like the South has had hers (bearing the Cross of St. Andrew) banned in many places in the [u]nited States. Humor has played a large role in Red Tory life, through Stephen Leacock in particular (p. 56), just it has with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, George Washington Lewis, Lewis Grizzard, and others in Dixie.

What is also quite important is the constant concern of the Red Tories not to allow Canada to become colonized by the Yankee Empire (p. 23 and many other places). This has been an abiding concern of the South as well, not to be molded into the image of Gnostic, industrial-technological, post-Christian, post-human Yankee New England.

The Red Tories of Canada seem quite trustworthy in their conservatism. Any group represented by a man who is bold enough to declare Edmund Burke, who is revered as a conservative by many in the [u]nited States, a liberal and lump him in with arch-liberals John Locke and Thomas Paine, as Prof. Dart has done (p. 6), is full worthy of consideration as an ally by Dixie.

Wales, like Canada and the South, has also struggled under oppressive empires. Southern history, in fact, mirrors Welsh history very closely in certain respects. The Roman Catholic Normans came rampaging into Orthodox Wales about 1067 on a mission of military and political conquest and cultural genocide (Geraint Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, Cambridge UP, New York, 2007, p. 65). So it was for Dixie in 1861, when Lincoln and the Yankee Army invaded and laid waste our land, sparing neither civilians, farm animals, nor the even the African slaves they said they cared so much about.

The ways that the Welsh (which is the name the Normans gave them after their conquest was completed; originally they were known as Britons or Cymry/Cymru (p. 61)) kept their culture alive and vibrant during their time under the heavy Norman-Anglo yoke is similar to the way Southerners have kept their culture alive under the Yankee yoke – literature and religion. Books like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) and the collected tales of The Mabinogion (both appearing about the 11th-12th centuries) did much to raise morale amongst the Britons (pgs. 84-5, 87). The court poets (Gogynfeirdd) especially, however, spurred the leaders of the Welsh to rise up, shake themselves off, and challenge once again their Norman conquerors in battle (pgs. 83-4). Southern soldiers, citizens, and statesmen were likewise fired by the words of her poets in the war with the Yankee North: Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Fr. Abram Ryan, and others.

It is noteworthy, too, that both the South and Wales embraced a very enthusiastic, low-church, ‘evangelical’ form of Christianity during their days of captivity, which reached its summit in the 19th century in both countries after a series of revivals (p. 207).

All three – Canadian Tories, Welsh, and Southrons – have seen their ups and downs over the years. Things do not look especially good for any them at the moment. Canada and Dixie are deeper in the pit of Yankee globalism than they ever have been; Wales, while recovering a measure of self-rule from England in 1997 (p. 297), has nevertheless adopted the nihilistic morality of post-Christian globalism – Christianity is a shadow of what it once was there (p. 273).

Remarkably, though, the thing that can rescue all of them, the Orthodox Faith, has begun to shine in each place. Prof. Dart spends many a page discussing the Canadian Red Tory/Anglican dialogue with the Orthodox in his aforementioned book; one of the leading organizations in the South dedicated to preserving her history and culture – the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship – is openly dedicated to spreading the Orthodox Faith amongst Dixie’s people; and Wales has seen the return of the Orthodox Church, which blessed her with many wonderful saints, especially in the 6th century, to her land after a 900-year absence brought about by the Normans.

There are many reasons for a friendly alliance between these three in their battle against culture-annihilating globalism, but unity in the Orthodox Church would add a deep and powerful dimension to it, uniting them with God the Holy Trinity and His saints and angels, thus providing them with everything they need to free themselves from their enemies, if and when the Lord allows it.