Generalizations about the US Hinder Geopolitical Advances

Essays like Bruna Frascolla’s that reveal the links between the false religious beliefs that abound in the United States and their negative social and geopolitical effects are valuable things. But there are claims and generalizations in her essay that are patently wrong and in need of clarification. Doing so will aid in freeing the world from the delusional and dangerous US hegemony that she and others rightly denounce.

Let’s begin with her statement about US origins: ‘ . . . the United States is a country founded by Puritans.’ First, the US aren’t a single country. More on that later. Second, if one does a little looking, he will find that the earliest permanent English colony in North America was not in Puritan New England (first settled in 1620) but at Jamestown in non-Puritan, Cavalier Virginia (the progenitors of the Southern people) in 1607. The two colonies were manifestly different.

The people who first settled the South (or Dixie, as she is affectionately called by the people of that place) and gave her the main features of her culture were largely from southwest England, where rural farming life, hierarchy, large manors, few cities, and tradition in religion (high-church Anglicans) and politics (royalists) were highly valued (David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York, Ny., Oxford UP, 1989, pgs. 240-6).

Those who settled the New England States were quite the opposite. They came mainly from the southeast coastal counties of England, where industrialism, densely populated cities, equalitarianism, and rebelliousness in religion (Puritanism) and politics (Cromwellian roundheads) held sway (pgs. 42-9).

These cultural differences have continued down through the centuries and are still with us today, as seen in religious attitudes, voting patterns, speechways, etc., as ably demonstrated by Professor Fischer in the book cited and also in a documentary produced by the Abbeville Institute, a Southern heritage organization. It is thus a manifest error to lump all the States into the New England Puritan mold.

And this leads to another error by Miss Frascolla, that Unitarianism was wildly popular outside of New England. She claims at one point, ‘In the United States, however, there was no serious attempt to repress them: in the 19th century, the Unitarians took over Harvard and elected a president, John Quincy Adams,’ and then later, ‘Thus, the United States had nothing remotely similar to the Inquisition, and Unitarianism enjoyed the same freedom as any other religion. There is no room, in the institutional history of the United States, for the category of heretic. Nothing is heresy, everything is religion.’

The phenomenon of Unitarianism was mostly limited to New England. By 1833 Boston by herself had nearly 100 Unitarian churches, while the Southern States never had more than three (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview, New York, Ny., Cambridge UP, 2005, p. 788; to anticipate an objection, for those who may be tempted to believe the caricature of the South as some kind of evil gulag for Africans, please don’t believe it. Many readers of web sites like Strategic Culture, Geopolitika, etc., will be familiar with the lies told about Chinese abuse of the Uighur Muslims; it is a similar situation with Southern slavery. At least be so curious as to read this and this). J. Q. Adams as a candidate was attractive mostly to the voters of the New England States. If not for the three other candidates in 1824 splitting the vote of the States of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the old Northwest, he would likely have lost, as he did in 1828. It wasn’t union-wide Unitarian sympathies that placed him in the president’s chair; it was an abundance of candidates for the position.

Furthermore, Southerners were keenly attentive to the existence of heresies, and sought to keep them out of their land. To quote but one line of what could be many: ‘During the War, southern preachers forcefully reiterated a long-standing theme: Atheism, apostasy, and heresy had corrupted northern society, weakening scriptural faith and piety, whereas southern society had resisted such evils and remained untouched’ (Genovese, p. 634). Likewise, some Baptist congregations in the western parts of Dixie, when it came to Unitarians, ‘resorted to expulsions’ (p. 788).

Miss Frascolla is correct in concluding that liberal ‘religious freedom’ leads to things like transgenderism and other sexual perversions, but this only serves once again to draw distinctions between the various cultural regions that exist within the US. New England is unsurprisingly a major proponent of the cult of sexual liberty, while conservative States in the South, the Great Plains, and elsewhere have passed laws to prevent gender transitioning of minors, ban LGBT-friendly books in public libraries, and so on.

These cultural divisions have repercussions outside the borders of the United States. Southerners are more habituated to look askance at foreign adventures. One of her sons, Henry Hughes of Mississippi, expressed well the Southern spirit of restraint in foreign policy when he wrote,

‘ . . . Nobody ought to meddle; meddling is immorality.

’26. Charity ought to begin at home. As long as it can find there, anything to do; it ought to stay and do it. It may travel when its work is done; it may use its feet, when its hands are idle. The whole power of the society, ought to be applied to its ends. After they are perfectly realized it may help other societies. It must not be generous to others; while unjust to itself. It must perfect itself, before it perfects others. There is little room for charity abroad; if there is much room for charity at home. Home duties are highest. If one community tries to better another before it betters itself; it worsts both. It does a wrong. It wrongs those who are nearer and dearer. That wrong is atrocious. If our state or family are not perfect; they need our means. They must have preference. If there is any giving or helping; it must be for them. Everything must go to them. If they have no needs, the surplus may go to others; but the first needs must be first answered’ (Treatise on Sociology, Book I, Philadelphia, Penn., Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854, p. 74).

The Yankee Puritans take the opposite approach. The moral perfection they see in themselves, and the imperfections they see in others, compel them to invade, conquer, and indoctrinate other peoples. Dixie herself was the first major conquest of the Yankee American Empire in 1865 when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. The methods of total warfare used against the South would go on to be used against Native Americans, Filipinos, Germans, Japanese, Iraqis, and so many others.

Many in the States are easily cajoled into supporting these ideological crusades because, as Miss Frascolla suggests, they have no traditional religious anchor nor any kind of truly aristocratic leadership: ‘If the United States, being liberal, cannot adhere to any religious creed, and does not have any strong leader (such as an Emperor or a Supreme Leader), power ends up falling into the hands of technocrats trained by the most important universities.’

In the South once again we find the antithesis of such things. Richard Weaver, one of Dixie’s finest philosophers and defenders, avers, ‘The South, moreover, is the part of the Western world which has suffered least from what Hermann Rauschning has called “the fading out of a spiritual tradition among the ‘historic’ ruling classes.” Because the Southern aristocracy was an aristocracy of achievement far more than is generally supposed, it has some vitality left. It has never abdicated; and it commands some solid respect at home, a different thing entirely from silly adulation by elements at the North, which it would be better off without’ (‘The South and the Revolution of Nihilism,’ The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, Curtis III and Thompson Jr., eds., Indianapolis, Ind., LibertyPress, 1987, pgs. 187-8).

Marion Montgomery, another defender of Southern ways, expands on the traditional views of Southerners that protect them from ideological follies:

‘Southerners have a sense of place in a way that sets them apart from other Americans. New Englanders, Easterners, even Midwesterners have always believed in abstract America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, with liberty and justice for all. Southerners have been more inclined to love its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills, and more accurately, certain rocks and woods, the ones they see and move among and know are real. Abstractions, however pretty, are to most Southerners no more than vague and inaccurate rumors of the truth, a questionable report on the nature of God the Father.

‘ . . . Southerners have been relatively immune to the tyranny of ideas in an age characterized by the emergence of one ideology after another. Nazism and communism, the two dominant political schemata of the twentieth century, have had some currency in the Northeast and even in the urban areas of the Midwest. In the South the Communist party had no following, and during the 1930s, when the German-American Bund was holding huge rallies in Madison Square Garden, there was not a single active chapter in a Southern state. Not one.

‘In some measure this reluctance to join the larger movements of the age results from the fact that Southerners do not believe they have to join anything in order to have a sense of belonging, to derive some personal satisfaction from an emotional identification with a larger group of their own kind. They belong, after all, to the family, which has the advantage over “the Folk,” or “the Proletariat,” or “the Party” in that the family is composed of flesh-and-blood people, whom you know well and who know you and who, because they are so complicated, defy ideological classification.

‘ . . . To boil the matter down to an essential proposition, the best of Southern literature is characterized by its ontological orthodoxy. For the most part Southern writers believe somehow, some way, in the Incarnation and in all that such a miraculous event implies. The flesh—the concrete particulars of time and place—are therefore important, good, and hence sacred’ (‘A Note on the Origin of Southern Ways’, Why the South Will Survive, Athens, Georgia, Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981, pgs. 162-3, 164-5, 166).

The nations of the world are quite rightly fed up with US hegemony, with its arrogant assertions of chosenness and exceptionalism. But those are a product of New England Puritan delusions. They should not be ascribed indiscriminately to all the States. The United States are in fact, as we said above, not one nation but many. They are made up of several cultures (see, e.g., The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau and American Nations by Colin Woodard), and politically there are actually 50 unique nations making up the confederation of the US, just as there 27 independent nations of the European Union. The EU is not ‘one nation’ any more than the US.

For the sane nations of the world, mostly in the Global South these days, who want to forge a more peaceful, cooperative future, we would recommend that they bypass the corrupt oligarchy in Washington, D.C., and engage with the governments, businesses, and other social institutions of the individual States that still retain some respect for tradition, custom, Christianity, and other historical norms. But to do that, the peoples of the Global South must shed the notion that United States are one nation, one people, sharing one culture. That is a falsehood, and adhering to it will hamper dialogue with the spiritually/culturally healthy States and regions of the US who are their potential friends.

The totalitarian union of the United States, like the EU, should be broken up, just as the totalitarian empires of the USSR, Third Reich, and Charlemagne eventually were. There are good people trapped in the first two, as there were in the latter three. The Southern people of Dixie are amongst them. We would make good friends with traditional-leaning countries like Slovakia and Hungary, Georgia and Serbia, Uganda and Ghana, and others.

Prof. Weaver, in describing why the South took such a resolute stand against the Nazis in World War II, describes as well what the Southern people still offer to the world, despite the overlordship of the Puritan Yanks in DC. It is our prayer that the peoples of the world who read them and agree with them will unite in friendship with us in some way, that we might cooperate as much as possible in bringing to fruition the multipolar, polycentric world that is on the minds of so many:

‘The South, by its firm grasp of the traditions of our civilization, has had a great part in giving us one more chance for the conservative solution. While the old sources of power and self-confidence were being weakened by debunking and scientific investigation, it clung to the belief that man is not saved by science alone, that myths and sentiments are part of the constitution of a nation, and that poetry ultimately decides more issues than economics. In the choice that had to be made its voice was perhaps decisive; and the choice was between a world illuminated by religious and poetical concepts and made human by respect for personality, and a world of materialism and technology, of an ever greater feeding of the physical man, which is nihilism.

‘In this, and not in natural belligerency, or poverty, or loyalty to the Roosevelt administration is to be read the explanation of its role in World War II’ (‘The South and the Revolution of Nihilism,’ p. 188).

The South is not quite what she used to be: Propaganda about American exceptionalism has poisoned many minds and souls over the last century and a half of her subjugation by the Yankees. And yet Dixie still abides, a unique ethnos, waiting to be rediscovered by the world.