No Foreordained Outcome

We expect the first Congress to be a modest affair. There is no pre-ordained outcome, other than to meet and get itself organized -- on a permanent basis, we hope. It is not a rubber stamp for anyone, not a puppet organization, and not a new political party. In fact, we hope many parties and many points of view and diverse interests will be represented. The SNC is not being called to issue an ordinance of secession or any other pre-determined manifesto. A Southern congress will exercise sovereignty over its own views and will speak in its own voice, thus no one can say in advance what might actually do. The possibilities range from deciding to do nothing and go home to our football and beer and NASCAR races, to taking a bold aggressive stand. The first meeting will plant the seed. If the seed is watered and fertilized, and if the plant is pruned and cared for, no telling what good fruit it might bear eventually. That’s why the SNC is sovereign, at least over itself, because no one is telling it what to say or do, or what the outcome must be.

Let the Past Be Past.

This may disturb some Southern patriots who feel compelled to mount a defence of every symbol under attack, but the focus of SNC is not The War and The Flag. We have to re-orient ourselves to the future, not the past. Forget slavery and racism. We need never apologise for what we were, or what we are. When our detractors throw slavery and racism at us, we needn’t fall into the trap of responding. Instead, we must turn the argument back on them. It’s today’s wretched Regime that deserve condemnation for all the reasons stated above, not the last bastion of Christian culture and ordered liberty -- the South.

So let it be understood, by ourselves as well as by our inevitable critics: we are not trying to reconstruct the Confederacy of 1861. We don’t apologise for it, and indeed we are justly proud of the courage, sacrifice, and dedication to principle our Confederate forefathers demonstrated. But the South is more than just a huge battlefield park. It existed before 1861 and after 1865. The cause of the South is not expressed solely in the tragic events of The War Between the States. We Southerners of today have legitimate interests, grievances, and solutions that have little to do with The War, and we need a forum relevant to today to express them.

But before we leave The War behind entirely, it does offer a lesson we should take to heart: we must submit ourselves humbly to each other and to the Southern cause. There is no room for personal agendas, ambitions, and egos; these must be subordinated to our higher purpose. We have to learn how to cooperate, to make allowance for each other’s flaws (so our compatriots will do the same for us.) Of course, we must behave in a principled way, but without standing so staunchly on our rectitude that no one else is deemed worthy of labouring alongside us. If our squabbling Confederate forefathers had learned this lesson, the War of 1861 might have had a different outcome.

But Will It Work?

We can’t solve our problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, according to Albert Einstein, demonstrating that his genius extended to more than just quantum physics. We have two enemies; those who say there is no problem, and those who say there is no hope. The counsel of despair will undermine Southern liberty more surely than all the lies and blandishments of the Regime. It’s true we are few and they are many. At the moment we are weak; they have the full power of the state and schools and money and the media behind them. But we still hold the trump card, the one thing without which no regime can exist, even a tyrannical one -- we still have our consent. Peaceful non-cooperation, withholding our consent, and creating our own alternative legitimate structures will work. In fact, exercising our sovereignty, however limited its sphere, is the only thing that will work for us, because it’s something Those People can’t control. It’s what they fear most, and it’s why they keep us diverted and embroiled in peripheral battles over the Flag and Confederate symbols.

You doubt it? Well, practical use of this principle undergirds some of the most extraordinary success stories of the 20th Century. Just ask the heirs of Mohandas Ghandi, the Irish Republicans, Scots nationalists, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela, or people in the scores of countries that have freed themselves from European colonial empires. Closer to home is the example of Martin Luther King, whose tactics of refusal and peaceful (more or less) non-compliance were the engine of the civil rights revolution. We may not like the outcomes of all these revolutions, and we can argue that the U.S. civil rights revolution has not solved the problems plaguing of the black community. But we can’t deny these efforts were successful. We should learn to apply those techniques, as appropriate, to our own cause.

The Few Always Decide.

Mass numbers are not the key to success, for revolutionary change almost always comes from the vision and actions of the committed few, exercising leverage at the strategic margin -- a vanguard, in other words.

Ray McBerry, in his recent primary campaign for Governor of Georgia, received 50,000 votes, 12 % of the total, in the State’s Republican primary. While he lost the primary, we repeat, he received 50,000 votes! That is, by running, he not only conveyed a vital message to our fellow Southerners, but he and his team also identified 50,000 people in Georgia alone who still love the South, cherish their liberty, and were willing to put down their marker. If we had 50,000 people in every Southern State – and quite frankly it wouldn’t take that many – we could break our lengthening chains, guarantee the retreat of tyranny, and assure a new birth of Southern freedom.

Now, understand we are not talking about armed resistance in the SNC, but America’s struggle for independence from Great Britain does dramatize the power of the committed few acting at the strategic margin. From 1776-1781, it’s estimated that roughly one-third of American colonists were indifferent, sitting out the conflict and taking neither side. Another one-third remained loyal to the Crown, and many of them fought in the Loyalists regiments or as Tory militia. And roughly one-third supported independence. Of this Patriot one-third, only about half or fewer were actively engaged in the struggle at any given time, either by giving their resources or bearing arms. Washington could seldom count on more than five or six thousand effectives under arms. Francis Marion, the great “Swamp Fox” of the Revolution, had at most 400 men in his “brigade” at any one time, yet managed to tie up a British force ten times his number in South Carolina and inflict one defeat after another on the enemy. In other words – and this is the astonishing conclusion – our forefathers managed to wrest our liberty from the mightiest military and commercial power on the globe with only about 12-15 % of the people actively engaged – roughly the same percentage, by the way, that voted for Ray McBerry in his recent campaign. We must understand that numbers alone are not decisive. The discerning, dedicated few are preferable to the many who lack clarity of vision, commitment, and courage.

Peaceful Means

We emphasize that the SNC is committed to peaceful and honourable means. In the words of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, we think none harm, we say none harm, we do none harm. But because we are peaceable doesn’t mean we are servile and cowardly, or that we’ll stand by and allow our culture and our liberty to be destroyed without resisting. As Edmund Burke reminds us, “There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.” The SNC doesn’t violate any laws and we do not advocate violating any laws. For the time being at least, it’s no crime for us to seek recognition as a people who have values, interests, and goals that diverge widely from those of our indifferent and hostile rulers. Moreover, to fight corruption, to oppose tyranny, to protest injustice, are not crimes. They are a duty. “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” These ringing words come from the Declaration of Arbroath of April 1320, in which the Scots, from whom so many of us Southerners are descended, declared their commitment to the integrity of their own nation.

We have a right to be who we are and not to be coerced into something a hostile Regime has decided we must be -- for its benefit, not ours. Sure, we have our faults, and to say we want to be true to ourselves doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to be better. But it’s up to us to decide how, not the self-righteous and oh-so-high-minded people of the North or the Left Coast. And anyway, who are they to tell us anything? Just look at the awful mess their stewardship has made of their own communities and the whole United States.

Jeers and Scoffing -- and Worse

As the SNC gets organized and begins to make our collective voices heard, no doubt we’ll encounter jeers and scoffing from America’s self-anointed elites, their Fellow Travellers, and their Useful Idiots among our own fellow Southerners. This is one of the Regime’s best methods of keeping dissent in check -- to send forth its minions, including all too many in our own Southern media, sorry to say, to ridicule anyone who departs from Politically Correct opinion. When that doesn’t work, then we’re condemned as racists and slavers and unreconstructed rebels. Odd, isn’t it, that we Southerners are the ones always accused of dredging up the past! In any case, we shouldn’t delude ourselves that we really enjoy true freedom of speech in this country. The ancient Greek dramatist Euripides said, “A slave is one who may not speak his thoughts.” Is this what we Southerners have become in the era of Political Correctness: slaves who may not speak our thoughts? Or the truth? Ironic, isn’t it? Say the wrong thing today in the so-called Land of the Free and the P.C. Gestapo will surely come after you; if not in a formal, legal sense, certainly in other ways. If they aren’t content merely to jeer and scoff, they’ll attempt to destroy your livelihood, as too many Southern patriots today can sadly attest.

Nevertheless, we remain partially free to speak out. We’d better use what remains of our freedom before it’s finally, totally, and irretrievably lost, for that’s where we’re headed unless we do speak out. And when tyranny at last runs free of all restraint, our silence will not save us.

If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

– Samuel Adams, 1776