Since the founding of the American Republic in the late 18th Century, Southerners have been ardent patriots and practitioners of a great martial tradition. The move for secession and independence from the British Empire may have begun in the northern Colonies, but it was won by the Southern Colonies. Had it not been for hard-fighting, liberty-loving Southerner patriots – partisan leaders like Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter, the “Over Mountain Men” who won the decisive Battle of Kings Mountain, and the Southern riflemen of Cowpens -- the Union Jack might still be flying over much of North America today.

However, this proud history poses the questions: what was the meaning of patriotism to our Southern forebears? What was so dear about this fundamental principle that legions of them were willing to answer the call to arms and give their lives for it?

The beginning of the answer lies in the true meaning of the word itself. The English word ‘patriotism’ comes to us from the Latin word ‘patria’, which means fatherland, one’s native country, or homeland. It is also associated with the Latin word ‘patrius’, which means handed down from one’s forefathers. As you can see, the Latin roots of our English word make the notions of family and immediate proximity an explicit part of patriotism’s true meaning. Certainly that’s how our Southern ancestors understood it.

True patriotism is a healthy love of one’s family, the place where you were born and raised, and the people, culture, and ideals contained and nurtured there. This understanding of patriotism is in harmony with God’s created order. It is natural that our strongest and most enduring affections should be for the people and things closest to us, and that those affections should diminish with distance and unfamiliarity. We live with and love the family into which we were born. We make friends with, and fall in love with and marry, our neighbours. We farm, hunt, fish, and explore the countryside where we live. Its features and creatures become a part of us, and eventually we’re buried beneath it. Everything that flows from this fountainhead forms and sustains the culture, society, principles, and worldview of our unique place on earth. This is what binds a people and a place together so intimately and strongly that they will work together to nurture it, bequeath it to their children; and, if necessary, die defending it from destruction. This is quintessential Southern patriotism.

With this understanding of the word and with a little reflection on Southern history, it should be abundantly clear why the Southern People fought and died for their homeland and their inheritance in the 1860’s. True patriotism compelled them to do so. Like King Leonidas and his heroic Spartans at Thermopylae, our ancestors did not die for far-off, abstract ideas like democracy, financial prosperity, “the Union,” or empire. As the actor Richard Jordan, portraying General Armistead in the movie Gettysburg, calls out to his men just before beginning Pickett’s Charge: ‘Virginians! For your lands, for your homes, for your sweethearts, for your wives, for Virginia! Forward… March!’ Sadly, since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the ascendancy of the centralised, unitary state in Washington, D.C., the healthy, natural idea of patriotism has been supplanted by a virulent Marxist form of nationalism. Nationalism is the antithesis of patriotism, as it turns the latter upside down and backwards.

Think of the hierarchy of affections and loyalties that the modern U.S. regime demands of it subjects. Ultimate allegiance must be given to the central state; that is, the Federal government and those ‘elected’ to administer it. This idea is reinforced by the daily recitation of a Marxist-style ‘pledge of allegiance’ in the government (public) schools. The minions of the central government and their accomplices in the media continually reiterate that the solutions to all our problems are to be found in Washington, D.C. There is a saying that all politics is local, yet we are subjected to a constant display of lobbying trips to, shameless begging of, and acquiescence to, the Federal regime by our local and State politicians. We are programmed to think of ‘the nation’ first. God, family, home --those are relegated to secondary considerations, if they’re considered at all.

Worse yet, this convoluted thinking begets a haughty and condescending attitude towards other peoples, their cultures, and their homelands. It is displayed in phrases like, ‘America is a shining city on a hill’, ‘we must make the world safe for democracy’, ‘the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world,’ and the like. Comments like these necessarily imply that all other peoples are lesser beings than we Americans, and that it’s our sacred duty to make them just like us, whether they want to be or not. Therefore, following this so-called logic, imperialism and its associated foreign military interventions are the natural steps in the progression. Consequently, the U. S. regime has been ‘exporting democracy’ to benighted foreign masses by bombast, bombs, and bullets for well over a century. This attitude is neatly encapsulated in a scene from the Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket. A very New England-sounding Colonel chews out an enlisted man during the Tet Offensive, telling him that, ‘We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook, there’s an American trying to get out!’

All of the preceding leads me to my final point. Because of our proud Southern martial tradition, and our having been placed upon the stools of everlasting repentance for our ‘rebellious’ ancestors of the 1860’s, our brainwashing in the government schools, and our consequent desire to prove what ‘loyal Americans’ we are, too many of us Southrons have forsaken a healthy and true patriotism for Marxist, Yankee nationalism. Too many of us have turned our backs on our kin, our kind, our beloved Southern homeland, and our traditional principles of liberty and self-government. Our Southern sons and daughters are not fighting for the cause of freedom here at home or for the liberation of the oppressed abroad, so much as they are fighting and dying for the greed and power of the central bankers and international corporations who own and control the U.S. regime and direct its policies. Sad as it is to acknowledge, this makes them no more than hirelings – paid mercenaries – in the imperial forces of our conquerors. All our wishing otherwise, and all the propaganda of the regime to the contrary, can’t change this truth. We have become what we once despised and abjured.

But for a Christian people, hope springs eternal. We can throw off the mentality and the regime of our Yankee conquerors. All that is required is the individual and collective will of the Southern People to return to the principles of our ancestors, to return to a true and healthy Southern patriotism. Let us not follow the example of our Scots and Irish forebears under their British occupiers who provided the best soldiers of British imperialism. We Southrons must no longer be willing to go to faraway places and fight and die for anyone else’s liberty and independence but our own. Friends don’t let friends join the Yankee army. The only people’s liberty for whom we Southrons should fight is ours! May God grant us the wisdom and courage to embrace this true patriotism. And may that give us a name and place among the nations of the earth – and soon!

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