|
Bob Whitaker's Weekly Articles – September 19, 1998
|
September 19, 1998 –
Observations
September 19, 1998 –
George Corley Wallace, RIP
September 19, 1998 –
Why I Will Not Denounce Southern Racism or American Imperialism
1. Clinton doesn't matter.
What does matter is that the so-called "women's movement" is history.
We don't realize how important that is precisely because the liberal women's' groups that were so important last December have disappeared from the media radar without a whisper. We have already forgotten that they used to get attention.
As my brother Jon has pointed out, until last December there was a story in the papers every week about some CEO getting charged with sexual harassment.
Gone.
2. Who the hell CARES whether Russia goes on with its economic reforms?
Socialism had absolutely nothing to do with our concern about the Soviet Union. It was the USSR's threats against us that was the problem.
A stable Communist government run by old ex-Communists right now would be no problem, as long as they took back control over their outdated atomic arsenal. That's our problem. Their economic system is of no concern to us at all.
GEORGE CORLEY WALLACE, RIP
|
In the wake of the death of George Wallace, I am sick and tired about all the talk of his "apology" for his prosegregation stand. In his last interview, they asked him if he regretted anything. He started to make the ritual apology, then sat back and smiled, and said "No."
You are not going to see a repeat of that interview often.
The whole point of paying any attention to Wallace, from the media's point of view, was to get to his apologies for having been an Evil Racist.
Otherwise, he didn't exist.
Bill Moyers, PBS' official political historian, showed a Humphrey for President ad from the 1968 election. In its original form, this ad consisted of quotes from Nixon and Wallace, and it then contradicted them, and showed a balloon bursting with each "wrong statement. In the Moyers' version, the Wallace part of the ad was cut out, question by question! According to the Moyers version, Wallace did not exist in 1968.
Moyers put Wallace, quite literally, right down the Orwellian Memory Hole!
In 1968, the Wallace vote, which got as high as 22% in the polls, was the most historically significant for the future of politics. It was the first movement of white Southerners and Northern white ethnics out of the Democratic Party. The Wallace Democrats of 1968 became the Reagan Democrats of 1980.
It is not surprising that Moyers simply cut Wallace out of political history. The Wallace phenomenon did not fit PBS' version of Social Progress in History, so it was removed without a whisper of objection.
I met Governor George Wallace twice, once when he was on his feet and the second time when he was in his wheelchair.
The second time was in 1976. In 1976 I had written a book, A Plague On Both Your Houses, which discussed Wallace's importance to political history. Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee who had a huge lead in his presidential race against Gerald Ford, was in Montgomery waiting to see Wallace, but the Governor wanted to talk to me. His wife called twice while I was there, and the last time he picked up the phone, said, "I'm COMIN'!" and hung up.
He wanted to talk to me because I took his historical role seriously. He preferred that to playing second fiddle to Carter.
As he wheeled out of the room, he was still talking furiously: "If I had my legs and you were working for me, we'd have gone places!" He also said he wished he had had a chance to hire me earlier.
He did.
In 1968, in the midst of Wallace's historic third party run for the presidency, I went to Montgomery with Maurice Bessinger and Lake High in an attempt to get Wallace to turn his campaign over to us and our Independent Party. The guy he was handing the campaign over to in South Carolina was either a ringer or a fool. We were told that he reported to a Republican Party committee every week. But he had the nicest, most respectable friends! This same guy, to whom Wallace turned over his 1968 campaign, is now South Carolina's leading far leftist. In the end, Wallace ignored our advice and South Carolina became the only state in the Deep South that Wallace lost.
Wallace lost South Carolina in 1968 by succumbing to the "respectability" gambit.
He made a great point of getting "working people" to support him in the North, because only working people WOULD support him there. But in the Deep South, where he had more general support, he chose to reject those of us who dealt with real working people. In South Carolina he wanted to go with the coat-and-tie crowd. The Republicans, of course, owned the support of that coat-and-tie crowd. So Nixon won South Carolina in 1968.
In the end, Wallace renounced his earlier views and pursued respectability. Time after time, year after year, he did the Southern Crawl, begging Yankess to forgive him for ever having been a segregationist. Southern conservatives love to do the ritual Southern Crawl. To be a respectable Southern conservative, you have to love to beg for forgiveness. And Yankees love to watch them do it.
But in his last time in public, George seems to have gotten his pride back.
In the end, George refused to do that one last Crawl. The Moyers' and the conservative respectables will remember George's years of snivelling. But those of us who never have been respectable remember him at the beginning and at the end, when he stood tall.
In the wake of the death of George Wallace, I am sick and tired about all the talk of his "apology" for his prosegregation stand. Every bad thing we segregationists predicted integration would bring has happened, and it was the integrationists who were, as they always are, dead wrong. Eleven years ago, when I was a Senior Editor of Southern Partisan, they made the ritual apology for Evil Southern Racism. I blew my stack in the following reply. It was written in 1987. I stand by it today.
WHY I WILL NOT DENOUNCE SOUTHERN RACISM OR AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
(originally published in Southern Partisan, 1987, and is reprinted with permission)
|
There are always self-styled spokesmen for America who use Moscow's language to confess American evil. There are always self-styled Southern spokesmen who use New York language against the South. Both groups turn my stomach.
In Moscow's terms, I am a warmongering imperialist, and proud of it. If in New York terms I am a racist provincial then I am proud of that, too.
America has a huge defense budget. The kind of American Pravda likes apologizes for the arms buildup without ever asking why it was necessary. The kind of Southerner loved by the New York Times regularly offers up ritual denunciations of Southern racism and hate groups, again without ever asking why those groups came to be.
Two New York Times-style denunciations of Southern racism appeared in the last two issues of the Southern Partisan
When I was fifteen, I was arguing that any integration would lead to total integration, and that interracial dating and interracial marriage would become established policy. Those who said I was crazy then now brag about how great it is that the Supreme Court forced Bob Jones University to permit interracial dating.
Back then the Enlightened Bunch argued that no such results were possible. Look around you and see how wrong they were. Now the Enlightened Bunch claim that the melting pot gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling; they worship the Statue of Liberty and gather on Ellis Island to sing hymns of glory before the fiery torch that fuses all races into one that is neither white nor black, red nor yellow.
That torch is not my god. And while it may be blasphemy in our time to say so, I am proud to be white; I like my race and I pray that my children and grandchildren will retain their whiteness.
As several national columnists have had the courage to point out, the existence of the white race is, in sober fact, threatened. Europe, North America and Australia have been opened wide to a flood of third-world immigration.
To the turncoats on the Southern Partisan staff, the white race may be just one of those little sacrifices one has to make to be liked by Yankees. A Southern partisan doesn't think like that.
I am not surprised to see working people, confused by the madness of our time, drawn to groups like the Klan. Such groups merely articulate a prejudice that has gone out of fashion in chic places. But make no mistake about it, those who dwell in chic places are filled with their own bigotry.
Sure, we would like for people who are drawn to the Klan to do something more constructive and to give a more persuasive shape to their arguments. But I do not blame them for feeling betrayed when the Southern Partisan publishes drivel about how hateful and retarded Southerners are. If we cave in, they will find other leaders.
What Vancounver calls "hate" has loyalty behind it. There are lots of writers in other regions to denounce our extremists. Our job is to denounce theirs. And if our people join "hate groups," it is because "respectable" outlets like the Southern Partisan offer no leadership - just the history of yesterday's bravery and cutesy wimpishness today.
In dealing with Moscow, we can prevent war by giving up our country. And we can solve the race problem by giving up our race. I reject these solutions.
My people and their prejudices are better than the Enlightened Bunch and their prejudices. I am a partisan loyal to my race, my nation (which is the South) and to the country which protects my nation's existence. I have respect for other races who feel the same way about themselves because only a clown can be loyal to a melting pot. By definition, a melting pot is nothing specific. Anyone who can be deeply loyal to nothing specific is in urgent need of psychiatric care.
|
|
