The United States is nearer a nuclear war today
than it has been since the Cuban Crisis of 1962.
Russia today is somewhat like Japan in 1941. Back
then, the Japanese Army was actually operating on
its own. We tend to think of Imperial Japan as a
centralized dictatorship, like Nazi Germany or Fascist
Italy. But, in actual fact, the Japanese Army was
fighting in China and taking other actions on its
own. To a large extent, the Army dragged Japan
into its increasing confrontation with the United
States.
That piece of history is important to us today.
We are dealing with a Russia that still has nuclear
power, but it is no longer Soviet Russia, where
the central government is in absolute control. Yeltsin
is old and sick, and his government is not in real
control of its nuclear weapons.
Russia is humiliated and its generals are furious.
Our attacks on Serbia, which Russians regard as
a fellow Slavic state being humiliated by the United
States, has infuriated even Yeltsin. One can only
imagine how upset the Russian military men are.
Yeltsin has actually threatened the US over Serbia.
This is a first for him, one which has been largely
ignored here.
This brings up another factor which makes this situation
especially serious.
That is the fact that we took the USSR seriously,
but we do not take Russia seriously. That could
lead us to take steps which would lead into nuclear
war, steps we would never have taken in the face
of Soviet threats.
Before anyone reassures themselves that Russian
nukes are not what they used to be, remember that
we have no defense at all against missiles. Russian
has numerous missiles for each American target.
They may be slow, many may be inaccurate, but there
is no defense against them.
The horror and revolutions and slaughter that constitute
the history of the twentieth century began at Sarajevo.
Sarajevo was in what was then Serbia and later became
part of Yugoslavia. In 1914, an Archduke was shot
there, and all of Europe got into the act and World
War I began. Serbia, and later Yugoslavia, were
part of the Balkans, the southeastern part of Europe,
east of Italy. The Balkans is an area all sane people
know not to get into.
Now the United States is in there.
This century could end in a nuclear massacre springing
from the same stupidity, and in the same place.
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We are becoming more and more an atomic
society, a society in which each person is a separate
unit. A person can sit at home with television,
he can buy about anything on his computer, or he
can talk to almost anybody on his computer or on
the phone. Our jobs are becoming more and spread
out, and we no longer all go to a single central
city for anything.
By the time we attain independence, technology will
have moved forward another computer generation or
two. If we are to look to our future as an independent
South, then, we must think in terms of that world.
We may find that our present demand for devolution
is outrun by technology.
Instead of having a problem with the basic unit
of society being too big, like the Federal Government,
we may well find we have problems uniting something
as large as the South into a single meaningful unit.
This is a reversal of the historical trend. For
thousands of years, we defined civilization in terms
of large size. The very word "civilization"
means nothing but "city-ization." The
history we learned in school ignores the advances
made in Northern Europe that did not involve cities.
With all the great praise of the Roman Empire and
groaning over its collapse, it was the northern
"barbarians" who advanced European welfare
with a huge leap in the middle of the so-called
"Dark Ages."
In the seventh and eighth centuries, these "barbarians"
DOUBLED the output per acre of land in the former
Roman Empire of the North. Output per acre had stagnated
for centuries before then. In fact, there had been
precious little advance in this area since the beginning
of agriculture millennia before.
These "barbarians" introduced the first
real plow. Brilliant Roman civilization had used
the same poking stick they had inherited from a
thousand years before. The "barbarians"
invented the horse collar, which replaced the primitive
Roman harness that had been choking horses for centuries.
The "barbarians," again in the "Dark
Ages," invented the horseshoe and the three-field
system.
All that we learn in history courses is that everything
collapsed and ignorance ruled when the Roman Empire
was driven out of Northern Europe. The fact is that
real production and the real standard of living
went up for the mass of people.
To us, the development of civilization means the
pyramids, the empires of the Middle East, the huge
slave-based societies like Imperial China or Rome.
Historians go where the records are, and the records
are where the masses are forced together and enslaved.
All this leaves us completely unprepared to deal
with real history.
And being unable to deal with real history makes
us unable to deal with the real future. The real
future will have little room for city-ization.
Today, the only reason we have cities is because
our technology is still primitive. The city is rapidly
losing all of its old functions.
I remember very well when you had to go downtown
to get almost anything you couldn't buy in a general
grocery store. A general grocery store back then
had about what you would now find at a convenience
store. Any Wal-Mart or K- Mart in a small town today
has more than the whole city of Columbia could offer
in 1955.
The big cities offered as much as Wal-Mart or a
shopping center today has, and they had entertainment
as well. But even a big city did not have all that
you can get on cable today.
And remember we are talking about a society that
is still absolutely primitive in terms of a few
decades from now.
There are those of us who will always be dissatisfied
if they cannot go to a live play or hear a live
orchestra. That is charming and all, but let's discuss
reality here. Most people, even the ones who claim
all those artistic preferences, will not go to such
performances when we get better-than-live performances
in our homes.
In the Old South, if you said you needed to talk
to someone, it meant you had to wait until the weather
was good, get dressed, get out the horses and hitch
them to the wagon, and go and see if whoever you
wanted to see was at home. Now you call.
Have you seen the New York hit play, CATS? I have.
I saw it on PBS, and it is coming out on tape. Actually,
I saw the part I wanted to see. I wasn't in the
mood, and I wasn't stuck in a New York theater seat,
so I'll see the rest if and when I feel like it.
It has been years since I bought anything in the
downtown part of Columbia where we used to buy pretty
well everything. I simply do not remember the last
time I HAD to go downtown to buy anything. In fact,
the only time I have to make a trip to buy something
is a trip out to Columbia Mall, which is well out
of town.
Meanwhile the cities are becoming havens for communities
of people who simply don't belong out there in the
countryside. "Inner city" has an unpleasant
connotation. But the inner city is also being taken
over by homosexual communities and other groups
who need to cluster. I am all for their clustering,
myself:
1) I do not want them near me, and
2) I do not want them to be miserable, so, in a
truly Southern way, I act accordingly.
3) I segregate myself and those I identify with.
No longer do we need to live together and tolerate
each other for the sake of production or marketing.
We will all deal with the whole world from our living
room, via computers and virtual reality.
There will be very little you CAN outlaw on the
virtual reality Internet. Because one will be a
direct part of the world via the virtual reality
Internet, enforced "multiculturalism"
should be totally abandoned in terms of where one
has to live. Since everyone can reach everywhere
from where they sit, there is no reason to force
people to live in "multicultural" groupings.
In this as in other areas, the Confederacy will
first be distinguished by what it does NOT do. The
Confederacy will not, for example, begin with the
things other countries all did first. Some examples
of the first things we have traditionally expected
every new country to do: 1) set up a post office
and issue national stamps, a first sign of sovereignty,
2) print its own currency, 3) set up embassies in
other countries.
The Confederacy will NOT have a post office. The
government-run post office, whether it is run outright
by the bureaucrats or is a state-granted monopoly
as in the United States, is an expensive, cumbersome
dinosaur. Whereas every other form of communication
is open practically 24 hours a day, for example,
our outdated postal monopoly makes people form lines
from 9 to 5 for postal business.
The only reason we still have a Post Office is because
we have a law which says that only the Post Office
is allowed to deliver first class mail. By simply
not passing such a law, the Confederacy will have
the world's first private, truly efficient, and
TAX-PAYING mail delivery service.
As for money, more and more transactions will be
by machine with plastic. But even plastic is soon
going to be replaced by handprint or voiceprint
identification.
Nor does it look like there will ever be any Confederate
embassies. Embassies were developed back in the
days when communication was slow, and an ambassador
had to reside in a foreign capital to represent
his country's interests. Today, Paris can deal directly
with Washington.
As Ross Perot has pointed out, traditional embassies
are pretty well passe. International relations should
be handled by teleconferencing or other means. "Face
to face" meetings of leaders are staged affairs,
and do exactly the opposite of what they should
do.
It would be far, far better if leaders met more
regularly by simple teleconferencing.
Our present political setup was developed to deal
with the world as it existed before all these changes.
Things were organized on a clear, step-by-step continuum.
If you lived in the middle of South Carolina, and
you wanted something that was available only in
Atlanta, you ordered it through a store in Columbia.
To express your opinion, you elected delegates from
your county, who in turn elected delegates from
the state, who in turn went to national conventions.
Now, what we do more and more is simply to email
Washington, DC. Under earlier technologies, our
work determined where we lived. We had to learn
to deal with whoever our job put us into contact
with. Now, more and more, we can determine where
we want to live according to our preferences.
What I would like to do is to be able to live in
a community of people I feel comfortable with, regardless
of how that may upset Politically Correct people.
In earlier ages, this would have limited a number
of my horizons.
In a few years, I can have all the advantages of
dealing with any kind of people I choose, and still
live in the kind of community I choose.
In my opinion, this will lead many of us evil whites
to live in evil, overwhelmingly white communities,
just because we want to. Since nonwhites no longer
have to live with us in order to obtain the advantages
of dealing with us, this takes nothing from them.
Liberals point to poll data and tell us that all
whites want desperately to live in mixed communities.
If this were the case, Charlotte would not have
just signed its umpteenth agreement to force integration
onto its people. If this were true, we would not
have this insane national policy of chasing down
whites with busing and "low-cost" housing,
then white flight, then more busing and "low
cost" housing, and so forth. (Please see my
February 13 article, "When
Are You Integrated?") As I said in an earlier
article, I think the rise of super terrorism is
going to put all the theories of multiculturalism
up against a test they cannot pass. (See November
21 article, "Superterrorism")
Nor is superterrorism the only reason we may have
to divide up into widely separate units. We have
new diseases like the Ebola virus and the AIDS virus,
both of which are mutating. There is also the fact
that old infectious diseases are becoming immune
to all of our present antibiotics.
The only sane policy is for us to spread out into
self-contained communities. I like that idea. In
any case, the new reality is that an individual
will be a part of the world community by virtue
of the new technology.
There will be no natural, step-by- step units between
him and the world in general. He will not deal through
local cities and local governments and then to higher
units. The individual will be part of the world.
That is one end of the new duality technology is
producing. The other end is that the individual
will be dealing with that world directly and ALONE.
He will not go to the state convention as part of
his county group.
So we have a person who is part of the world through
technology. He can deal directly with government
through technology. But he also needs a sense of
belonging to a community. His entire sense of community
will come from where he lives, so where he lives
must be entirely his own choice. The world of the
future should be a set of communities, united on
a voluntary basis.
The function of such a voluntary unity is one for
which our Confederate mindset is admirably prepared.
We are, in fact, the only modern political thinkers
of our age. This is because we are the only people
who are accustomed to thinking in terms of bringing
separate units together voluntarily under one umbrella.
Every other group today can only think in terms
of all the units being brought together into one
unit by some kind of force. This includes the libertarians.
Under libertarians or liberals or the Christian
Coalition, you must have one society, obeying a
single law. Libertarians want open borders and open
communities and open markets, and they will do anything
they have to make this happen everywhere within
their domains.
Confederates are very used to thinking in terms
of local areas which only have very limited obligations
to the central state and the central market and
the central ideas that are supposed to govern everybody
in a single area.
In other words, you pays yo money and you takes
yo choice. Your community must help provide for
the common defense.
And that, boys and girls, is the way everybody is
going to have to learn to think. Technology is making
us, at the same time, a single society and a fragmented
society. With each year that passes, the potential
for a single person to kill anybody within miles
of him is becoming simpler and simpler and more
and more available. With each passing year, it becomes
less necessary for voluntary communities of several
thousand people each, the population of a town or
apartment complex, to live within miles of each
other.
We will have to have compact, voluntary, trustworthy
groupings of people. No matter how much libertarians
may cry about it, these communities must have strict
control of physical access.
None of this will limit our economies or our interaction
with the rest of the world in any serious way. We
will be able to live among those we choose to live
among and deal with anyone we choose to.
As Confederates, we have no universalist ambitions
as to how everyone should live. But we do have very,
very strong opinions on what should be allowed in
our own communities. So the society of the future
will come naturally to us.
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