Memphis mayor hints at possibility of MLK plaza

by the League of the South City continues to push anti-Southern, anti-White agenda Memphis Mayor A C Wharton recently hinted that plans may be in the works to honour Dr Martin Luther King Jr with a plaza if the proposed Heritage Trail comes to fruition. His comments came in response to questions regarding the recent renaming of three Confederate parks in the city, reported Kevin McKenzie of the Commercial Appeal. “My personal philosophy is that we always need more history,” Wharton told a Memphis Rotary Club audience. “You don’t correct history by taking stuff out of it; you correct it by putting more into it,” Wharton said. Wharton gave as an example of focusing on “more history” a previously unannounced plan to have a plaza honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. included as part of a proposed, federally funded Heritage Trail Community Redevelopment Plan. If Wharton truly meant that ‘we always need more history,’ he would be actively working to encourage the City Council to restore the names of the Confederate parks. Instead, it seems that perhaps to him ‘more history’ means more of HIS people’s history. Memphis already has a Martin Luther King Jr Avenue and a Martin Luther King Jr Expressway. The Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated in 1968, is now the National Civil Rights Museum — a veritable pilgrimage site for King worshipers. Now the anti-White powers-that-be in Memphis want to pile on yet another honour, this time as part of a larger project that would among other things link together several sites considered important to the black community, using taxpayer money. The Heritage Trail Community Redevelopment Plan, if approved, is expected to cost approximately $100 million, $20 million of which would come from federal funds. The rest would have to found elsewhere, potentially from increased taxes on downtown properties. The campaign of cultural genocide against Whites in Memphis is entering its final stages. The anti-White Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission (with help from a Federal judge) have conspired to force the reintegration of schools, decades after Federally-mandated desegregation forced Whites into the suburbs in search of better, safer schools for their children. Now all traces of our Southern heritage are being erased and replaced with shrines to those who are responsible for the destruction of our homeland and culture.

Rhett vs Davis on Confederate foreign policy

By The League of the South On the Golden Circle podcast today we take a look at the political struggle over foreign policy and war preparations within the newly-established Confederate States Government in the winter of 1861.Topics include: Southern nationalists vs Southern conservatives; Excerpt from William C Davis’ book Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater; Rhett’s vision of a free South; Conservatives prevail in the Confederate government. ‘My uncompromising Southernism and anti-Tariffism, I suppose, renders me unfit for the councils of the Provisional [CSA] Government.’

Southern nationalism in the 21st century

February 12, 2013

By The league of the South

The following is an excellent audio recording that was recently sent in to SNN. The speaker and location of the address are undisclosed. What is important is that this brief speech addresses the need for Southern nationalism and how it can and will succeed in our century. The recording brings to mind the oratory skills which were practiced and polished in the Old South, when our classically-inspired civilisation placed great importance on the art of oration. It certainly sounds nothing like the egalitarian, democratic pandering of a US politician. Yet, this speech is for our age and the problems we face – namely, securing our demographic and cultural survival and ultimately achieving independence from a goverment educational system and media which work towardsand applaud our destruction.

We at SNN invite our readers to give this brief speech and a listen and see if you are not inspired to take up the cause of the Southern people.

TN opens offices overseas to promote exports, attract investments

It was announced earlier this week that the state of Tennessee will be opening offices overseas with the dual goals of promoting exports from small- and medium-sized businesses located within the state and promoting foreign investment in Tennessee. James Dowd reported the story for Memphis’ Commercial Appeal. Gov. Bill Haslam and state Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bill Hagerty launched the ECD’s International Division, which features export development offices in Heidelberg, London, Mexico City and Shanghai. In addition, the ECD has established export recruitment offices in Düsseldorf, London, Tokyo and Toronto. The plan marks the first time since 1997 that Tennessee has established foreign offices that are devoted to the state’s export trade. “This is a new division that will promote foreign direct investments in Tennessee and expand the number of small and medium-sized companies here that export their products to other countries,” said Samar Ali, ECD assistant commissioner for international affairs. “Most of the companies in Tennessee involved in exports are large businesses with established legal departments that guide them through these practices, but most smaller companies don’t have access to those kind of resources. With this program, they will.” Currently, there is a good deal of international investment in Tennessee and the South in general, with a large amount of investment coming in the form of manufacturing operations. The overseas offices established by the ECD will help Tennessee compete with other states for those investments. The strategy is a proactive approach to boosting exports and also to attracting global companies to locate here, Ali said. Currently, there are 834 Tennessee companies that are U.S. subsidiaries of global corporations, employing more than 110,000 workers. And state exports have tripled in the last decade, with more than 6,400 state businesses counting more than 80,000 workers selling in excess of $30 billion of Tennessee products in 2011. Among the more notable foreign corporations with operations in Tennessee are Nissan (with plants in Smyrna and Decherd) and Volkswagen (with a plant in Chattanooga), which combined employ thousands. Electrolux is currently constructing a 750,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Memphis, which when completed will employ 1,200 people. Add this to the Tennesseans employed at their existing plant in Springfield and Electrolux will employ a total of 4,000 in the state. In addition, Greeneville is home to manufacturing facilities for Huf North America—a subsidiary of the German corporation Huf Hülsbeck & Fürst GmbH & Co KG which manufactures automotive parts. Both Nissan and Huf North America have recently announced that they will be expanding their Tennessee plants and adding new jobs. No doubt many international companies have chosen to locate operations in Tennessee (and throughout the South) because of the general ease of doing business here when compared to northeastern, far western, and Rust Belt states—and particularly because Tennessee, like nearly all Southern states, is a right-to-work state. Whatever the reason, this is good news. An economically robust state will be more capable of achieving independence from the American empire, and Tennessee is definitely taking positive steps toward creating an environment in which her people can prosper.

Birmingham schools’ Third World computers & the failure of the ‘New South’

One bit of evidence which points to the continued decline of Birmingham, Alabama in particular and the South in general under the ‘New South’ model of US-style democracy and equality, is the deal that was signed a few years ago to deliver to the city’s failing schools thousands of cheap laptops that were designed by humanitarian groups to be distributed in the Third World. This is a story that many might have missed. It points to a deeper problem in the South, which will be addressed below. Marie Leech writes for AL.com: Birmingham city schools will be the first in the nation to receive laptop computers designed for children in third-world countries under an agreement completed over the weekend, Mayor Larry Langford announced Monday. Langford signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops from One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit foundation whose goal is to provide every child in the world with access to technology. “We live in a digital age, so it is important that all our children have equal access to technology and are able to integrate it into all aspects of their lives,” Langford said. “We are proud that Birmingham is on its way to eliminating the so-called `digital divide’ and to ensuring that our children have state-of-the-art tools for education.” Under the agreement, the city will buy 15,000 laptops for $200 each, Langford said. The $3 million deal will allow every child in grades one through eight in Birmingham city schools to receive a laptop, he said. THIRD WORLD TRANSFORMATION The city of Birmingham was founded in part on lands that once formed part of a Southern plantation in what was in the Old South a wealthy and productive region. The people who first settled the area and created the city were mostly of English ancestry (as is common among Southerners in the Lower South) and named their town after the British industrial giant. It grew into a major transportation and industrial centre under the regime of limited autonomy in the post Reconstruction era. However, the so-called ‘Civil Rights’ movement of the 1950s and 60s changed all of this. The imposition of US-style democracy, equality and forced integration (the denial of property rights and free association) led to a mass exodus of White Southerners from the city. That process continues to this day. For example, in the year 2000 the city was 62% Black and 35% White. A decade later it was 73% Black and 22% White. The results have been similar to those in Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta and other cities. The demographic changed that was caused by the US Federal Government’s intervention has has disastrous consequences. Birmingham (a small city compared to metropolises such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) now has the tenth highest crime rate in the US and was ranked as the third most dangerous city in the US for 2011. Only Atlanta (another Southern city ruined by US democracy, equality and demographic change) and St Louis ranked higher. The county in which the city is located, Jefferson County, has filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times described the situation with the headline, ‘In Alabama, a County That Fell Off the Financial Cliff.’ Essentially, Birmingham is now a Third World city in terms of demographics, crime, corruption and economic collapse. It is virtually certain that as conditions continue to worsen in the city that the remaining White people will attempt to flee. New suburbs outside of town will continue to be built as many hundreds of millions of dollars will be wasted on replicating the infrastructure of Birmingham that US democracy and equality have allowed to be lost. It’s an enormous waste of resources, really, much like the Third World computers that will distributed to Birmingham schools. Does anyone seriously think that or similar measures will, as former Mayor Larry Langford (who is now in prison after being found guilty of corruption) said, ‘eliminate the digital divide’ and provide ‘state of the art tools for education’? Does anyone believe that the quality of education or life in general in Birmingham will ever equal that which can be found in the suburbs built for the White refugees who were forced out of town? Even setting aside the particulars of mayor/criminal Langford’s scheme, what about the broader question of the failure of Southern cities and the abysmal state of education in quality of life in Southern cities such as Birmingham? SOUTHERN NATIONALIST SOLUTION This process of continued decline could be halted and reversed. However, that would require a willingness to scrap the policies and political/social values which created the current Third World conditions found in Birmingham. Southern cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham and Memphis were once safe and prosperous communities; they were once good homes for people. They could be again. To put it bluntly, the policies and political/social values under which these cities were created and prospered worked; the current US policies and political/social values do not work. The Southern nationalist solution is simple, really, though, as stated it would require a willingness to admit the failure of the ‘New South’ model under which US values and policies were imposed in Dixie. Rather than continue down the road of destruction, Southern nationalists will, if given the opportunity, end the failed experiment in democracy and equality in Southern cities and restore civilisation and the rule of law. We will not permit people to be preyed upon by Third World elements. Part of this will entail halting the US government’s policies of promoting demographic replacement and therefore avoiding the chaos and social destruction these policies inflict upon communities. Accountability (political, judicial, educational and otherwise) will be restored and a code of honour, once vital to the functioning of our civilisation, will be encouraged. We will restore local control of education (along with a reality-based, Southern model of education) and end forced-integration, thus allowing good schools to re-emerge even in cities such as Birmingham, Memphis and Atlanta. We will encourage self-determination on the local level rather than centralising power. Functioning, safe suburbs should not be subjected to the rule of corrupt Third World governments such as the City of Birmingham. We would also recognise the important role of natural elites in leading their communities and providing local services (the marginalisation and destruction of the Southern elite paved the way towards creating the current mess). Rather than continue with the Progressive model which has wrecked the city, Southern nationalists would restore a classical model emphasising sustainability, continuity, family, faith, tradition, honour and civilisation. These are the broad outlines of Southern nationalist reform. They are the basis of the sort of policies and values which made Birmingham successful and which could make it successful once again. What is the alternative? More of the same. But clearly the ‘New South’ model is not working in Birmingham. It’s time to consider Southern solutions for the problems faced by a Southern city wrecked by US policies and values.

Consequences of destruction of Southern agrarian elites(Golden-Circle)

Some historians have described the Old South as a ‘seigneurial’ society that was part of a broader civilisation of classically-inspired, agrarian-based cultures. This civilisation was quite distinct in numerous important ways from the sort of society that emerged in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. One of the ways in which Southern society was unique was the nature of its ruling class. Italian professor Raimondo Luraghi on page 32 of his book The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South describes the Southern ruling class: Wade Hampton (prior to the US conquest of the South he was possibly the wealthiest man in the United States) is an example of the sort of elite produced by the Old South In the South, Renaissance “gentlemen” believed in a strong individuality and defied adverse fortune by personal virtue. Habitual seigneurs of large land-holdings, without any strong religious discipline, they were fond of good reading, leisure, hunting, and horsemanship. The professor describes the society which these Southern gentleman ruled as ‘a hierarchic society founded upon land seigneurie, as in Europe’ prior to the political rise of the bourgeois. In contrast, Luraghi notes that New England was ‘a land of thrifty merchants, shipmasters, and bankers, inspired by the idea of a divine mission.’ It is logical that the sort of elites who emerged to lead each of these societies would have been quite different from one another – and, in fact, they were. The United States’ military conquest of the South in 1860s and the subsequent military occupation (‘Reconstruction’) and lengthy period of crushing poverty inflicted disorder upon the region and created an environment where the class which had long led the South was largely replaced by outsiders and those who emerged from a new bourgeois order. The continuity that was central to Southern civilisation was disrupted and the continued existence of the South as a distinct culture was put in jeopardy. Southern writer and professor Herman Clarence Nixon‘s article ‘Whither Southern Economy?’ (which appeared in the 1930 Southern manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition) summarises some some of the reasons for the fall of the old aristocracy in the South. He also mentions some of the consequences of the ‘New South’ order, which led to the imposition of a new economic system, media and understanding of work and leisure. Southern resources were grabbed up by Northern industrial and financial elites, who used the power of government to reinforce their economic control. The South was left unprotected without its old, leading class: In disrupting and disorganizing the economic life of the South, the Civil War [sic] jolted from power and status the most articulate agrarian group known to American history, leaving no effective check to an industrial dominance in national [sic] public policy, particularly in tariff matters. It partially terminated and partially modified the distinctive plantation system, making Southern agricultural diversification and industrial recovery difficult for lack of physical goods and capital. It forced a dependence in the South on the one-crop system, temporarily reinforced by unusually high prices for cotton. It terminated slavery without removing negro labor. It brought to the South an appreciation of the common man and the dignity of labor with an accompanying loss in the appreciation of the uses of leisure. It created a Southern vacuum for an economic invasion, with the region becoming a suppliant for outside aid and yielding much control of its economic destiny. It destroyed real estate values, not only with serious damage to pre-war owners, but with the consequential jungle of speculation, promotion, and “booms” as values moved upward again with many ups and downs. It tended to throw the Southern perspective towards a bourgeois materialism, to shift the embodiment of ideals from the country gentleman to the captain of industry or finance. With a mixture of justification, and perhaps, exaggeration, a spokesman of the ancien regime complained in De Bow’s Review, November, 1866, that Southern railroads, factories, and debts were owned by interests in the North and East and that an elegant Southern aristocracy had been displaced by a new “Northeastern moneyed aristocracy.” The worked, he said, had never seen “an aristocracy half so powerful, half so corrupt, so unprincipled, and rapacious, nor one-tenth so vulgar and so ignorant, as the moneyed aristocracy of the Northeast.” In more ways than one was there truth in the provincial epigram, “The bottom rail is on the top now, mister.”

All But Their Honor

Rhett, Southern independence & the Golden Circle

by The League of the South

The Old South is understood by historians to have been part of a much larger civilisation of plantation societies in the New World that stretched from Brazil north to through the Caribbean through the mainland South up to Delaware. The centre of this agrarian, classically-influenced civilisation was the Caribbean and there the plantation model of society was most intense. Prior to the American Revolution the South had been part of the same empire as the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean. The severing of that union in 1776 ultimately led to the downfall of the British Caribbean and saw the agrarian South join with New England in an ill-advised union of greatly different cultures and economies. Nineteenth century Southerner leaders understood all of this and many Southern nationalists such as South Carolina statesman Robert Barnwell Rhett dreamed of uniting the entire plantation region of the New World in a single confederation which would be powerful enough to stand up to the growing industrial powers of Western Europe and the US North (and thereby prevent disastrous economic (high tariffs), political (democracy) and social (equality) policies from being implemented in the region). ‘The Golden Circle’ was a term that many Southerners (and sympathisers in the North) used to describe the future they envisioned in which the mainland South, the Caribbean and coastal lands around the Caribbean would be joined together, forming a large ‘circle’ of sorts on maps. Professor Eric H Walther describes Rhett’s vision of Southern independence on page 150 of his book The Fire-Eaters. Clearly, this was not simply a reaction to Northern intervention in Southern society; this was a program which many Southerners must have found inspiring as they thought about how to strengthen, expand and further enrich their society. Walther writes:Rhett offered an alternative. An independent South, he claimed, would be invincible. Eight million whites, holding 4 million slaves, “are too mighty in their strength to trust any other people to shape their destiny,” Rhett argued. “They must be independent and free in the high station for which they are designed amongst the great nations of the earth.” Furthermore, southerners had a “high mission” imposed upon them: they had a duty to show the world a slaveholding republic could not only exist but thrive. A thriving future, he said, was inevitable. Freed from the restraints of Yankee domination, he pledged, “Expansion shall be the law of the South.” In his incredible picture of the future, a Southern nation [sic] would consume all potential plantation regions in the Western Hemisphere, reaching thirty degrees north and south of the equator (roughly from Virginia to the southern tip of Brazil). Southern institutions would thus remain safe for centuries, southern economic power would dominate the world, and liberty for white southerners would never again be in jeopardy. If northerners joined southerners to elect a Democrat president in 1860, the South might choose to remain in the Union a while longer. But if a Republican were elected southerners must choose between a dangerous Union and a “glorious Southern Confederacy.”

Maxcy Gregg: Fire-Eater & Confederate general

By the League of the South

One of the leading Southern nationalist advocates in the Palmetto State years before secession and the US war against the South was Maxcy Gregg. The Columbia native was a lawyer, scientist and soldier who ultimately gave his life for Southern independence, killed in 1862 while resisting the US invasion of Virginia. The picture below was taken yesterday and shows a sign in Columbia, SC just a block from the Statehouse where a house once stood in which Gregg was born. Notice that the sign, erected in 1938, refers to the ‘Southern rights movement.’

Memphis, Tennessee turns back on Southern identity

The City of Memphis has decided to eliminate the Southern names for three city parks. WMCTV covers the story: The council decided Nathan Bedford Forrest Park will now be called Health Sciences Park. Confederate Park will no[w] be named Memphis Park and Jefferson Davis Park will now be known as Mississippi River Park. It should be noted that Memphis’s population is now 62% Black and less than 30% White. ‘New South’ democracy and equality mean that Southern heroes are cast aside while people (such as those who staff the local government) with no regard for the historic Southern identity and culture of the city are allowed to push their anti-Southern and anti-White agenda.