Sunday, September 13, 2009

Point Two: Charles Johnson is prejudiced, and subscribes to stereotypes

Johnson's attack on me at LGF depends largely on convincing his readers that, because I am an obstreperous Southerner . . . well, nudge, nudge. You know how those people are.

Except when they aren't. I've sometimes had occasion to warn my fellow Southerners not to imagine they can defend the South halfway, or be a "moderate" defender of the South.

People who hate the South -- and I think Charles Johnson might fit that description -- will not permit you the leisure of merely saying, "Well, we're not all bad." They will insult you and goad you until you feel the temptation . . . well, remember when Zell Miller wished he could challenge Chris Matthews to a duel?

No Southerner should ever think he will be allowed to defend his homeland and her people without being insulted for it. If you're going to defend the South, you must be prepared to defend it down to the last boll weevil on the scraggliest cotton patch in front of the most decrepit tar-paper shack in Mississippi.

So widespread is anti-Southern prejudice, especially among the intellectual elite, that the man who presumes to defend the South might as well begin by foreswearing any further ambition in life. Assume at the outset that you will be denounced and castigated and exiled to outer darkness, and resolve that this daunting prospect will not deter you from your duty.

Ask yourself this, my Southern friend: Who are these people who insult you, your friends and your family? Why does it give them so much pleasure to insult you? And why do they imagine that you will let the insult pass by unnoticed?

Does Charles Johnson suppose that I am a coward? Or that I am too stupid to understand when I am being insulted? Does he believe himself so infinitely superior to me that I cannot hold my own in debate with him?

At one point in what he imagines to be an indefeasible attack on me, Johnson quotes one sentence from a speech I made to a Sons of Confederate Veterans camp in 2003. Permit me to quote a little more of that:
Some people desire to wish away the past, or to revise history to fit the passions and politics of the present. Forgetting seems to be the most popular course; surveys show that mere fractions of Americans today know even the most basic facts about the war, or about any history at all, for that matter. If Americans are intent upon a general amnesia, I suppose we must be regarded as spoilsports for insisting that they remember at least part of our past. An America that knows nothing of Saratoga or Brandywine or Yorktown will be annoyed that we scold them for forgetting Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville and Franklin.
So I began, you see, by pointing out the widespread ignorance of history, a problem the SCV is pledged to fight against. Subsequently, I observed that this kind of ignorance is certainly not a new problem:
One of the more shocking claims of our radical adversaries is that, in commemorating our Confederate ancestors, we are somehow "un-American." But this is nothing new. The Union cause attracted to itself numerous German revolutionaries who had fled to America after collapse of the European uprisings of 1848. Though they had left the Fatherland behind, these Germans had not abandoned their radicalism, and so were among the most militant of Yankees. Professor Clyde Wilson reminds us of an encounter between one of these German radicals and Confederate General Richard Taylor. In his elegant memoir, "Destruction and Reconstruction," General Taylor recalled the occasion in 1865 when the duty fell to him to surrender the last Confederate army east of the Mississippi River. At Union headquarters, a German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured General Taylor that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught "the true American principles." To which General Taylor -- the son of Zachary Taylor --- replied that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him these "true American principles."
Ironic, yes? Just as ironic that those of us who today remember General Taylor and his fellow Confederates are denounced as un-American by people whose ideas of "true American principles" are derived not from the Founders, but from radical intellectuals and foreign philosophers whose ideologies were unknown to Washington, Jefferson and Madison. They accuse us of "hate," when in fact we are motivated by love, love for our ancestors, and love for the America they created. Worse still, when provoked, these radicals will even compare our ancestors to Nazis. My father was wounded within an inch of his life while fighting the Nazis in France. Who are these people to tell such insulting lies about my ancestors?
My father served honorably, as had his grandfather, Winston Wood Bolt, an illiterate farmboy who fought as a private in the 13th Alabama Regiment and was captured at Gettysburg.

Southerners aren't prone to back down from a fight -- Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) wrote an interesting book on this subject called Born Fighting -- and an admiration for stubborn tenacity in conflict explains one thing some people don't understand about me.

Why do I always stick up for people like Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, Mark Steyn and Kathy Shaidle? Because they fight. And the harder they're attacked, the harder they fight. What's more, because they do not flinch under attack, they fight and win, and every victory makes them stronger.

The kind of fighters I admire are smart enough to distinguish friends from enemies. Malkin or Coulter might criticize a squishy member of the Republican "jellyfish caucus" from the right, but they spend most of their time attacking liberals. This habit makes them valuable conservative allies.

Charles Johnson . . . eh, not so much: Note: Charles Johnson was not there. I was. And so were lots of people from Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia . . . oh, wait. I forgot. All Southerners are ignorant racists, right, Charles?

So never mind the people who attended from Ohio, New York, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Idaho -- you get the picture. Charles Johnson sits in front a computer whining because nobody's acknowleding his superiority, while I'm out busting my ass to report this story, and when VodkaPundit uses my reporting, this results in Charles accusing Vodka of being in league with the (Southern raaaaacist) Devil.

Except Charles Johnson doesn't believe in the Devil. He also doesn't believe in God, because the only deity Charles Johnson acknowledges is himself. He is omniscient and omnipotent, and your refusal to bow down to him is blasphemy.

Kind of like Obama, really.

PREVIOUSLY:
Point One: Charles Johnson doesn't know me from Adam's housecat
Point Three: Charles Johnson will regret it but once, and that will be continuously

16 comments:

  1. My dad was a Texan, his was a Northern English-Scots Irish ancestry. His ancestors fought at Kings Mountain, and every war since. He spent 33 years in the Navy himself. Your article begins to hit on a phenomenon that so few understand. That of the role of the large numbers of the failed 1848 German Revolutionaries on Civil War politics and the resulting coming of Progressivism. Since that time it has been quite acceptable, nay fashionable for the intellectual eltie that came to make up the Eastern Establishment to point to the south as the bastion of stupidity as well as racism. Their understanding of the culture is so ignorant that I can't find any better word than ignorant. To truly appreciate that it is necessary to realize that to a very large extent those early Progressive were educated either in Germany or by German intellectual thought. And LaSalle's German Socialism was not Marx's socialism, but did look a bit like Progressivism. It's a funny thing too, Woodrow Wilson's obvious racism is dismissed out of hand as a product of having grown up primarily in the South instead of as a byproduct of his political orientation.
    I don't physicially live in the south but I am very much my fathers daughter. Charles Johnson seems intent on insulting as many as he is able. I quit going to his site when he decided that anyone who didn't believe in evolution was an ass. Once upon a time he had some relevence, but since he went back to his liberal roots, no longer.

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  2. Charles Johnson used to have a blog worth reading. Now he has started running what could almost be mistaken for a diary at Daily Kos. It is rather sad that he decided to hang his hat on the hook of ideological and theological purity rather than recognizing that thee is room for reasonable people to disagree.

    But as we now see, Johnson is not reasonable.

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  3. I like even love the people you like. German import Southron that I am. I love fighters who fight for the right no matter where they come from. Carry on Mister.

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  4. I wonder if CJ haa a brain tumor and that is why he gone completely utterly bonkers.

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  5. An America that knows nothing of Saratoga or Brandywine or Yorktown will be annoyed that we scold them for forgetting Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville and Franklin.

    Let's not scold them for forgetting Sharpsburg when we know the proper name of that battle is Antietam. ;)

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  6. Well, LGF changed their tune as soon as Obama became president. So, what they say doesn't matter. They should change their name to Arlen.

    Left Going Forward.

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  7. You are ever right about the anti-southern folks. I spent my entire freshmen year at an east coast college dealing being forced into arguments about the south by a bunch of new york/new jersey folks. It's bizarre how much bias people enjoy cultivating about the south.

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  8. Charles Johnson does not and is incapable of debate. That's far above his intellectual capacities.

    The brain tumor theory (or just neurological deterioration of the frontal lobes) can explain sudden changes in personality but Johnson merely reverted to his pre-9/11 personality because as you may have noticed, liberals have amnesia for history.

    It is convenient amnesia as their initiatives have all ended in disaster one way or another (destruction of the black family by Welfare in a way slavery did not, the predictable over a million slain by communists after the American left forced us out of Vietnam, millions of children dead of malaria in Africa after the left got perfectly safe DDT banned etc.)

    A "man-made" disaster as Obama now wants us to call terrorism such as 9/11 has to be erased as well because it was perpetrated by one of the Left's new client groups, supremacist Muslims working toward sharia (Islamic religious law) wherever they colonize).

    Luckily this cataclysmic event is written in indelible ink on the hearts and brains of America's better citizens.

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  9. The pointy-head types that make up the liberal Eastern establishment, and now control our government, fear that which they don't understand.
    And ridicule (of Southerners, in particular) is borne out of this fear. They fear people who will fight to the death, if need be, in defense of their family, and who don't make a living hiding behind words.
    When I run up against these pretentious fools, I find the best response is merely to look at them and laugh. For they truly are a sorry bunch of idiots!

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  10. Linked to at:
    http://www.thecampofthesaints.com/2009.09.13_arch.html#1252891529927

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  11. Well Mr. Other McCain, now that's a fine Southern name, if I ever heard one, "Other." I greatly enjoy your blog. It seems to me that you are one of the few conservative pundits not afraid to put up a fight and a fine fight you do put up. As for Charles Johnson, who is he? As one Texas preacher said, "I've been criticized by experts, these little spurts don't bother me at all."

    Greg Marquez
    goyomarquez@earthlink.net

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  12. Well, if we're going to be critical of Southrons it is fair to remember that the worst anti-school integration riots occurred in Detroit and Boston.

    A quick check at Wikipedia, that noted ultra-right website reveals:
    " 'Forced busing' was a term used by many to describe the mandates that generally came from the courts. Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; Pasadena, California; Richmond, Virginia; San Francisco, California; Detroit, Michigan; and Wilmington, Delaware. From 1972 to 1980, despite busing, the percentage of blacks attending mostly-black schools barely changed, moving from 63.6% to 63.3%.[2]"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing_in_the_United_States

    One can argue whether, in 1830, it was better to be a black slave in Richmond or an Irish factory-worker in Boston. Certainly the slave was guaranteed an adequate diet and retirement, even if as valued livestock, while Irish workers in Boston were treated as disposable parts. I don't think I would sacrifice my freedom for such, but the North has more than a few beams to answer for ere it points to motes in Southron eyes.

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  13. Is RES seriously arguing whether it's better to be a slave or a factory worker? Oh no, he's covered... "One can argue," he says; and presumably the "one" is somebody else. Then why bring it up? Meanwhile, Anonymous implies that the destruction of black families in bondage through selling off and separating members of the family isn't as bad as the perverse incentives of welfare programs.

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  14. Charles Johnson? Blechh. I got sick to f’g death of his ridiculous bike photos… hated those almost more than his nutty system update entries. (Dude, who gives an eff?!? Besides, LGF still has one of the slowest & buggiest comment systems out there — really — it’s crap.)

    And oooohhhh!!! Did you ever see that flashing gif of the Rathergate docs? How far do you think he’s gonna try to ride that one?

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  15. My gosh, this was a nice piece. I never left my own Southern home in Kentucky until I married my sailor; we first lived blissfully in Florabama for about six months and then moved to the cold (spiritually as well as physically) environs of Connecticut for three long years.

    I had no idea what it meant to be Southern til we had lived there for a bit. My accent caused people to single me out or exclude me; it took me six months to find a job, even though I have a degree and some butt-kicking computer skills; even then, the job did not pay nearly what I was worth. I wanted my husband to stop at the border when we left so I could moon the state, but he wouldn't even slow down, the rat.

    We're moving back to the South - Georgia now - at the beginning of the year. It feels good.

    (so does posting here get me banned at The Other Place? :) )

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  16. The Ghost of Flannery O'ConnorMon Sep 21, 05:13:00 PM

    One of the things I find morbidly amusing about many urban liberals outside the South is how, on the one hand, many of them wear their prejudices against Southerners on their sleeves, and their "multiculturalism" or "worldliness" on the other. But there's a tiny problem with that: the same things they criticize Southerners for are a large part of what connects them to all the other cultures of the world, which through which urban, non-Southern "cultural elites" regard these other cultures as "quaint", "charming", or some other patronizing adjective.

    A Yankee "cultural elite" would scoff at a Southerner for remembering Mosby's Ride, yet applauds the Scotsman for his local "color" of spitting out the name Campbell like a curse. Both responses are simply different ways of elevating the "cultural elite" to a position of self-prominence, only the former is openly insulting while the other is patronizing. To the "cultural elite" remembrance of the past of one's culture and treating it as relevant today is beyond his "nuanced" scope.

    What the "cultural elites" fail to grasp is that the average Southerner has more in common with the various cultures of the world than the "multicultural" urban-dweller who can only see the superficial differences, yet rejects the true roots of his "Other" in lieu of congratulating himself for his make-believe "multiculturalism".

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