A warning from the past about Rainbow Confederates
August 27, 2012
By Michael
Frank Conner concludes his book The South Under Siege: 1830-2000 with some advice for Southerners about how to save the traditional South and move towards independence. One of the many points he makes is to warn against an unfortunate and self-destructive trend that was emerging at the time. Connor could not have known that this trend would continue and eventually have a huge impact on the Southern heritage crowd. Since then, the folks now known to us as Rainbow Confederates (or PC Confederates) have found a fair number of Baby Boomers (especially online) eager to buy into the values of the 1960s cloaked in a Confederate flag and a lot of talk about heritage. Their plans to convince the broader public that the Confederacy was really a universalist, multicultural and egalitarian propositional nation have not fared nearly as well, despite sometimes elaborate and underhanded efforts. They have succeeded in pushing away a lot of traditional Southerners though. As well, they have moved from one defeat to another in the battle to preserve Confederate symbols and flags. Connor predicted this and warned against the Rainbows’ defeatist strategy back in 2000:
Many conservative Southerners believe that they can best preserve the surviving remnants of our culture and our history by persuading the black civil-rights activists (and the liberals) to stop attacking us; and they believe they can work that miracle by embracing multiculturalism. Toward that end, some members of Southern-patriot organizations have written books about blacks who served the Confederate Army; and some Southern-patriot organizations devote inordinate amounts of their public memorial services to discussions of blacks in the Confederate Army, or use black spokesmen to deliver their organizations’ public speeches. However, we can see from the steadily-increasing attacks in recent years by the black activists and liberals against the history and culture of the traditional white South that this policy of appeasement has been a total failure.
In addition, by accepting the liberals’ concept of multiculturalism, those Southern patriots are necessarily signalling to the general public their acceptance of: the preferential treatment of the blacks; the black activists’ inexcusable vituperations against the white Southerners; the destruction of the white Southerners as a people; the deliberate balkanization of the nation [sic]; and everything else that results from multiculturalism. By accepting the cynical double standard of multiculturalism, those Southern patriots are repudiating the values and culture of the traditional South, and thus are helping the liberals/black activsts to destroy our heritage just that much faster.
On The Web: http://southernnationalist.com/blog/2012/08/27/a-warning-from-the-past-about-rainbow-confederates/