"Incomparable in Its Symmetry"

On the 4th of August, 2007, R. Jamison posted a remarkable speech by John Sharp Williams on the blog Spirit Water Blood. Williams was a U. S. Representative and U. S. Senator whose father was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. The speech was published in the Confederate Veteran magazine in 1904 (Vol. XII, No. 11, November 1904, pp. 517-521).

The speech is magnificent. It is impossible to imagine any U. S. politician of the last fifty years speaking with such depth and insight.

Let me just quote a few passages to illustrate Mr. William's profound insights.

On the subject of fighting --

"Mere fighting is no virtue; far from it. Indeed, the man who is not great enough and brave enough not to fight when he ought not to is a poor excuse for a man. Speaking for myself, I have no admiration of the professional fighter, whether he be a Texas cowboy or a West Point graduate…"

Williams expresses my own feelings about war and fighting. I have no respect for "our troops" because they are not fighting for a cause I respect.

Why did the South fight? –

"But there was something else, and even a greater cause than local self-government, for which we fought. Local self-government temporarily destroyed may be recovered and ultimately retained. The other thing for which we fought is so complex in its composition, so delicate in its breath, so incomparable in its symmetry, that, being once destroyed, it is forever destroyed. This other thing for which we fought was the supremacy of the white man’s civilization in the country which he proudly claimed his own; 'in the land which the Lord his God had given him;' founded upon the white man’s code of ethics, in sympathy with the white man’s traditions and ideals."

Yes, it is the same today. We are not fighting for free trade, capitalism or the U. S. Constitution. We fight for white civilization.

The great struggle during the "Reconstruction Era" –

"There is no grander, no more superb spectacle than that of the white men of the South standing from ’65 to ’74 quietly, determinedly, solidly, shoulder to shoulder in phalanx, as if the entire race were one man, unintimidated by defeat in war, unawed by adverse power, unbribed by patronage, unbought by the prospect of present material prosperity, waiting and hoping and praying for the opportunity which, in the providence of God, must come to overthrow the supremacy of 'veneered savages,' superficially 'Americanized Africans' – waiting to reassert politically and socially the supremacy of the civilization of the English-speaking white race. But what gave them the capacity to do this sublime thing, to conceive it and to persevere in it to the end? To wait like hounds in the leash – impatient, yet obedient to the call of the huntsman’s horn – which came upon the heels of the autumn elections in the Northwestern States in 1874? What gave this capacity to the 'easy-going, indolent, life-enjoying' Southerner? What if not four years of discipline, training, hardship? Four years which taught the consciousness of strength and mutual courage, the consciousness of capacity for working together, the power and the desire of organization, and which gave them, with it all, a capacity for stern action when required by stern events? But for the war – the lessons which it taught, the discipline which it enforced, the capacity for racial organization which was born with it – I, for one, do not believe that conditions in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi to-day would be very far different from what they are in Hayti, Cuba, or Martinique."

Alas, the fruits of that great victory were squandered. By the 1950's the "veneered savages" were ushered back into white civilization. Yes, it was often at the end of a Northern bayonet, but that doesn't explain the South's capitulation.

In the past, as Williams points out, the white Southerners stood shoulder to shoulder against the racial universalists. What happened? I think the South succumbed to the great seduction. They learned to love Big Brother. It gets rather tiresome to always be contra mundum.

And once the incomparable symmetry of white civilization is destroyed, can it ever be regained? The answer is no, if we think like the walking universalists. There is no system, no magic talisman that will restore white civilization. It's not a question of restoring the Latin Mass or voting for a president who is "born again." The princess in the fairy tale remains in a death-like slumber because no one loves her. She will be restored to life when she is loved. The love that brings even the dead to life comes only from those men and women who are connected, through their spirit and blood, with His civilization. Nothing is impossible to such men and women.