Just recently, a friend emailed me and commented that he’d like to see another movement promoting Southern heritage emerge. I replied to him that I didn’t see that happening in my lifetime. From about the early 1990s we had the emergence of a Southern Heritage movement that lasted until just recently. Now, it’s all gone for all intents and purposes. And there are several reasons for that. All that is left now is the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and although they are not perfect, at least they are trying to preserve Southern heritage, which is more than you can say about some of their detractors whose main mission in life seems to be to complain about everything the SCV does. How that helps to preserve Southern heritage, I have yet to figure out.
One big failing the Southern movement had, as a whole, was the lack of a cohesive agenda. Without that, you are not going very far. Over the years, I have followed and often been part of the John Birch Society. And ever since I knew anything about them, the JBS always had an agenda of several different concerns which their members could choose from to work with. Nobody can be good in all areas, but most folks can usually find two or three areas of a given agenda that they can work with. And the JBS always sent you a monthly bulletin listing their projects for any given month.
The groups in the Southern heritage movement seldom did anything like this. Southern heritage groups needed to do this kind of thing, even though it would have been on a smaller scale than what the JBS did. We needed to give our members something to work on, some project to be able to follow through on other than just sending in their yearly dues. I suggested this on several different occasions, to no avail. If you don’t have some worthwhile project(s) to work on, your members just don’t stay. They may hang around for a year or two, but with nothing to do, they will shortly move on. Just loving Southern heritage is often not enough if you don’t work at developing ways to preserve and protect that heritage, and most Southern groups didn’t. They couldn’t seem to see that far ahead.
Most groups I dealt with developed credible websites, many of which were pretty good. But, with no agenda to back them up, all they could do was provide useful information – with no way to use that information for heritage preservation except on the individual level. Some groups had newsletters, which was good, but editors who don’t get paid for what they do have a hard time coming up with information to fill a newsletter every month, or even every other month. Then, too, you had people in some of these groups whose chief contribution to a newsletter was to complain about its content. They griped about the sources of information some editors used, but when asked to contribute articles to newsletters, their response was a deafening silence. After all, they were there to critique what they didn’t like, not to make any positive contribution to change that!
Then, there were some groups whose sole contribution to the cause of Southern heritage was to get their members to sign a paper saying they agreed with it – and then they never had to do anything else – and so they didn’t! So, you had some groups whose membership was tremendous on paper, but basically non-existent otherwise. Such “groups” may have a few thousand paper members in them, but if they are not doing anything but signing onto a group they claim to believe in, what good are they?
While I can’t cover all the problems the Southern movement had here, this is some of them. Something else they needed to do that they never learned to do was to spot agent provocateurs in their ranks. This was something they couldn’t seem to fathom. I know of one group that was basically destroyed because of one such person – and after he destroyed it, he simply resigned from it. His job was done!
Any new group serious about preserving Southern heritage and history has to be able to come up with an agenda of what they want to do and how they plan to do it, and once they are organized, they need to stick to the agenda they’ve come up with. Just getting a group together who wants to preserve Southern heritage with no idea of how they plan to do that is about as useful as spitting in the Gulf of Mexico to try and raise the water level. A constructive agenda of how they plan to achieve their objective is a necessity. Any group not willing to do that will simply fail, as most Southern groups in the past have, or they will end up with a pile of paper memberships which are basically meaningless with no workable agenda behind them. I’d love to see new Southern heritage groups emerge, but I’d like to see them do it in such a way as to have some chance of making a difference – and without a workable agenda, you just don’t do that. I hope there’s a little food for thought here.
-By Al Benson Jr.
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
“the lack of a cohesive agenda.”
Our enemies have it — we don’t. Their agenda is global domination for their international people and the enslavement of all other nations and people groups; and it’s a trans-generational agenda that’s been progressing for a very long time.
Getting people to believe this is seemingly impossible. It’s disheartening, but we must keep trying. What else can we do without, as Dabney said, yielding to a degradation worse than defeat?
I actually made some suggestions in a rant (I was fairly pissed that day’ so I’m afraid I came off as more belligerent than I should have, but I still feel my criticism is valid) below Lancelot Lamar’s recent article. The 80 mil who voted against the regime–what all votes for trump de facto represented–are enough to break the system’s stranglehold on our economic well being and our culture; they just need to be organized.
I’m afraid even if it were possible to organize the 80 mil who voted against the regime they’d still be no match for organized Jewry. They’re united against all of us dissidents around the idea that they are the exclusive CHOSEN by God to rule every lesser race. They view themselves as a higher order of being. If the only thing all of us have in common is that we’re against their straw-man regime, we’ll remain easy pickings for them to isolate and destroy.
You are correct. The movement of our adversaries is transgenerational. They have been at it in this country since before 1800. How you convince people of that I don’t know. I’ve been writing and working against it for over 50 years now as best I could and I know lots of others have been able to do more than I could. Still, our adversaries with their one world govt. approach seem to be winning because they have an agenda and most of us don’t.
Thanks for the article, and I agree with you assessment.
Personally, have no time for just Southern heritage movements, they are the slow road to perdition.
We a engaged in something much bolder, and just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it does not exist. But there is always room for more. Start somewhere, start small, and grow. The rest of us will find you eventually.
Of the few “southern” blogger / alt media folks out there … they’re all wasting time yapping and accomplishing nothing. Occidental Dissent is a prime example. So much potential … wasted. Wanna get rich helping the south? Think and plan very carefully, then launch a southern heritage / movement site / podcast. Don’t charge a membership. Instead deliver extreme value AND create a high quality daily / weekly / monthly planner. Charge about $29. for each years new one ( or whatever as long as you can NET at least $10. per order. Use POD so don’t have to mess with everything. Have a different CIVIC DUTY DAY for each planner with detailed instructions. Eg., which rep’s to contact, what to say, who to support and vote for, how to unite and prep with militia’s “ETC.”
Get everyone on the same page so to speak. Your goal is at least 1 million followers but even if you only got 100,000 … X $10. a year is what? Awaken the ( southern ) sleeping giant.
PS : Abbeville Institute ( on Youtube ), is too soft and organizes nothing. It seems they’ve drifted off the wayside?
This is so not a time to waste platforms. Whenever we see a southern platform TRYING … donate a$ much to them as we can. Let’s get the show on the road!
One place I think a lot of people go wrong is they try to catch more people by casting a wider net. But this waters down the message and gives everybody more sacred cows to dance around. I think it would be a lot more productive to organize around fundamental, non compromisable beliefs, including beliefs about who we are as a race, and get whatever core group you can get who accept those fundamental beliefs. Then ask “What can we do with the people we have?” rather than “How can we get our numbers up to do these things we want to do?”
Fundamental beliefs>people>mission/agenda
^In that order.
And by fundamental beliefs I mean beliefs about reality that will necessarily weed out people who refuse to accept those realities. I don’t mean things you “believe strongly” I mean things that are just true and important to accept as true. To “strongly believe” something is to believe a lie. I don’t strongly believe that 2+2 = 4 and I don’t strongly believe that only women can have babies. But some people strongly believe that a man can have a baby. Many such examples.