Originally published September 13, 2021, at Dissident Mama.
“No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
— Virgil
I spent a day in Atlanta last February when meeting up with friends enroute to the Great Wolf Lodge about an hour south of the city. But where would be a good place to assemble our group of two mamas and six homeschooled kids for a picnic lunch and little sight-seeing?
The Coca-Cola Museum? Nah, too pricey and anti-white. Not a bargain at all.
The Margaret Mitchell House or the Swan House? Nope, both closed due to covid cultism.
The Atlanta History Museum and its Cyclorama? Uh uh, way too Yankee-fied. Plus, they were either closed or required masks. I can’t recall.
Okay, what about some other outdoor “Civil War” sites where we could gather and learn a bit about old Atlanta, you know, battlegrounds and what not? Well, turns out there’s not much prebellum history to see due to William Tecumseh Sherman’s utter destruction (which wasn’t an anomaly but, rather, was Union policy) of the Southern city so vital to the Confederate cause. More about that in a bit.
So, on this balmy winter day, we opted to convene at the free and centrally located Oakland Cemetery. “Founded in 1850 … [it’s] the oldest municipal burial ground in Atlanta, and one of the few remnants to survive Sherman’s March.” Margaret Mitchell, author of “Gone With the Wind,” is buried there, as well as five generals from the War Between the States and 27 city mayors.
But most notable to me were the Confederate Memorial Grounds — the final resting place of nearly 7,000 Southern soldiers, including the remains of about 3,000 unknown servicemen who perished during the 1864 Atlanta campaign and were eventually reinterred in Oakland. They are buried in a green square and guarded by the Lion of Atlanta monument, underneath which “are boxes containing amputated limbs” of these defenders of kith and kin.
My feature photo at top is the sad state of the Lion after BLM-Antifa nihilists were freely allowed to desecrate it during the 2020 riots. Compare that to the image of what the majestic Lion used to look like pre-woke terrorism (above) and then all that remains of the monument today (below).
However, when I was at Oakland in early 2021, the Lion was tightly covered in a tarp and behind locked gate in a half-assed attempt to pretend to shield onlookers from the vile things tagged upon this memorial to the dead. Really, though, it’s all part of the humiliation ritual within what Pedro Gonzalez calls the “culture industry.”
So, in impromptu rebel form, I old-lady hopped the wrought-iron fencing with the help of my best friend’s 9-year-old daughter. By God, I was going to see that Lion come hell or high water.
Above and below are photos I was able to capture underneath the shameful shroud, before the elderly black groundskeeper arrived on the scene.
“Lady, y’all can’t be in there,” he frantically yelled.
“But I drove down from North Carolina to see this Lion, and he’s all behind lock and key and covered up,” I explained. “So, we had to make do.”
“Ma’am, you can’t just jump the gate. We have rules,” he insisted.
“The people who hammered and spray-painted these monuments didn’t follow the rules,” I replied.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
“Carved from the largest block of marble ever quarried in America until that time (1894),” the Lion is made of Georgia stone and was sculpted by a Georgian native, who based his design on Switzerland’s Lion of Lucerne.
But the paws of Atlanta’s Lion can no longer protect his home. Removed allegedly to “temporary storage” due to “public safety concerns,” his pride is being hunted and eradicated.
“Vandals have left the city little choice but to move it,” claimed a neo-Bolshevik on Atlanta’s City Council. “It’s been a constant drain on city resources,” added another comrade, feigning concern over a dangerous and expensive situation they incited and emboldened, while supporting the erasure of the victim.
Here’s the Schadenfreude shit-show we witnessed upon entering Oakland Cemetery. Bear in mind, this was some eight months after the anti-white anarcho-tyrants were allowed and encouraged by government, police, and corporate media to carry out their “Kristallnacht for legacy America.”
Since a homeschooled adolescent could out debate the low-IQ “social justice” clowns, no wonder they disparage us as having white supremacy; it’s an easy out.
Seems the “struggle for equality” presentist “context” at the bottom of the sign is not enough for the haters, who insist upon misspelled inanities instead. And apparently, Rover has rights but not the Southern man. Better be careful, lefties, since even treating animals humanely is yet another thing now pegged as “white supremacy.”
“You know who hurts black ‘trans women?’” my best friend rhetorically asked. “Black men.” Yep, even the “transgender” advocates agree, yet somehow it’s still Robert E. Lee’s fault.
Luckily, C.S.A. Gen. Evan’s grave was unscathed. Chock one up for the illiteracy-pushing public schools!
I used my Swiss Army knife to cut the zip tie holding down the taut trash bag so that we could read the sign (above) leading to the Lion, which you can see shamefully cloaked. I also used my trusty tool to remove the tarp concealing the gaslit slogan spray-painted on this nearby bench (below). Don’t the woke mobs know they couldn’t survive and thrive without the support of police? It is they who are clearly the beneficiaries (and tools) of anarcho-tyranny, not we “neo-Confederates.”
Just like the United Daughters of the Confederacy sign (above) states, our ancestors are “never to be forgotten” and must live “through those left behind,” like my sons (below, reading headstones). It’s never been more vital to learn and teach your progeny real history.
How else can our children make sense of this deceitful and devious world? For instance, the very existence of Oakland’s Confederate Memorial grounds is a testament to the strength of the ladies of the South. Yet, current cemetery administrators try to weave together a “myth of Southern womanhood.”
My children know that feminism — from the first-wave temperance busybodies and suffragettes to today’s third-wave pill-popping washouts — has always been about smashing faith and family and promoting the “Jacobin theory” of egalitarianism. Truth is, the fiery and feminine dames of Dixie never needed the left-wing ideology and we still don’t. The learned lasses, mighty matrons, and humble homemakers are keys to the flourishing of a balanced and complementary social order. Now there’s real power!
Margaret Mitchell was one such bold belle. Both rabble-rousing and rooted, the Pulitzer-prize-winning author (whose Oakland tombstone is above) was the great-great-great-granddaughter of an American Revolution veteran, whose son served in the War of 1812, and his son was a “circuit-riding Methodist minister who settled in Marthasville, which later was named Atlanta.”
Mitchell’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy during the War for Southern Independence “and suffered two bullet wounds to the head during the fighting at Antietam,” what Dixians call the Battle of Sharpsburg. Even though Mitchell’s mother Maybelle was a suffragist with a penchant for progressive politics, she instilled in her daughter a haunting understanding of the War’s horrifying impact on Georgia, its culture, and its people.
The gifted writer penned the bulk of her iconic novel at this Midtown Atlanta apartment (above, seen from rear), which Mitchell playfully called “The Dump.” Before HBO “temporarily” banned “Gone With the Wind” in 2020, both the Nazis and the Soviets outlawed the book since it was seen as a story of resistance to central authoritarianism, survival, and hope.
But it also showed the miseries and senselessness of war, especially that of Sherman’s Total War campaign, in which the federal barbarians’ blazed across the Georgia countryside, annihilating farmland, crops, feed, cattle, domestic pets, and property. And let’s not forget the civilians who were starved through “cruel and rapacious” barbarism, as Karen Stokes describes it.
After meting out miseries to the defenseless women and children of rural Georgia, hellish helmsman Sherman then made his way to Atlanta, a railroad hub, supply center, and medical site. Predictably, the Old South city would not be spared the atrocities “which the Yankees seem to delight in committing.”
“Sherman’s bummers, unleashed upon the people of Georgia and South Carolina, stole whatever they did not eat on the spot and burned whatever they could not carry away,” explained Thomas Fleming, while “Yankee cavalry general [Judson] Kilpatrick, a ruthless, venereal-diseased Irishman,” as Clyde Wilson describes him, covered the right flank of the Union’s ruinous march to the sea.
It’s estimated that the “grand arsonist” of Atlanta decimated nearly 40% of the city, leaving in its fiery wake tens of thousands dead. Some historical revisionists (a.k.a. liars) now claim that it was the civilians who burned the city and then blamed the act on Sherman!
But true history shows that is was the “homed devil” himself who seared the city and then went on to unleash similar horrors in Eastern Georgia and in South Carolina, even burning Columbia after people surrendered. This scorched-earth tactic by the federals made Dixie a playground for reformers and revolutionaries. And Atlanta, so devastated as it had become nearly a blank slate, was to be the “New South” jewel in the “Proposition Nation” crown, all shiny and pretty on the outside but empty and dead inside.
I’ll pick up there with part 2, which includes our afternoon jaunt to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc. (now simply known as the King Center), and tie together what all this means for any American who’s an old-school lion. Liars be damned.
Truth warrior, Jesus follower, wife, and boymom. Apologetics practitioner for Orthodox Christianity, the Southern tradition, homeschooling, and freedom. Recovering feminist-socialist-atheist, graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and retired mainstream journalist turned domesticated belle and rabble-rousing rhetorician. You can read her blog at Dissident Mama.
Phenomenal article. I’ve never been to Atlanta but have always wanted to visit. Sad to see their current state of affairs.