Earlier this week, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) dropped its lawsuit against Memphis Greenspace, the fictious corporation created in coordination with the Memphis City Council as a means to run an end around Tennessee state law which prohibits localities from removing monuments from public property without the permission of the state legislature in Nashville. In so doing, the ghouls of the Left will exhume the bodies of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife and the SCV will reinter them at the Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee, about a half an hour from where Forrest was born.
I’ll get to the editorial commentary in a moment, but let us begin at the beginning, as it were. Forrest has long been a target of the Left because of his association with the Ku Klux Klan. The communists, of course, cannot be bothered to educate themselves enough to know that the first iteration of the Klan used its heft to terrorize white Yankee carpetbaggers and white scalawags cooperating with the Yankee occupiers. Their resistance was crucial in defeating the endeavors of the Radical Republicans and forcing an end to the first round of Reconstruction.
When the second round arrived in the form of the Civil Rights movement, the Yankees made it clear that they had learned their lesson from the original failure: they could not allow a fourth column of resistance to embolden the hearts of besieged Southerners. Thus was the third Klan born, a gaggle of ill-kempt bottom feeders who were an embarrassment to the South writ large. “Men” who thought it a good idea to throw firebombs into black churches, as though that would engender sympathy for the cause of Dixie. You know, the more I think about it, Klan III sounds a lot like the Alt-Right…no wonder the AR always rubbed me the wrong way. Indeed, such actions had quite the opposite effect, causing those who did not support Civil Rights to quietly knuckle under, lest they be associated with the cretins committing these terrible acts.
You’ll note I skipped right over the second Klan, which was largely a function of Yankeedom as a response to increased Catholic and Jewish immigration into the North. All the pictures of mass rallies of men marching in bedsheets took place up there.
I went on that historical aside because it is germane to how we got here with General Forrest. The Left had periodically flapped its gums and shook its fist about the racist Confederate statues, but it never really got anywhere. Then Dylann Roof happened. When Roof shot up that church in Charleston, he provided a bully pulpit to the enemy within and poisoned the well such that many good Southern people who do not hate their heritage were afraid to stand up to the invader lest they be tarred with that brush.
And before I get some yahoo going off in the comments: yes, I’m aware of the claim that Roof was targeting a Far Left radical who was a political functionary in South Carolina. I do not find such activity to be productive nor sagacious. Murder is wrong and we’ve dedicated many articles and podcasts on the subject.
In the days immediately after the Charleston shooting, the Left declared war on the South, because there were some pictures in which Roof had a battle flag patch on his kit, along with the Rhodesian and the old South African flags. The commies had already killed the latter two, and now they had all the ammunition they needed to go after the former. It was all the way back in July of 2015 that the race hustlers declared that they wanted to tear down Forrest’s statue and remove his body from the premises.
I distinctly remember this moment because that utterance is what shook me from my libertarian doldrums. Respecting the dead has been a core tenant of civilization and even of pre-civilization. Neanderthals are known to have practiced funerary rights and to have honored their fallen. Digging a man up because you don’t like his politics was a bridge too far for libertarian me. Even in some beautiful utopian future where Dixie is free, I would respect the bodies of my enemies who found their final resting place on Southern ground.
I had, for several years, deluded myself into believing that there was a peace possible with leftists: leave us alone and do what you want in your own areas. Of course, this was never possible, but it took this traumatic rhetoric to get me to see the truth of who and what my enemy was. I had always been sympathetic to my country’s past, and honored my heritage, but it was in a normie-friendly SCV kinda way. After the pimps and hustlers declared war on the dead? There was no turning back at that point. It was on that day that your old buddy Whitlow was born.
More: