N. RATIONALISTS vs S. CLASSICAL CULTURE
 
From: tmanning1@triad.rr.com
 
Dear SHNV Friends,
 
Many of my friends are “self-conscious” Southern agrarians who very accurately define the political and cultural conflict that is rapidly bringing down the USA to a third world status. This battle was really over 100-150 years ago.
 
Once in a while I get emails from someone who was born in the northern or western States, but rarely. Southerners are to a large measure "reconstructed" to some degree, just as I have been. But we have offered a determined resistance to Marxist indoctrination. The peoples of the northern States have not. It is to the Southerners that I wish to be of help. I really do not care how people in Maine or California do and think about things. Southern States do not now nor have ever shared a common culture with these folks. We are a separate and distinct people in spite of repeated attempts to force us to have their laws, their educational systems and their political points of view.
 
It is significant that the "Civil Rights" clashes focused on a Southern university campus. Here is the reason. To help a northern born person you first need to introduce them to a classical education outside of American liberal egalitarianism. The racial conflict at a Southern university was a result, not so much over differences in racial attitudes, because northerners where I lived in Michigan, Ohio and Washington, D.C. were just as racist as any neo-Nazi I have known. Generally outside of some “reconstructed (yankeefied)” Southerners I have found racial attitudes more generous and open than in the northern and western States. American (yankee Nativism) was anti Roman Catholic, anti-Jew and anti-all non-whites.
 
The foundation of the clash on the Southern university campus under an Ivy League egalitarian U.S. President (JFK) and Administration was over classical academic beliefs and culture that still structured the thinking of the Southern people. George Wallace was right about wanting to maintain State control at our schools, but was manipulated into taking his stand amid a racial conflict spilling over from burning and fractured northern cities and their racial conflicts. This is clearly demonstrated in northerners taking buses South to bring their racial conflicts to the more sedate and peaceful Southern cities and university campuses. I supported the stand of George Wallace then, and I have found no reason to change my position.
 
Better than 93% of northerners are agnostic or atheist when confronted with questions of Christian orthodoxy. Their lack of recognition of a power higher than their own power to reason normally blinds them to any real level of understanding about Southern agrarians who are Christian in their thinking. As such they also lack a classical humane respect for human life as are most liberal Marxists who seek military answers to cultural problems. My life is short to waste on their nonsense.
 
By 1935 or so the northern culture was fractured and the basic presuppositions with which we for centuries had come to a table of discussion had surrendered to rationalism and Marxism. Such people fail to realize that rationalism is not rational. This is very important. These presuppositions were gone in Europe more than a hundred years before that.
 
At least most Southerners think of themselves as Christians with an "orthodox" world view through most have not taken the time to define exactly what that is. We still instinctively are somewhat classical in our thinking. Classical civilizations of the past still have something in common with Southern thinking. But classical thought has nothing in common with Marxism and rationalism.
 
This is why teaching northerners about the Founders view of the USA rarely achieves anything. Teaching them, about the true meaning of the St. Andrews or Southern Cross falls on deaf ears and a blind mind. Southerners are closer to classical thinking and that of our Founders. This is why I have sought to build friendships composed largely of classical thinking Southerners.
 
Timothy D. Manning, M.Div
Executive Director
www.TheSouthernPartisan.com
Kernersville, North Carolina