Awesome SCV Video

The Southern Legal Resource Center eU P D A T E

SLRC TO RINGGOLD CITY COUNCIL: PUT THE BATTLE FLAG BACK

RINGGOLD, GA --The SLRC has submitted a written request to the City Council of Ringgold, Georgia, to restore to its rightful place a Confederate Battle Flag that was removed from the Ringgold Depot historic site nearly three years ago.

In 2005 the City of Ringgold completed restoration work at the depot and added a brick walkway, with some bricks bearing the names of about 750 Confederate soldiers who embarked from the station to fight in various theaters of the war. The local SCV camp purchased and contributed a Confederate fieldpiece as a centerpiece for the memorial area. Four flags, including the Confederate Battle Flag, were later installed on poles at the site.

Soon after the flags were put in place, however, local representatives of the NAACP told the Council that they objected to the Battle Flag’s presence at the depot, and in March of that year the Council voted to remove it and to substitute a replica of the Hardee-pattern unit flag – a white oval on a white-framed dark blue field – on the theory that the Hardee flag would have been carried by most of the units involved in the November 27, 1863, Battle of Ringgold Gap. SCV members and other citizens criticized the council’s move on grounds that the Hardee flag was not representative of all the soldiers who passed through the Depot, and that Council had in fact interfered with a public monument by removing the Battle Flag.

In a detailed three-page letter sent to each member of the city council, SLRC Executive Director Roger McCredie cited primary sources which proved that flags other than the Hardee flag were in fact carried into action at the Ringgold Gap battle. However, the issue of what flags were carried in that action is a moot point anyway, McCredie’s letter said, since the intent of the Depot memorial was to honor all Confederates who entrained there for service across the South and the Battle Flag was the appropriate flag to display in that context. “The Confederate Battle Flag is the most suitable flag for the display because it is immediately recognizable, it represents all Confederate soldiers and it was the choice of the veterans themselves,” McCredie’s letter stated. “Your action [in restoring the flag] will benefit your fellow Southerners who struggle daily to preserve the history, culture and symbols of this region.”

McCredie also noted that color prints of the depot as it appeared in 2005 with the Battle Flag in place are currently on display in several public buildings in Ringgold including the county administration building, the health department and the public library.

The TAG & Middle Georgia Chapters

The New Confederate Partisans
Ringgold FLAG RALLY!
We will honour our heroes with their Flag!

Apr. 26 2008
Ringgold Ga. Details HERE




SLRC plans to revive national origin issue

The SLRC is preparing to revive the issue of Southerners as a legitimate ethnic group whose culture is entitled to protection under law, and to seek national and international recognition of that status.

Executive Director Roger McCredie confirmed that next month’s issue of the SLRC newsletter will contain an updated hard copy version of the Confederate-Southern American National Origin Affidavit currently available on the SLRC website, and that the website version will also be redrafted to make it more readable and easier to complete. “We urge all loyal Southerners to complete and send us a copy of this affidavit,” McCredie said. In fact, we would urge everybody who signs one to make additional copies and circulate them.”

“Submitting this form in no way compromises anybody’s patriotism or standing as a good American,” SLRC Chief Trial Counsel Kirk Lyons said. “All a person is doing by filling out this form is saying, ‘I am a Confederate-Southern American, one of a people who share common cultural traits and beliefs, and entitled to be recognized and protected as such,’ ” Lyons said.


PLAYING TO WIN

Editorial/Roger McCredie

The Northern historian Bruce Catton, describing the prolonged intense fighting at the Mule Shoe salient at Spotsylvania, said, “There was no victory in all of this, and no defeat. There was only fighting, as if that had become an end in itself.” Sometimes I think that we present-day Southerners shoot ourselves in the foot by treating the struggle to preserve our heritage and culture as though it, too, were an end in itself, with no possibility of victory on the other side of it.

God knows this is understandable. For a generation now, as part of their cultural manifest destiny, the forces that shape mainstream opinion and policy in America have made it their business to wage war on the South’s symbols, history, language, customs and attitudes. Anti-Southernism in America has become fully institutionalized. There is hardly a Southerner who has not in some way been directly and personally affected by it, or will be; and those Southerners who object, or who attempt to appeal to reason or fairness, are either ignored or denounced as ignorant, malevolent racists (“racism” having replaced “communism” as the national hobgoblin). The abuses and injuries, the insults and lies fall so thick and fast that we experience overload; we fight as best we can, and bravely enough, but with a sort of numb desperation.

There is an old saying that you can’t solve a problem from the level of the problem, and the first rule of success in going into any adversarial action is to have a clear answer to the question, “Why am I fighting? What, at the end of the day, do I want out of all this?” Within what is known as the Southern Movement, there is a whole spectrum of answers to that, ranging from Southern independence to cultural recognition to simple respect and fair treatment. They are all valid answers, by the way, but for them to be translated into success, we have to keep asking them of ourselves, and then keep answering. It’s amazing how, as we go through that exercise, the next thing we need to do becomes clear. And the smoke lifts for a moment and we truly see what the field will look like when the battle is over and we have won.


O wise men, riddle me this:

What if the dream come true?

What if the dream come true? And if millions unborn shall dwell

In the house that I shaped in my heart,

The noble house of my thought?

-- Padriag Pearse


If you have a stake in Southern heritage and culture, and are looking for a meaningful way to honor and protect them, please give generously to the Southern Legal Resource Center. With your help we can continue our aggressive efforts to secure the rights of all Southerners to express pride in their regional identity without fear of ridicule or reprisal, as should be the case for all Americans.

The Southern Legal Resource Center is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, and contributions to it are fully tax deductible. Credit card and PayPal donations may be made at our website by clicking on “How You Can Help.” Checks payable to the Southern Legal Resource Center should be mailed to P.O. Box 1235, Black Mountain, NC 28711. “Thumbs Up for Dixie” stickers are available for SLRC and local heritage fundraising projects. Contact the SLRC for details at (828) 669-5189 or mim@slrc-csa.org.

General Robert Edward Lee

By Cassandra Bell
American Chronicle
READ IT HERE

McCain, Romney hit over Confederate flag

By Stephen Dinan
Washington Times
READ IT HERE

Will Confederate Flag Ambush GOP In South Carolina?

By Tim Manning
VDARE.com
READ IT HERE

The Confederate Flag Issue

by Tim Manning

Yes, this matters in South Carolina, in the good way. But first, for non-natives of the Palmetto State, let me rehash the highlights of the storyline on this issue, and set the context for what could lead to yet another issue-specific Ron Paul mini-surge in an early primary.

For seven or eight years, beginning in the mid-90s, the Confederate flag was the singularly overarching driving political issue that permeated everything that touched South Carolina politics. Any time anyone maneuvered in our state, from within or without, the underlying question was: How is this person trying to use what he or she is doing to maneuver around the Confederate flag issue?

Well, here’s what happened, and how it stands to re-emerge as the morning after issue, following the New Hampshire primary.

Pee Dee region (South Carolina’s most heavily Yellow Dog region) South Carolina House of Representatives member David Beasley won election as governor in 1994. South Carolina had only recently become a virtually Republican state, and Beasley himself had only recently become a Republican.

The driving force of the grassroots underground rumor mill, otherwise know as a Lee Atwater issue, a strategy that was even more easy to pull off in the days before the internet, was the emerging debate over the Confederate flag. Beasley promised to keep it flying atop the State House capitol. Southern Heritage activists, the most truly ‘activist’ of all activists, pounded the bushes, and Beasley won by a narrow one percent margin.

With the NAACP and the national media holding up everything the state legislature tried to do for nearly all of Beasley’s first (and only) term, the governor was visited by an angel in the wee hours of the morning, after long laboring in prayer in his bedroom. At least that’s the story he told on South Carolina television the next day: God wanted him to take down that flag.

The legislature didn’t support him, and neither did the voters, who soundly shot him down for reelection, giving the governor’s office over to Jim Hodges, a Democrat driven by the gambling industry, but who nevertheless promised not to oppose the legislature on the Confederate flag issue.

Hodges kept his promise. Trouble is, the national press got to the Chamber of Commerce. A story that is not well known, even among inner circles in South Carolina, is that the establishment Republicans were not complicit. It was the rural outsiders who sold out, in order to get a piece of the establishment pie. And it worked.

Andre Bauer became Lt. Governor. Greg Ryberg nearly became State Treasurer. Dan Tripp was in the fast lane, but perhaps his sins returned to haunt him, when his wife divorced him and ruined his political career.

The tragedy in the whole mix-up is that so many good ‘establishment’―as much as that word can be taken seriously in the hothouse that is the South Carolina GOP―Republicans voluntarily took the rap (or as some probably see it, the credit) for the flag compromise. Before the Democrats knew that the Chamber had bought off a handful of fringe GOP’ers, the establishment caught wind―that very same afternoon of the deal, in fact. In that day, lies the rub.

The establishment immediately went to the Democrats and offered their own compromise. Leaders in the state House and Senate, particularly the stronger supporters of the Confederate flag through the entire debacle, such as Glenn McConnell and Rick Quinn, struck a bargain with Democrat leaders such as Kay Patterson and Darryl Jackson.

The deal took the flag down from the dome and the Senate chambers, but put one up smack-dab right in front of the State House, and positioned the memorial state commission for the Hunley Confederate submarine in a good place for funding and publicity.

In the end, only seven Senators voted to keep the flag up. For the most part, they were outsider outsiders such as Bill Branton and Jake Knotts, who even to this day are heavy tax-and-spend used-to-be Democrats, and accept campaign funds from the traditionally scummy Democrat source, the payday loan lending industry. In the heyday of the battle, there was even a pub across the street from the State House Confederate flag named the Blue Dog. ‘Blue Dog’, I assumed, because there was a tiny cadre of rural, blue collar Republicans who always voted with Democrats.

Why does all of this mean anything? It sets the stage for how the Confederate flag became an issue that every presidential candidate since 2000 has had to take a position on.

Bush and McCain, who both used ‘establishment’ South Carolina consultants in 2000, were grilled by the national press about their opinions over South Carolina’s little internal hothouse of a struggle. The ‘compromise’ was only about to be reached just after South Carolina’s 2000 presidential primary.

It should be noted that for the last 30 years, South Carolina’s “First-in-the-South” primary has been the establishment firewall, set up by Lee Atwater in the late 70s to handover what is widely accepted by conservatives as a good thing, the election of Ronaldus Magnus.

But, as any perceptive Southern conservative has noticed since the mid-90s, there has been a shift away from the Southern strategy. Dixie is the Solid South again, only now, it’s Republican. Battleground states have moved to the Midwest.

The ‘activist’ activists of Southern conservatives, however, are feeling more and more extremely taken for granted. That is, Southern Heritage activists. Radio talk show hosts such as Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter, Ray McBerry, James Edwards, and Larry Salley have been railing recently on what others have sensed for years: Southern Republicans have become to the GOP what blacks are to the national Democratic Party, and are now taken totally for granted as token mindless drones.

In return, they’ve spiked a few elections and given a few dying gasps to Yellow Dogs, such as the election of Jim Webb and Mark Warner in Virginia, and a few others elsewhere. But they all agree that their efforts are neutered by Hillary and company.

Since Atwater’s South Carolina firewall was put in place 30 years ago, every winner of the GOP nomination for president has had to win South Carolina.

But things are changing in 2008. The national GOP is shifting to a national primary, the mega super Tuesday on February 5. Traditionally early primary states have been penalized 50 percent of their delegates to the convention. In other words, their votes are only worth half as much as voters in other states. On the other hand, their votes as early primaries are probably still worth more than other states, regardless, due to the impact of momentum.

The shift to a mega Tuesday, however, coincides with the shift away from the Southern strategy.

That brings us back to South Carolina. Why is the Confederate flag a persistent issue?

The question has been asked in two of the GOP presidential debates. It’s also been asked in the Democratic debates. South Carolina’s primary is on January 19, and Hillary and Obama will both be giving anti-Confederate flag speeches on the South Carolina State House steps at the Martin Luther King Day rally on January 21.

In other words, they are spending their crucial primary election time in a state that will have already held its primary, instead of in Florida or any of the 22 mega Tuesday states. The Confederate flag is a national issue. It’s the patsy the NAACP uses to push the GOP away from their Southern strategy. All the while, they’re busily underway building a monument to Martin Luther King in Washington, D.C. that will rival that of Lincoln’s.

From what I can tell, none of the Republicans are quite sure how they’re going to react when the Confederate flag issue explodes in their faces. Some of them don’t even see it coming.

McCain is the most finessed. He says his support of the Confederate flag in 2000 was the greatest and most despicable blunder of his career. It’s a symbol of racism, bigotry, and hate. When he said that in the May 15 debate in South Carolina, the crowd was silent. He punctuated that, however, by saying that he stands by the compromise to keep it out in front of the State House―a position that continues to puzzle Fox News commentators who’ve barely, if ever, stepped foot into South Carolina. Yet, when McCain hinted in the direction of favor toward the Confederate flag, he was greeted with the most enthusiastic cheering all night.

Who knows what Huckabee will say. He comes from a Yellow Dog world of Beasley-esque politics. He’s a big tax-and-spender, worse as governor of Arkansas than Clinton, according to the American Conservative Union, the number one rating outfit on these kinds of things. And, if you missed it, as recently as last fall, Huckabee was standing by his position in the debates that illegal immigrants should be given college scholarships as “atonement for slavery”. It’s not much better when he says Jesus can save us from abortion just like Lincoln saved us from slavery.

Thompson and Giuliani have taken a cue from McCain, and Bush in 2000. Thompson is slightly more finessed than Rudy, but they both read the same bottom line, almost as if there are guns to their heads: It’s a states rights issue. That flag means different things to different people. I’m not taking a position.

Everyone should know what that really means. Southern Heritage activists do, and they’ve been protesting and picketing Thompson and most of the others every time they cross the Mason-Dixon.

Bush said in 2000 that he thought it was a states rights issue. Well, that’s just evasion. That’s how Rudy spins his position on abortion, a tactic which both he and Thompson are applying to every social issue in which they stand to the left.

A tiny handful of Southern Heritage activists have bitten the forbidden fruit of passivity, saying that they hope the Confederate flag does not become any greater of an issue than it already is. They exhausted their efforts in the flag battles of the 90s. In reality, they won―the hearts and minds of their fellow Southerners, that is.

In Georgia, Roy Barnes was heftily booted out from reelection to governor by Sonny Perdue, who won by taking the hard line, even in his own primary, by promising a referendum to restore the old Georgia state flag’s large Confederate emblem. Just as in South Carolina, the Chamber of Commerce bought off a handful of Republicans and slipped in a new ‘compromise’ flag in the dark of night.

In Virginia, Mark Earley ran for governor and was soundly defeated by a Democrat who promised to work with Southern Heritage activists in favor of Confederate flag license plates, Lee-Jackson Day as a state holiday, and Confederate History and Heritage Month (April). Southern Heritage activists went to great expense with professional polling companies and found that over 70 percent of Virginia residents are in favor of Confederate symbols: the Confederate flag, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.

In Missouri, Governor “One Term” Bob Holden ripped two Confederate flags from a harmless, rural cemetery, which is said to have hampered his credibility for reelection.

In Mississippi, when the NAACP attacked their flag for including the Confederate battle flag as the canton, an actual referendum made it up for a vote. They voted two-to-one to keep their flag, including a significant portion of black pro-flag voters.

Everywhere in the South, whenever the Confederate flag becomes a voting issue, an overwhelmingly, and shockingly to non-Southerners, high margin supports it. A recent South Carolina poll showed that over 80 percent of the GOP primary voters supported the Confederate flag out in front of the State House. In South Carolina and Georgia, routine polls even show that 14 to 18 percent would prefer that their states secede―today.

All of this seems to have caught Mitt Romney virtually by surprise. He’s hired the most expensive and established handlers in South Carolina politics, but apparently, on the Confederate flag, he didn’t get the memo. When blindsided by the question in last fall’s CNN YouTube debate, he butchered the question and answered nearly word-for-word like Hillary or Obama. Not even a tip of the hat to the South Carolina GOP, the people to whom this matters most, that he might support the Confederate flag on the State House grounds. He even took it a step further and said that it doesn’t even belong in anyone’s bedroom. Or, even worse, perhaps this is the burgeoning new position of Romney’s South Carolina establishment consultants.

When the deal was struck in 2000 between the South Carolina GOP and the Democrats to relocate the flag, it was an agreement between politicians. South Carolina President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell openly and adamantly states that “that flag will be removed from the State House grounds over my dead body!” In fact, it is him who led the flag battles of the 90s and delivered the keynote oratory in his Confederate officer’s uniform and surrounding regalia in front of millions of people in April 2004 in perhaps the country’s largest ever funeral (which was for the Confederate Hunley crew)―second in onlookers, perhaps, only to Reagan’s funeral.

On the South Carolina Democrats’ side, it was also a deal with politicians. That is, politicians only. Not the NAACP. Black incumbents, a thing that is not often (almost never, in fact) defeated for reelection, met an ugly battle over the following years after the ‘compromise’. The NAACP kept up their ‘boycott’, which South Carolina’s current governor and close friend of Ron Paul’s (something that even he’s been afraid to say much about it, since he plotted to be Giuliani’s running mate) claims has only served to boost the South Carolina economy. More importantly, the NAACP diligently sprouted up a small 20-something crop of Obama-like―or, as Joe Biden would say, “clean and articulate”―state legislators who are calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from where it now stands.

The entire state GOP establishment is quivering in their boots and trying to pretend that the restlessness does not exist. But it’s coming. And this time, Oprah will be on board.

What are the neocons saying about it? Take a close look at the behavior of Bush and Cheney. Every president, even Bill Clinton and Bush, Sr. appeared publically in the presence of a Confederate flag. Reagan did, of course. It was a major part of Nixon’s Southern campaign, and to some extent Carter’s. But the neocon position is a total purge, a policy that the president and vice president will never appear publically within visible range of a Confederate flag.

Al Sharpton recently caught Cheney off guard and demanded an apology for visiting an upstate New York hunting club where a reporter photographed a small Confederate flag hanging in a garage window on a remote part of the club’s property.

When Columbia, South Carolina Congressman Floyd Spence died a few years ago, his last wishes were for a funeral with a Confederate flag next to his coffin and that “Dixie” be played. Cheney was willing to attend if both conditions were cancelled, and the Democrat governor secretly did his bidding.

In the dark of night, Bush removed a tiny memorial plaque from the Texas Supreme Court building placed there by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. No response or reason was ever given, even after great heartland uproar.

Hundreds of Southern politicians are members of one or another Southern Heritage organization. A few highlights: Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina, South Carolina Attorney General (and future candidate for governor) Henry McMaster, Congressman (and future candidate for South Carolina governor) Gresham Barrett, State Senate Agricultural Committee Chairman (and likely future candidate for Lt. Governor) Danny Verdin (who was even a prominent leader among Southern Heritage activists), and many others. This is the up and coming generation of at least South Carolina’s Republican leaders.

How should the Confederate flag issue be featured in the presidential primary campaigns? A game of defense can be played against the Democrats by repeating what most of the candidates are saying. That is, except for Romney and probably Huckabee, who join with the Democrats. The tired old lines from McCain, Thompson, and Giuliani have the feel of sickness. As Southern Republicans said during the flag battles of the 90s, if you give the NAACP an inch, they’ll demand a mile, 400 acres, and 6 mules. And they will.

I personally take this opportunity to challenge Brit Hume, the Fox News moderator, journalists across the spectrum from liberal to conservative, and South Carolina Republican Party leaders to ask the question that I believe is in their own best interest, and in my opinion the best interest of everyone in the battle against political correctness and cultural Marxism. That is: As president, would you or would you not be willing to appear publically in the presence of a Confederate flag?
That’s the question that will really be a tell-all about the candidates. It’s the question that none of their handlers have prepared them for, and that all of America and especially South Carolinians would love to see them answer. It’s the truly investigative question to ask about the Confederate flag issue, and probably doesn’t even take any guts to do it.

An affirmative answer is not necessarily an endorsement of what one or the other kind of person’s opinions may be about the flag. It could, however, be a simple show of intent that they will not add on to the pressure against the South Carolina Republican Party to continue moving further and further to the left. It could be a simple statement that the there will at least be a few minutes of this year’s primary that will pay tribute to the GOP’s Reagan-era Southern strategy greatness, something which would come in handy in the fading free-for-all that is the South Carolina primary. It could be a simple statement that the best and strongest of American conservatives might not always be treated by the neocons or Democrats as Orwellian ‘unpersons’.

Given the chance, there’s at least one person who will likely be in that debate who would love to elaborate.