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Old February 12th, 2011 #23
Alex Linder
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Southern Perspective: James Kibler's Our Father's Fields



Jimmy Cantrell

Yet again I am too late, but I must declare that a perfect Father’s Day gift (as well as perfect for birthday or Christmas or graduation or retirement or anniversary or old-fashioned instruction), especially for those with an interest in Southern culture and history and/or the Federal Leviathan’s growing threats to family, local community, farming (as opposed to agri-business), and traditional conservative values and heritage, is James Kibler’s Our Father’s Fields. The winner of the Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 when published by the University of South Carolina Press, Our Father’s Fields is now available from Pelican Publishing. As I find it disgusting to give money to any entity associated with “educational” institutions that today specialize in despising and working to exterminate Southern culture and identity (for postmodern diversity requires genocide of certain cultures), I had never purchased Kibler’s history of the land and house he bought to restore. Because Pelican is a publishing house owned by good Southern folk who are neither afraid nor ashamed to promote writing from traditional Southern perspectives, I wholeheartedly encourage people to buy Pelican products.

And the book is not for men only. While its emphases and its language will appeal more to men than to women, Our Father’s Fields, ostensibly concerning the remodeling of an old house, can be used to slide women into awareness of the reality (which is close to 180 degrees from the liberal American stereotypes that for the past 40-50 years have reigned with all the fury of Absolutist Monarchy and Cromwellian ‘reform’ rolled into one) of the antebellum Southern planter class and the Reconstruction and early-twentieth century eras in the South. Thinking they are merely reading a detailed version of a Bob Villa fix-it-up, they will encounter astute cultural and political analyses that will, if they are not brain-deadened and/or conscience-deadened from our popular and educrat and political cultures, at least ease them toward seeing traditional conservative Southern views as reasonable and well-informed.

Though neoconservatives, often worshipers of both Mammon and concrete, have painted all environmentalists as utterly irrational socialists and Luddites, the reality is that even after years of being hounded by Wall Street-obsessed Yankee Imperial Conservatives and welcomed by most parts of the cultural-political Left, many, perhaps most, environmentalists retain cultural views that are much closer to paleoconservative and, especially, to paleolibertarian than to the purely mechanized, socialistic, and urban-focused NAACP-NOW-NARAL-La Raza-ADL-GLAAD axis that both controls the Democratic party and wields powerful influence on the social-cultural views of silver-spoon liberal northern Republicans and neocons: who both invariably either hate and fear Southern culture or dismiss it contemptuously. Our Father’s Fields, like the work of Wendell Berry and during the 1930s I’ll Take My Stand, can help bring some of those environmentalists to see that their most natural ally is the old-style conservative Southern farmer-hunter-fisherman. The environmentalist who joins with the leftist coalition to make cultural war on the South achieves only the long term weakening of his own cause.

Kibler makes that case most forcefully with a perfect passage on pages 108-09 and another on pages134-35. He drives it home near the book’s conclusion: “Modern popular ‘forest management’ techniques whose aims are to maximize profits in the short term are even more guilty of causing precious topsoil loss and soil depletion than any of the most improvident of uninformed farm techniques in the past” (358). The libertarian as well as the environmentalist should grasp the point and see the connection: the kulturkampf against the South has resulted in both a loss of liberties for all Americans and unnecessary destruction of increasing parts of our natural environment.

One of the most important sections in Kibler’s work is his list of the 1860 rankings of per capita wealth of free citizens by state. Because the list gives the lie to much Yankee nonsense repeated ad nauseam, I will reproduce the top 12: (1) MS (2) SC (3) LA (4) AL (5) VA (6) GA (7) TX (8) FL (9) TN (10) NC (11) KY (12) AR. Connecticut at #13 is the highest ranking non-culturally-Southern state. The remaining culturally Southern states, all of which had slavery, are: (16) MD (17) DE and (24) MO. Massachusetts, the epicenter of both Abolitionism and hatred of Southern culture and Southerners, is ranked #18, while Kansas, the epicenter of violence against Southerners before Lincoln’s war and populated heavily with descendants of New England Puritans, is ranked dead last: #35 (195).

Because the false myth is that slaves in the South were the poorest of the poor in at least the Western World, which made white Southerners far richer than they otherwise could have been and falsely elevated the rankings of Southern states in per capita comparisons, the 1860 list of per capita wealth of total population is even more important and cliché-destroying: (1) MS (2) LA (3) SC (4) AL (5) CT (6) TN (7) TX (8) VA (9) NJ (10) OR (11) DE (12) KY (13) GA (14) MA (15) MD (16) AR (17) NY (18) RI (19) FL. The lowest ranked Confederate state is NC at # 23, and the lowest ranked culturally Southern state is MO at #24. Kansas, the home of the most rabidly violent Abolitionist and Republican Party haters of Southerners and Southern culture, remains dead last.

Taken together and compared to such lists from the 1870s on, these two lists suggest that, as many Southerners charged before PC meant that such would end your career, the War Between the States was very much a conflict about regional envy-born hatred empowered with centralized governmental tyranny that achieved a massive redistribution of wealth, which afterwards was defended with continuing culture war, including not merely the teaching of lies but also governmental policies to maintain poverty in the raped South (see also page 361). Cromwellians, French Revolutionaries, Marxists, German National Socialists, Yankee Unionists: all self-righteous and self-justified in their ethnic-cultural-religious hatreds and murderous fury and all driven by utter covetousness, worship of raw power, and maniacal rage against everything that by its very existence revealed the truth and the preferable.

Kibler rightly notes that after the War, lasting until roughly the World War II era (after which the South once again began to produce wealth and comfortable living), the South was treated as a colony to be exploited for the benefit of the conquering: “”it [the Tyger River valley] and the South were to become a colonial producer of raw materials for northern mills, which paid low prices for the cotton and received tariff-protected premium prices for their manufacturers from the very black and white men and women who grew the cotton and were struggling merely to eat” (312). As the South’s coal, timber, oil, and natural gas, as well as its livestock and food crops, were similarly exploited to create northern wealth and bleed cash-poor Southern consumers, only the ignorant or the politically-culturally biased can deny that the South suffered through colonial rule.

That means, among other things, that Southern literature is a pristine colonial and post-colonial literature. Of course, to make that assertion is to guarantee that you will be called a racist, for both leftists and Yankee Imperial Conservatives have pontificated both that only non-whites have been victims of colonialism and that Southerners are always guilty and never have been wronged.

Those who have read much of my work know that I do not see the War and the continuing kulturkampf as based on region and/or economics: I see the source as ethnic/cultural (including religion), with true Yankees, the pure Anglo-Saxons of New England, having come to dominate northern states culturally and intellectually while culturally Celtic peoples determined most of Southern culture. That means that I see the War and our ongoing fight against cultural genocide at the hands of “diversity”-loving promoters of “tolerance” as being merely the contemporary phase of a struggle by culturally Celtic peoples to survive that began no later than with the waves of Germanic barbarians landing in Celtic Britain and salivating at the thought of razing ‘Camelot’ after stealing all its wealth and usurping its superior culture. Yankee hatred of the South, of Southern culture and Southerners, proceeds from Anglo-Saxon ethnic hatred of and desire to exterminate Celtic cultures, if not necessarily to exterminate all people who are predominantly Celtic in bloodline.

And that is the very reason that virtually all leftists and Anglophilic Imperial Conservatives hate and fear the Celtic-Southern thesis and will do almost anything to keep it from being aired widely. If we Southerners know the basis of this theater of the kulturkampf and know who we are culturally, we will be better able to defend ourselves and to survive. If other Americans realize that the genesis of the hatred of Southern culture is an ethnic malice rooted in centuries of Anglo-Saxon imperial aggression to exterminate Celtic cultures, then at least some of those Americans will see beyond Yankee mendacity and propaganda to recognize the justness of our cause, our right to exist.

In some ways, Kibler’s book presents a continuation of the New England WASP Puritan versus Cavalier view of American culture. That view, which I have treated, is far more correct than the later ‘white Americans before the massive Great Famine era influx of Irish Catholics were all descended from basically the same Englishmen and thus were the same culturally and ethnically except for Southern sinfulness, especially in owning slaves’ nonsense that is all the rage in PC circles. Kibler notes of the Hardys, the family whose ancestral house he restored, “Theirs was not the New England Puritan ideal of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill, but instead the Southern dream of a fertile, pleasant valley” (7).

As the Hardy name is Norman and the family holds a pedigree stretching back to the Magna Carta, it is natural to associate them and Our Father’s Fields with the WASP Puritan versus Cavalier thesis: the Hardys were epitomes of the Norman Cavalier South besieged by reforming Puritan fanatics. But even Kibler, who clearly respects the Hardy ancestry, makes the understated case that the Celtic-Southern thesis explains far more about the South. First, he notes that, as McWhiney and others have documented indisputably for the entire non-coastal South, the Norman surnamed Hardys were a distinct minority in Upcountry South Carolina to the majority of Celtic, mostly Scots-Irish, ancestry (14). Kibler also notes that almost all the other families of distinction in the area, with whom the Hardys socialized, worshiped, and intermarried, were from Celtic lands: Eppes, Caldwell, Maybin, Rogers, Douglas, Beard, Renwick. Nor should anyone assume that these families were either ignorant of or hostile to their Celtic ancestry: “Although both John Rogers Sr. and Jr. were said to have ‘loved the virgin beauty and freedom of the hills of Carolina, yet their hearts yearned for ole Ireland’” (211). Ignorance of and hostility to Celtic ancestry grew in the South beginning with Reconstruction and mushrooming in the early 20th century, as Southern children were indoctrinated with anti-Celtic, pro-Puritan WASP propaganda in government schools. The result, seen today in even many genuinely conservative pro-Southern Presbyterians and Baptists who at least romanticize and defend Puritans as long as they murdered and stole and raped traditional conservative cultures while still devout Calvinists, is that most Southerners of Scots-Irish and Welsh ancestry came to see themselves as Anglo-Saxon if only because they had been trained to equate Protestant with WASP.

Kibler’s book helps show how the Puritan versus Cavalier thesis is at best partial. His list of Anglo-Norman traits that defined the Hardy family (14-15) is worlds apart from the traits that both McWhiney and David Hackett Fischer have seen as defining the ethnically pure Anglo-Saxons of southeastern and east central England. If the traits that define the Anglo-Normans of western and northern England are often diametrically opposed to the traits that define the ethnically pure Anglo-Saxons, then the cultural traits that define those English Normans cannot be truly Anglo-Saxon; their “Englishness” must be culturally something that is far from pure Anglo-Saxon. As those traits sound rather French, the natural assumption would be that what makes Normans from the west and north of England culturally different from pure Anglo-Saxons is the French heritage. That is reasonable, especially as most Norman families in England spoke French as their first language to at least the beginning of the fifteenth century.

That, though, merely begs the question, for we then must consider why French traits are often diametrically opposite those of ethnically pure Anglo-Saxons (and all northern Germans). The answer is Gaul. Though the Germanic Franks conquered and politically unified and gave their name to the language and the nation, and Normans were also Germanic, Gaulish Celtic cultural traits remained predominant in France. That is the reason that Vercingetorix is the archetypal French hero and that Charlemagne filled his court with Irish scholars and came to realize that as long as they remained culturally Germanic, the Germanic tribes he ruled would not rest until they destroyed French culture. That also is the reason that, while Kibler’s list of Hardy family Norman traits clashes with cultural traits of the pure Anglo-Saxons (as well with Prussians and Hessians), it fits smoothly and naturally with both French and Irish/Scottish traits.

The main division in Western European culture is between Celtic and Germanic ways and identities (recall that Celtic and Latinate are so closely related linguistically that they are best seen as one group). England’s Puritans, who were Calvinist versions of pristine Anglo-Saxon culture just as Ralph Waldo Emerson was a pristine version of Unitarian Anglo-Saxon culture and John Dewey was a pristine version of Social Gospeler-become-atheist-humanist version of Anglo-Saxon culture, hated and wished to exterminate the Norman houses in the west and north of England primarily because those Anglo-Normans, like their kin who had become more Irish than the Irish, had adopted much, perhaps most, of the Celtic cultural worldview and its outward characteristics. It is the same reason that virtually all Anglo-Norman families fit easily and naturally into parts of the South in which peoples of Celtic ancestry were the vast majority. It is the same reason that English Puritans saw Scottish and Irish Calvinists as fit only for being cannon fodder against Catholics and Stuart adherents (Calvinists who still would be required to purify by losing all Celtic cultural traits and identity and to reform by becoming culturally Anglo-Saxon—or be destroyed by righteous, progressive WASP Puritans) and New England Puritans despised Scots-Irish Presbyterians as inherently inferior by ethnicity. As Clyde Wilson has phrased it, it is a Yankee problem, and Yankee culture is Anglo-Saxon culture in America: the pure culture of the ethnically pure WASP.

Kibler is aware of these implications and, to his great credit, does not flinch from them. He writes of the Hardy family livestock practices, “These facts place the Hardys within the Celtic tradition of herdsmen as explained by historian Grady McWhiney. Although they were Anglo-Norman rather than Scots-Irish, their manner of homesteading was analogous to the Celtic” (114). As he eases into his conclusion, Kibler suggests, “Maybe it is a Celtic thing with us, after all, the mythic and archetypal knowledge that sees us through” (392). Leftists and Anglophilic Imperial Conservatives alike are terrified more of us will come to that realization.

Our Father’s Fields should be in every public and college library. And it needs to be given as a gift innumerable times.

Jimmy Cantrell

http://web.archive.org/web/200306232...C20030616.html