Earlier by Jared Taylor: Video, Text, And Pictures: Spitting On Dead Confederates—And America
James Fulford writes: Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, spoke at the VDARE 2024 Conference on Confederate Memorial Day—still an official holiday in some states. Taylor wrote here on VDARE.com in 2011 “My great-great-grandfather, William Boggs, was an engineer who helped prepare the gun emplacements at Fort Moultrie, which delivered the heaviest fire [on Fort Sumter]. All my ancestors on both sides of my family were Confederates. There is not a single Yankee in my family tree, so my lineage is about as Southern as it could be.”
There are some people who feel that Confederate-Americans should be ashamed of their ancestors. Not Jared Taylor!
Here’s the video of his speech, with transcript below:
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow: Today is Confederate Memorial Day, and I asked Jared Taylor to say a few words about it.
When I first came to the U.S. and first came to North Carolina in 1970, the Battle Flag was everywhere, and nobody thought anything of it.
It was universally accepted.
Now we still have in this town a nice black man who goes around with a Confederate flag on his pickup truck, smoking.
We really have to get him here sometime!
Jared, you know, one of the things about the Dissident writers in our generation— I guess are we in the same generation?
Jared Taylor: Yeah, I’m afraid so.
Peter Brimelow: Well, there was a great division of labor that went on.
My book, Alien Nation was about immigration, and we founded VDARE, which focuses very narrowly on immigration, and not on a lot of other interesting issues which I would one day like, which I would really like to get into.
Kevin MacDonald focuses on his issues, and what Jared does is journalism that should have flowed out of The Bell Curve, but didn’t—the implications of what it means to have a bipolar society, now a multipolar society, in terms of IQ and ability.
Now, so Jared’s been running American Renaissance... for how long?
34 years, well that’s longer than VDARE.com—we’ve already been going 25 years.
And he’s a very great man.
His only problem is that he doesn’t do what he’s told. I told him to run in the primary, or as an independent in Virginia 10, a district then held by a RINO, who I’m happy to say was subsequently defeated.
And he refused to do it, which is very annoying.
But one of the reasons he refused to do it, apart from the fact he’s just ornery, and won’t do what he’s told, is that it turns out it’s extremely difficult in Virginia to run in a primary, or even as an independent, because you have to get hundreds and hundreds of signatures off of people, who of course would then be exposed and vilified by Twitter mobs.
And in other words, basically the whole principle of the secret ballot has been abolished.
And this is just another example of our ongoing Communist Coup that we have to face.
So I’m going to turn it over to Jared now, and thanks so much for coming.
(audience applauding) (audience applauding)
Jared Taylor: Thank you very much, Peter.
I believe, I certainly speak for all of you, but I say that we know that VDARE and Peter and Lydia are going through terrible times, and with all our hearts, we wish them every success.
May they be victorious, prosper, and prevail.
(audience applauding) As Peter said, he asked me to speak on the subject of Confederate Memorial Day.
On this day, in happier times, I used to play in a band to honor the Confederate dead in a ceremony that was held at the base of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.
There were reenactors, there were Confederate dames in their costumes, there were even cannons firing salute.
Of course, now, as you know, that beautiful monument that stood there for 109 years is gone.
Hundreds of Confederate monuments have been dismantled and destroyed, but this is, to my knowledge, the first one that’s been removed from a cemetery.
Generals A.P. Hill and Nathan Bedford Forrest, their monuments were built over their tombs, but they were on public land.
So I believe that the removal of the Arlington Monument is the first desecration of consecrated ground.
The monument was also a tribute to reconciliation.
The classical figure who stood at the top of the monument represented the South, and she held a pruning hook in her right hand, and she stood beside a plow.
And at her feet were the words from Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” It’d be hard to think of a more conciliatory and peaceable war monument.
And that monument stood in section 27 of Arlington.
It was specifically set aside within the National Military Cemetery to honor Confederates, who at that time were recognized to have fallen in honorable combat.
Section 27 was the idea of President William McKinley.
He was a Union soldier.
He joined as an enlisted man at the beginning of the war, fought all the way through the war, and finished as a Brevet Major.
Despite this, he had no grudge against the South.
As he said in 1898, when he was proposing the establishment of section 27,
Every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American valor. And the time has now come when the spirit… in the spirit of fraternity, we should share in the care of the Confederate soldiers, the graves of those men, those heroic dead.
And over the years, 500 Confederates were moved to the base of that monument.
The sculptor of the monument was a Jew, Moses Jacob Ezekiel. But that didn’t save the monument, because he was the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute.
He was a loyal Confederate, and he fought all his way through the war, and he too lies in Section 27.
So far, the graves themselves have been undisturbed. But it was just last December that our black Secretary of Defense ordered every trace of the Confederacy eradicated from federal land.
There must be no reconciliation with the South.
And we now know that President William McKinley and others of his generation who honored the valor and the sacrifice of Confederate soldiers were morally stunted.
They didn’t have the exquisite ethical sensibilities of Lloyd Austin and Charles Schumer, who with the backing of the U.S. Congress are now correcting these shameful errors.
So what are we to make of this campaign of eradication?
First, it shows just how differently we treat the Confederacy compared to practically every other enemy we have faced in battle. Over time, the bitterness of war ordinarily dissolved.
The Japanese, whom we considered vermin during the war in the Pacific, have been our friends for decades.
Even the Vietnamese, despite killing an estimated two million of them in a completely useless war, they too are our friends. But the Confederates, with every passing year, we are to hold them in increasing contempt and deepening disgust. Of course, this is all quite new.
The very men the Confederates were trying to kill, Union soldiers, respected them.
One of the Yankees who fought under General Edward Ord was at Appomattox and watched the surrender of the once-formidable Army of Northern Virginia.
It was the end of this horrible war. As he watched the men in gray stack their arms for the last time, he expected to be filled with rejoicing.
But this is what he wrote.
We sat there and pitied and sympathized with those courageous Southern men who had fought for long, four long dreary years, so stubbornly, bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy. It was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad.
It moves me deeply to read this tribute from a man who’d risked his life trying to kill those men.
Stonewall Jackson was killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville. And at that time, Union General Gouverneur Warren wrote:
I rejoice at Stonewall Jackson’s death as a gain to our cause, yet in my soldier’s heart, I cannot but see him the best soldier of all this war and grieve his untimely end.
Foreigners admired the men who fought on both sides.
Sir Garnet Wolseley was one of Queen Victoria’s finest soldiers and reached the rank of Field Marshal, the highest in Britain.
He spent two and a half years in the United States observing the battles.
He crossed the lines many times and got to know commanders on both sides.
And he saw the Americans, north and south, as fellow Anglo-Saxons, almost cousins.
He wrote, ”I can see, in the dogged determination of the North persevered in to the end through years of recurring failure, the spirit for which the men of Britain have always been remarkable.” He saw them as men of Britain.
He said, ”It is a virtue to which the United States owed its birth in the last century….” Here too, the spirit of reconciliation, of former enemies, honorable, of an honorable foe that is due all respect.
Of the Southerners, Garnet Wolseley wrote this, ”I can recognise the chivalrous valour of those gallant men who fought not only for fatherland and in defence of home but for those rights most prized by free men” And he went on, ” The history of both armies abounds in gallant and chivalrous deeds done by men who fought for their respective convictions and from a sincere love of country. ” Listen to what he wrote about Robert E. Lee, whom he also met several times.
I have met many of the great men of my time, but Lee alone impressed me with the feeling that I was in the presence of a man who was cast in a greater mold, made of a different and finer metal than all other men, a man with whom none I ever knew and very few of whom I have read are worthy to be classed.
How often do men who are eminent in their own right speak so reverently of a contemporary? Wolseley also admired Stonewall Jackson.
30 years after the war, he wrote this about both Stonewall Jackson and North-South reconciliation. He said, ”With that innate love of virtue and real worth, which has always distinguished the American people.” Let me stop right there. Who would write that today about us?
With that innate love of virtue and real worth which has always distinguished the American people, there has long been growing up, even among those who were the fiercest foes of the South, a feeling of love and reverence for the memory of this great and true-hearted man of war, who fell in what he firmly believed to be a sacred cause
The fame of Stonewall Jackson is no longer the exclusive property of Virginia and the South; it has become the birthright of every man privileged to call himself an American.
All Americans could swell with pride at the thought of Stonewall Jackson, and that was largely true.
January 19th, 1907 would have been Robert E. Lee’s 100th birthday.
And on that day, Charles Francis Adams paid him a tribute at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, named of course for Robert E. Lee and George Washington.
Now, Charles Francis Adams, he was the son of a president and the grandson of a president.
And the John Adamses, as you know, were the only two of the first 12 presidents not to own slaves.
Charles Francis was Minister to England during the war and almost single-handedly kept Britain from recognizing the Confederacy.
He was no friend of the Lost Cause.
But speaking of Lee, he said, ”Virginians … show me the man you honor I know by that symptom better than any other what kind of men you yourselves are ... Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as one of our sacred men? Him you will set on a high column that all men looking at it may continually be apprised of the duty you expect from them.”
And that was the case all across the South.
Lee was set on many high columns, continually to remind us of our duty and what we ourselves ought to be. And so Adams, a former enemy from Massachusetts, saw what an inspiring model of manhood he was.
Later, during the First and Second World Wars, as an important sign of reconciliation and respect for the South, the army named ten military bases after Confederate generals.
The M-5 tank was named after Jeb Stuart. And the M-3 was named the Robert E.Lee.
Dwight Eisenhower, a Kansas boy, he hung a portrait of Lee in the Oval Office.
As he explained, ”General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. ... Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.”
There’s a portrait of Lee on a postage stamp that was issued in 1955 in what was called the Liberty Series.
So there he was, Robert E. Lee, along with Washington, Jefferson, Pershing, Paul Revere, and Lincoln himself, the Liberty Series, and Lee was part of it.
Believe it or not, as late as 1989, a Navy ship was christened the Chancellorsville.
That was in honor of Lee and Jackson’s greatest victory.
The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest honor that Congress can pay to anyone.
And in 1956, it was awarded collectively to all surviving veterans of the Civil War, North and South.
It depicts Grant and Lee, and it says, ”Honor to great soldiers and to great Americans,” ”great soldiers and great Americans.”
The bill to strike this medal passed unanimously in both houses of Congress.
So it’s been a very strange career for the Confederates, has it not?
During the war, they were courageous, honorable opponents. 100 years later, they were great soldiers and great Americans. Today, they’re scum.
What happened? Well, you know what.
The problem, of course, is race, that terrible, intractable problem that caused the war to begin with, especially the presence of blacks and whites, which has been a nightmare for this country and the source of immeasurable suffering.
Every system of black-white relations we have tried has been a failure: slavery, emancipation, segregation, integration, affirmative action.
Now, we live under what may be the most absurd regime of all, what I call the Apotheosis of the Negro.
(audience laughing) I’ve spent the last 30 years pointing out its absurdities, its follies, its cruelties.
In our era, there are many things that infuriate me. I’m sure they infuriate you.
But of the most infuriating one is the worms who don’t deserve to black the boots of a Confederate general, prancing and howling and posing as their moral superior.
This disgusts me.
(audience applauding) Thank you.
You’ll recall that Charles Francis Adams asked, ”Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as sacred?
Whom shall we set on a high column?” There was once a Southern Nation that set General Lee on a high column.
That nation, alas, is extinct.
The people of that nation are gone.
Now, there certainly are many Southerners who revere their heroes, but that kind of Southerner doesn’t really make a nation because today, to think that Lee and Jackson were great men requires a certain limited kind of politics.
I will summarize that kind of politics only by saying that they have views that the mainstream characterizes with very sharp pejoratives, whereas a nation, a real nation, has to have a variety of ways of thinking, not just one.
And let me offer as a member of that extinct nation, my mother, dead these 40 years.
She was a Southerner through and through.
She stood when Dixie was played and looked daggers at anyone who didn’t.
She thought Robert E. Lee was about as close to God as ever a human was, and that Monument Avenue in Richmond was the most heroic prospect anywhere on earth.
When Jimmy Carter was elected, she said, ”It was a relief, finally, to have a president who didn’t speak with an accent.” (audience laughs) My mother spent a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she loved to drive out to those quaint Massachusetts villages, all with their monuments to Yankee dead there in the green.
She didn’t know what to make of those monuments. She recognized the sacrifice they’d made, but she considered those men invaders. Naturally, they had to be killed.
And she finally hit upon a description for them with which she could make peace. She called those Yankee memorials “monuments to Confederate marksmanship.” And I invite all Southerners and Copperheads to use that expression.
And so my mother was as ardent a Southern patriot as any, but also a liberal through and through. She was a Norman Thomas socialist, an early feminist, an integrationist, an early advocate of gay rights. In her mind, none of this was the slightest obstacle to being a fervent Southerner and Confederate.
Now, do any of you know, even one ”check all the boxes” liberal who is likewise a passionate Confederate? It’s hard even to imagine such a person today. But there were many, many such people when the South was still a nation. Southerners could disagree about just about anything except for their love of the old South. And so that nation cannot be rebuilt because those people no longer exist.
Eras, ways of life, forms of government require particular peoples.
And that of course is why it is so foolish as so many conservatives do to pretend that somehow the country can be saved by going back to the true Constitution.
John Adams said our Constitution was made only for “a moral and religious people,” for a particular people, “wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
Now, some of you may know that the Constitution of Liberia adopted in 1847 is very closely modeled on the U.S. Constitution. I don’t think that point needs any elaboration.
So, whom do we set on a high column today?
Well, first of all, we don’t set anyone on a high column. It’s probably been at least 100 years since we’ve done that. All we ever do is take people down from high columns.
So, how does America honor great people, and set them as examples for the young?
One way to find out is to go into a bookstore, go to the children’s section and look at the biographies.
Biographies for children, biographies to inspire the young.
You’ll find Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson.
You can find children’s biographies of Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.
Do you know how many children’s biographies of Oprah Winfrey there are?
40 different biographies for children of Oprah Winfrey.
That alone would be proof, proof enough that all of us in this room, North or South, are utter strangers in our own land.
And so, in closing on this Confederate Memorial Day, I will say this.
I believe that one day, thanks to people like you, there will be an in-gathering of what VDARE calls the founding stock of America. Those men and women will rebuild an outpost of Europe on this continent.
I can’t predict how that will happen, what that nation will look like, but I believe that like Garnet Wolseley and the 84th United States Congress, that nation will recognize that my Confederate ancestors were great soldiers and great Americans.
That new outpost of Europe will not, however, be a return to the past, even though it will have deep roots in the past.
And when its leaders build its institutions, I hope that they will, like John Dickinson at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, I hope they will say, ”Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”
All my life, I’ve watched the United States degenerate.
And it gives me no pleasure to say that it is no longer my country, and it can’t be saved.
(audience applauding) I’ve spent the last 30 years trying to inspire a faithful remnant that will rescue a few bits of wreckage from our once great country and build a new home for our people, where we can celebrate both old heroes and the new ones who will build that new nation, where Yankees and Confederates alike will be recognized as the tragic figures they were in our desperate attempt to bring Western civilization to the new world.
Finally, on this Confederate Memorial Day, please join me in the fervent prayer that our people will never raise arms against each other ever again.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
