THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The website for Brainwashing 101 has a discussion forum. It gives a glimpse of how completely the professors have destroyed critical thinking. The self-styled "conservatives" rail at the self-styled "liberals" by calling them "racists" and accusing them of not fully embracing Martin Luther King, Jr. The liberals reply with incoherent Marxist gibberish.

One of the "liberals" wrote, "On being a racist, we're all inherently and subconsciously racist deep down. Don't you think?" I replied that if everybody is something, i.e. "racist," then the term is meaningless.

"Racism" is not a meaningful construct, but a religious epithet. It is akin to "heretic" in the Christian religion, except that a heresy (which means to choose between) can be defined against a fixed creed or dogma. A heretic is one who picks and chooses which of the doctrines he will accept and abide by. "Racism" has such a wide range of use and meaning that it is impossible to know what the standard is.

The creed or doctrine of the religion of Political Correctness is made up on the fly by its priesthood. That is why we have the ever-growing list of "hate crimes," speech codes, and "institutional biases," etc., etc.

It might be better related to the caste "Untouchable" in the Hindu religion. But one is born into a Hindu caste. A "racist" becomes "Untouchable" by decree of the priesthood.

If one is declared a "racist" then he does not have to be addressed as a human being, i.e. with reason, logic, and what Christians would call forbearance, but is worse than a leper in ancient times.

When "racism" entails everything from whistling Dixie (which even Lincoln had played at the formal surrender of the Confederacy) to discussing different physical or intellectual traits between races (i.e. "White men can't jump," etc.) to non-white on white crime (the FBI formally classifies Hispanics only as victims in crime statistics - when they commit crimes they are then classified as white), to "institutional racism" to "unconscious racism" to who knows what else, how can the concept be meaningful?

Medical care is being destroyed because of malpractice suits. In Florida, an obstetrician pays two hundred thousand dollars - yes, I said two hundred thousand dollars! -- each year for malpractice insurance.

The excuse for these runaway malpractice suits is that it is the only way to keep doctors honest.

Lawyers say that malpractice lawsuits are the only way to punish bad doctors today.

That is true. Doctors cover up for other doctors, so you can't convict them in criminal court.

Medical associations routinely protect bad doctors to a criminal extent. You cannot find out what your doctor did wrong from a medical association. The medical associations openly abet criminal doctors who want to hide their past.

So instead of jailing the really awful doctors or exposing them, we use these hideously expensive malpractice suits as our only means of fighting back. The result is that every doctor pays more malpractice insurance and passes the cost on to us.

Instead of demanding that any physician who covers up for another go to jail, the people have settled for malpractice suits that are making medical costs prohibitive.

Back in 1962, I was the first chairman of the Richland County Young Republicans. Lake High and I were Goldwater Republicans. The Republican Party had elected its first two Republican state legislators since Reconstruction in off elections that year.

The Kennedy Administration had sent federal troops into Mississippi to integrate the University of Mississippi. The 101st Airborne Division was in occupation of the town of Oxford. But the Republican Party of South Carolina didn't want to talk about that. It might sound unrespectable.

They could have won if they had done what Barry Goldwater did, and screamed the outrage of a people invaded by a Democratic Administration. Goldwater pointed out something Boston would find out some years later. He said the North should not cheer too loudly, because if Federal force could be used to push Social Progress in the South, it could be used everywhere else in the United States.

His prediction has come true again, and again and again, in every area of American life.

So while our region was actually being invaded, what did the Republican Party talk about in its campaigns for a United States Senate seat and a seat in the US House from our state? They talked about "fiscal responsibility."

Lake and I kept trying to persuade these dolts that, if all they talked about was "fiscal responsibility," they would lose all the working class white vote we could have gotten. Just as we predicted, South Carolina Republicans lost everything in 1962. Not only did they lose the House and Senate seats, they even lost the two state house seats they had won before.

But they were respectable. As good Republicans, they had put the conservative cause back by years, but that was of no importance to them at all. They had kept the South Carolina Republican Party respectable for the country club set. The Chamber of Commerce was very happy with them.

It would be many years before the Republican Party would address the traditionalist vote and get the white working class vote, the votes we now call Reagan Democrats. From 1962 to 1980, when they finally really went after those issues, we may have lost America irretrievably. I spent all those years fighting to make this transition.

And what was our reward for losing America? Republican respectability.

Now it's back.

David Beasley has stated nationally that he lost his governorship by switching sides on the Confederate flag in South Carolina. Here was a losing strategy, and there is nothing that respectable conservatives go for more hungrily than something that is bound to lose. So they smacked their traditionalist constituency in the teeth in 2000 on the flag, exactly as they did in 1962 on Mississippi.

Only the Chamber of Commerce and liberal opinion matters. To hell with the base vote of working whites and people who see themselves as Southerners, not as mere economic conservatives.

Respectable conservatives have no memory. They think they are doing something new. But for someone who has a political memory, they are doing the same old disastrous thing one more time.

Editorial Department

NATIONAL REVIEW

215 Lexington Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10016

July 27, 1999

Dear Sir

In his recent article, Forrest McDonald refers to a group of Americans he calls "southerners." Who are these people? Hawaiians are southerners. So are Puerto Ricans. All the vast population of southern California is made up of southerners. That is, each of these groups comes from what is geographically the southern part of the United States. But McDonald does not seem to be referring to any of them. He is talking about the losing side in the Civil War, which does not include any of these people.

Before McDonald, National Review had many, many articles dealing with Southerners, a regional group which has the identity McDonald seems to be referring to. But it is simply wrong, not to mention insulting to some of us, to refer to our region as "the south," or to us as "southerners." I realize that Russell Kirk invented a schizophrenic system of capitalizing "the South" and writing "southern" in the lower case. This is absolutely unique and idiosyncratic, and amounts to nothing more than bad spelling. I would appreciate National Review continuing to refer to my people as Southerners. We have a history and a culture which is worthy of that much respect.

Sincerely,

Robert W. Whitaker

Forrest McDonald is one of those people who has gotten a great reputation for defending dead Southerners in history. He therefore has a lot of valuable capital that can be used by liberals and respectable conservatives in their present battle against living Southerners. His latest article in National Review shows how that sort of capital can be used.

In real world politics, words are the main weapon. One of the first victories of the civil rights movement was when blacks got publications to stop writing "negro" and got the word capitalized. This looks tiny, but actually it was very important. It showed that, by the 1940s, there was a black reading public, and publications recognized that.

Exactly the same thing happened in the case of the Jews. There was a time when "jew" was freely used as a verb. There was a time when writers freely used the uncapitalized terms "jews" and "jewish." Once again, it was a major victory when the ADL and other groups managed to end this disrespectful lack of capitalization of the title of a legitimate identity group.

I hate this campaign to put "Southern" in the lower case, because I feel so absolutely alone in being against it. If you look, you will see that it is spreading steadily. There was a time when even our enemies would capitalize "the South" and "Southerners." But more and more, especially with the help of people like McDonald, the campaign to take away this recognition of our identity is gaining ground.

If we allow this trivialization of Southern identity to advance, we cannot win the bigger battle. If it weren't worth doing, our enemies wouldn't be doing it.

An otherwise sincerely pro-Southern Yankee, Russell Kirk, gave a big boost to this "southern" business. He used a really weird system of capitalization in his 1951 book "John Randolph of Roanoke." He capitalized "South" but not "Southerners."

This nonsense of putting "southern" and "southerners" in the lower case was a complete invention by Kirk. It is simply absurd, and it is simply bad spelling. Absolutely nobody capitalizes the name of a group, like Jews, and then uses the small letter in the adjective: You NEVER say "Jews are jewish." Such things are only invented by people who want to make a semi-apology for the South.

Kirk's schizophrenic nonsense was one of those totally weird attempts to appease those who hate the South. It was like the insane business of abandoning the flag on the South Carolina dome for a square Confederate flag (Please see July 24 article, "Why So Many Right Wingers Go Nuts").

And our enemies know how to capitalize fully on such apologies. Every enemy of the Confederate flag now uses the term "navy jack," which was coined by OUR apologizers*, to put down the flag on the South Carolina capitol. Actually there was at least one diagonal Confederate battle flag like the one on the state house dome, while the navy jack was one-third farther across than the one on the state house dome. So the modern, diagonal Confederate flag is NOT a navy jack. But, in their desperation to apologize, the people on our side have given our enemies this club to beat us with, and there is no way we will ever correct this.

Those who want to put all references to our identity in small letters -- and all references to other, "real," groups in capitals -- know how to use Southern apologizers. Just as flag opponents all use "navy jack" to put down the Confederate flag, these people find the Kirk-McDonald apology for "southerners" highly useful.

Before Forrest McDonald's article, National Review always correctly referred to those of us who are part of the South as Southerners. For no reason whatsoever, McDonald has now changed that, and has made a major contribution to the campaign to refer to a group called "southerners," which puts us in the same category as Hawaiians, Angelenos, and Puerto Ricans. Since conservatives constitute the only group which might actually show some respect for our Southern identity, this was a major blow for those of us who are still Southerners.

*An "apologist" is "one who speaks or writes in defense of a faith, a cause, or an institution." An apologist is the exact opposite of an apologizer.