THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THE CONFEDERATE ENTRY FEE | 1999-06-12

The Confederacy will probably be the only non-Wordist outpost among all the countries on earth that have a white majority. If you want an ethnically pure community inside the Confederacy, you will be welcome to have one.

As I discussed earlier, the Confederacy should allow people to form their own communities, all-white, theocratic, gay, mixed, computer fanatics, blood relations only, whatever you wish (See March 6 article, "How Tomorrow's Confederacy Will Deal With Tomorrow's Reality"). But there is a reality that we all must face: in order to hold ground, a nation must pay for it. This is the reality that limits freedom, and this is the reality that so many ideologues try to ignore.

Benjamin Franklin lived in Philadelphia, the home colony of the Quakers. Quakers wanted freedom of worship and they wanted to keep a very large colony under their rule. These are things men have to fight and die for. But Quakers also wanted to be pacifists. Obviously, if everybody in Pennsylvania had been pacifists, the Indians and/or the French would have driven them into the Atlantic Ocean. So other people had to do the Quaker's fighting for them. So the Quakers were the original American leftists. They never hesitated to be pure hypocrites.

In his autobiography, Franklin gives many examples of Quaker hypocrisy. He discusses one incident where William Penn himself was on a ship, which sighted another ship. Penn and the rest thought the other ship was manned by pirates. Faced with this threat of death, a young Quaker on board ran up to help fight off the threat, and all the other Quakers, including Penn, cheered him on.

Then it turned out the other ship was friendly. Immediately the other Quakers, including Penn, turned on the boy, shouting that he had violated his Quakerism by wanting to fight. The boy pointed out that, when they thought they were in danger, Penn and the rest had been all for his fighting.

More generally, Franklin points out that the Quakers used their pacifism to save money at the cost of other peoples lives. When Pennsylvania frontiersmen were massacred by Indians and asked for help, the Quakers piously refused to help, citing their pacifism. So they saved the cost of munitions they might have sent. But when the threat got past the frontier, and the rich Quakers themselves were threatened, Franklin got through an appropriation.

Today, the national Quaker organizations are the most left wing church groups, even among all the other left wing churches today. Solzhenitsyn discusses American Quakers who went to the Gulag Archipelago and who, being leftists, were good friends to the Stalinists and reported only what the left wanted them to say.

By the way, Richard Nixon was the descendant of Quakers. But Nixon's forebears went to North Carolina. In North Carolina, there was nobody to protect those Quakers, so they either had to do their own fighting or die. So, surprise, surprise, the North Carolina Quakers were known as "the fighting Quakers."

When I was a boy, I remember reading how William Penn had made an agreement with an Indian chief. The story, given as real history, said that, since that time, no Quaker had ever been killed by an Indian. Nixon's ancestors would have found that grimly amusing. Actually, the Quakers avoided Indian attacks by staying safely away from the frontier and letting frontiersmen fight the Indians. The frontiersmen would take land from the Indians. The Quakers would then nonviolently get the land from the frontiersmen by using the law.

Speaking of famous pacifists, one of the funniest things I have ever heard was said by the person whom liberals, and therefore respectable conservatives, look upon as a sort of human god. This worshipped being was Mahatma Ghandi. After World War II, someone asked Ghandi what he would have done if the Japanese had taken India. Ghandi replied that, if the Japanese had taken India, he would have used the same tactics against them that he used against the British!

I can just see it now. The Japanese invaders have finally conquered India. They have heard of this great Resistance Leader, Mahatma Ghandi. A Japanese officer is asking about this Ghandi when a dirty little man walks up and starts babbling about how he will starve himself if the Japanese don't leave.

The officer chops off the dirty little man's head. He then continues looking for this Mahatma Ghandi who is leading a Resistance to Japan.

Nonviolence only works if you have somebody to protect you. Quakers are big on nonviolence when it means THEY don't have to fight, but they have no hesitation in using others to do their fighting for them. If anybody threatens a Quaker, he immediately calls a policeman, a man with a gun at his side, to protect him.

In the Confederacy, there should be no room for people who piously refuse to carry their own weight. You pay our taxes, you help to fight our battles, or you leave. There can be room for a LIMITED number of genuine pacifists in the Confederacy, but only if they are willing to carry their weight some other way. When I was very small, our landlady was a descendant of a family that produced Confederate generals. Her son was a genuine pacifist, so he had done his duty in World War II as a medic. As a medic, he had won a Silver Star, which she showed to me. Seeing that medal, I realized that heroism and blood shows. Even as a pacifist, he could not help being a hero! He was the opposite of William Penn and the general run of Quakers.

But in the real world, if you want to have ground to live on, somebody has to hold that ground with a gun. Help us do it, or go elsewhere. We will have religious freedom, but religion will be no excuse to avoid your obligations.

Don't get me wrong. I think a pacifist should be free to avoid doing his part. I just do not think he should be able to do it at my expense. If someone wants to be a free rider, I think we should pay for his ticket to a country which will accept him and let him be a free rider at THEIR expense.