League of the South

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“”[I]n the heart of every true Southerner, a reverence for God resides that does not exist in other areas of the nation.
—Arkansas League of the South[1]

The League of the South is a Neo-Confederate, white supremacist, patriarchal, Anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and Anti-immigrant organization (the former two views held by the League's leader Michael Hill) founded to protect and promote "Anglo-Celtic" Southern culture.[2] Invocations of a centuries-old agrarian culture aside,[3] the League itself is fairly young, established in 1994.[4] It, naturally, promotes the Lost Cause of the South and advocates that Southern states secede from the Union. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies them as a hate group.[5]

The League of the South originally began as a haven for ostensibly respectable paleoconservative academics and intellectuals to express their racism and revulsion of multiculturalism. Later, the organization attracted a more vulgar form of racist that wasn't interested in using pseudointellectualism and pseudohistory to lend their racism respectability, eventually leading to an exodus of the educated from the organization.[6] The group closest to the League's original vision is probably the Rockford Institute, which houses several League members and ex-members.

Currently, the League is the go-to organization for racists to openly praise slavery[7] and fret about the decay of white culture. Officially, they don't consider themselves racist because "racist" is a communist word.[8] In a bizarre attempt to differentiate Southern culture from American culture and emphasize the former's "Anglo-Celtic heritage," their published material insists on using British English spellings.[9]

Online content[edit]

The articles hosted by the League and its regional chapters are chock full of pseudohistory, denialism, and remarkably dumb ideas; it seems that desperation to justify a Southern secession leads to amazingly bad arguments. Independent Southern states would have per capita GDP comparable to South Korea![10][note 1] The South is like the Hobbits in the war against Sauron in Lord of the Rings![11] Secession is the only way for the South to avoid the Muslim invasion![12] The South supplies most of America's troops, making it a military powerhouse![13][note 2]

Regional branches[edit]

The League has regional chapters located in over seventeen states.[14] The Missouri chapter also represents Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin (presumably those states don't have enough racists to get their own chapter).[14]

While officially the League wants an "independent Southern republic",[15] they aren't necessarily interested in recreating the Confederacy; their own websites occasionally discuss secession in terms of individual states becoming individual nations.[16][17][18][19][20] Of course, in a confederacy, sovereignty resides with the constituent states (which is part of why the Articles of ConfederationWikipedia failed so hard), so a collection of independent Southern states wouldn't be that different, politically, from a confederacy of some sort.

The Alabama branch recently had a billboard they put up saying "secede" taken down by the advertising company in control after complaints.[21] The group made claims of "Stalinism", seemingly unaware that Stalin's policy on secessionists was mass murder rather than billboard removal.

Antisemitism[edit]

This section requires more sources.

League founder Michael Hill has apparently a lot of beef with The Joos. He's written a number of nutty articles: "Trump on history's darkest hour" (concerning the Holocaust and Jesus Christ), "Holodomor and the Bitter Harvest" (an article on the Holodomor), "Max Boot's Brotherhood of Man" (focusing on, you guessed it, the Jews), and "What Was World War II Really About" (a historical revisionist article on World War II), where he expresses his frustrations and anger toward the Jews, blaming them for communism, killing Jesus, and getting America and Britain into WWII (damn those Japanese Jews, anyway!). This is pretty ironic because Hill seems to be unaware (or purposefully ignorant) of the fact that thousands of Jews (with estimates as low as 3,000 to 3,500 or as high as 10,000 to 12,000) fought for the Confederacy with the likes of Abraham Meyers as well as Moses Jacob Ezekiel and some Southern politicians such as Judah P. Benjamin and David Levy Yulee being of Jewish descent. Hill seems to not care about them at all.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Arkansas League of the South.
  2. ↑ League of the South Core Belief Statement. DixieNet.Org.
  3. ↑ Franklin Sanders. The South As It Was. FreeTennessee.org.
  4. ↑ Frequently Asked Questions About the League of the South. DixieNet.Org.
  5. ↑ League of the South. Southern Poverty Law Center.
  6. ↑ League of the South Loses Members and Momentum. Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center. Winter 2001.
  7. ↑ League of the South President: Whites Endowed with Divine 'Superiority'. Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center. Fall 2012.
  8. ↑ "The term 'racism' has its origins in Communism and that movement's sordid attempt to undermine Western Christendom." —League of the South Board of Directors. League of the South Statement on "Racism". DixieNet.Org. 2012 July 21.
  9. ↑ A Word about Traditional Southern Orthography. DixieNet.Org.
  10. ↑ Cole Cleburne. Southern State GDP per-capita Comparisons with Independent Nations. DixieNet.Org. 2012.
  11. ↑ Sara Hill. The South and the Shire. Southern Patriot magazine, page 2. Nov-Dec 2007.
  12. ↑ Yosemite Sam. "This Is Not Your Father’s America." Southern Patriot magazine, page 4. Nov-Dec 2007.
  13. ↑ Mike Tuggle. Two Soldiers. Southern Patriot magazine, page 5. Nov-Dec 2007.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 LS State Chapters. DixieNet.Org.
  15. ↑ "The League of the South believes that the answer to these problems is a free and independent Southern republic." —About the Arkansas League of the South. Arkansas League of the South.
  16. ↑ Ed Wolfe. A Free, Sovereign and Independent Georgia. Georgia League of the South. 2012.
  17. ↑ Louisiana Could Be an Independent Country. DixieNet.Org. 2012.
  18. ↑ Alabama As Its Own Independent Republic. DixieNet.Org. 2012.
  19. ↑ Florida As Its Own Nation. DixieNet.Org. 2012.
  20. ↑ Why Texas would be better off as a free republic. DixieNet.Org. 2012.
  21. ↑ Mike Cason. League of South president wants 'Secede' billboard restored on I-85 in Montgomery. AL.com. 2014 May 19.
  22. ↑ A Guide to Who’s Coming to the Largest White Nationalist Rally in a Decade by Spencer Sunshine (August 10, 2017) Political Research Associates.

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ This completely ignores the "government meddling" that props up their economies.
  2. ↑ While it's true that enlisted soldiers are disproportionately from the South, that's because the military actively targets the poor for recruitment — they're less likely to say no to the offered paycheck. This is particularly true in rural communities, where joining the military is often the only accessible career path out of town. It has nothing to do with patriotism or manliness; the South just has a lot of poor people.
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