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League of the South New Strategy Dr. Michael Hill The League of the South unveiled its new strategy at the 2005 national conference in Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 30 September-1 October. Below is a summary of that strategy.
First, the League’s new strategy must be implemented from the bottom up—locally--and not from the top down. If we don’t succeed on the local chapter level, then we will not succeed at all.
Second, we cannot emphasize
too often or too strongly that the League is a Southern nationalist organization
and not a heritage defense group. Our goal is Southern independence, complete,
full, and total. This is our chief principle of action. All efforts must be
tested against this question: Does it aid our quest for independence? If not,
then don’t do it. It’s as simple as that. If your agenda does not have Southern
independence at its core, then you’re in the wrong organization. Let’s briefly examine these seven parts. (1) We will never reach our goal of Southern independence if we don’t persuade our people that it’s both desirable and possible. We are thus waging a war to win the minds and hearts of the Southern people. (2) The League is the only game in town. In other words, we are not only the premier Southern nationalist organization, but to my knowledge we are the one and only group seeking to establish a free and independent Southern republic. We must convince our people that we are the natural leaders of the Southern independence movement.
(3) To “delegitimate” the
empire, we must continually point out its failures and its descent into tyranny
and convince our people to transfer their loyalty and support away from it. As
someone pointed out to me, we may not have to do much because the empire is in
the process of destroying itself by its own stupidity and hubris. (4) It is not
enough simply to persuade the Southern people to withdraw their consent from the
empire and its institutions; in addition, we must give them “alternative,
legitimate, popular” institutions to which they can transfer their loyalty and
support. We have been creating such institutions, though on a small scale, for
the past decade. (5) “Exercising moral leadership” means that we denounce and
condemn moral corruption in both government and in our own people. However, we
must also offer a positive vision of a moral society, keeping in mind that men
are sinners and are thus incapable of creating Utopia. (6) To be the
servant-leaders of the Southern people means first and foremost that we be
willing to serve our fellowmen in order to earn their respect and be able to
lead them to independence. Christ came to serve; we should do the same. (7)
Organic local communities are the natural outgrowth of a healthy society. They
cannot be manufactured by an ideology or imposed from the top down. Rather, they
must grow out of a particular people and the soil of a particular place. They
are real rather than abstract. They are local and not universal. Within these four distinct areas—cultural, social, economic, and political—we must find ways to integrate our new strategy.
May God continue to favor our Cause. Deo vindice!
Michael Hill Forrest/League of the South/Jekyll Island 30 Sept 2005Jekyll Island, 30 September 2005 LoS National Conference
A NEW STRATEGY FOR THE LEAGUE OF THE SOUTH By Franklin Sanders
In the providence of God, the Psalm appointed for this morning is Psalm 144: Blessed be the Lord my strength, Who teacheth my hands to war, And my fingers to fight! Whether you realise it or not, we are in a war, although nobody is actually shooting. Nonetheless, we are in a war for our survival, and the survival of our children. Coming soon to your hometown: The Third World! Not just the people -- they’re already here -- but the slums, the living conditions, the starvation wages, and the poverty. The empire is waging not just cultural war, but also economic warfare against you and your children. As with cultural warfare, you must decide whether you will fight, or whether you will give up and sink, abandoning everything your fathers fought to build and to preserve. There is no choosing neutrality. You must choose sides, either the South or extinction. And if you walk out that door today saying to yourself, “That fellow’s crazy, he’s exaggerating, I don’t have to choose sides,” you will only be lying to yourself, and you will have made a choice. You will have chosen economic & cultural suicide for yourself and your family. THE BIGGEST THING WRONG WITH THE SOUTH As the recent troubles in the Sons of Confederate Veterans has shown, or the Southern Growth Policies Board, or Southern business and political leaders, the biggest thing wrong with the South is -- Southerners. I don’t mean only the scalawags and collaborators who betray the South for money and place, but all those who love themselves, the sound of their own voices, and their own quirky ideas, more than they love their country. As it is with the South, so it is with the League of the South. The biggest thing wrong with the League of the South is its members -- including y’all. After 11 years, League members have still failed to understand its goal -- Southern Independence -- or how it must be implemented -- locally first, then nationally. After 11 years, members still think we’re a Southern heritage organisation. After 11 years, you still hold chapter meetings to discuss what sort of buttons Confederate soldiers wore. Now, there is nothing wrong with defending Southern heritage, in fact, we should do it, and I applaud all those who do it, but you miss the point utterly. The point is Southern independence. The point is to honour our Southern forefathers and the past by bringing its legacy to life in the present and the future. Every single person in the League from the top to the bottom must understand this and make it the chief principle of action. INSANITY If you’ve ever spent any time around Alcoholics Anonymous, you know that they define insanity this way: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.” For too long, we in the League have acted as if we were insane, doing the same things over and over but expecting different results. We have too many armchair revolutionaries, too many mouth cannons, and too many whiskey talkers. We need doers. If you are not a doer, then leave. Please stop wasting your time in the League. If you can’t understand this -- that the point is Southern independence and action not talk is necessary to win it -- then leave and stop dragging the rest of us down. EIGHT OAKS MEETING To address the League’s lack of focus Dr. Michael Hill convened a meeting in June at Eight Oaks Lodge. About 30 people were invited, not necessarily officers, but people who had accomplished something in the League. People who were doers, not talkers. Out of that two day meeting we have, for the first time, in 11 years, the League has a strategy. [Now every one of you pull out a pencil and a piece of paper, because you’ll want to write this down.] First, I have a book for you to read, and every one of you needs to read it. It is Dedication & Leadership by Douglas Hyde. From 1928 until 1948 Hyde was a fanatical member of the British Communist Party. In 1948 he converted to Roman Catholicism. Dedication & Leadership shows how the communists cultivated dedication and leadership within their ranks. He wrote this book, which was first presented to a church leadership conference, to answer this question: “Why are Communists so dedicated and successful as leaders whilst others so often are not?” Don't make the mistake of thinking this book praises communism. That would hardly come from one who had lefts its ranks to join the Catholic Church. Rather, Hyde lays out the techniques communists use to make their members and their organisation so effective, and many of these techniques can be morally used by any organisation. You can buy this book for $4.00 or less, from www.abebooks.com. Get it. Read it. Memorise it. It will teach you what standard of dedication we need in the League, and how to cultivate leaders. If you’re not willing to invest four bucks and four hours of reading time, you really don’t belong in the League of the South. THE STRATEGY STATEMENT Here is the new League strategy statement. It’s in seven parts, and you need to know and understand every one of them. They are broken down into the what, the goals in the first two parts, and the how, the way we will accomplish those goals, in the last five statements. I know that this statement is tightly packed, so that it almost sounds like jargon, but I will unpack all of it for you, every word. “The League of the South seeks [Goals] 1. to create a climate of public opinion conducive to Southern Independence, 2. making the League the leader of that movement [How?] 3. by delegitimating the empire 4. through creating alternative, legitimate, popular institutions, 5. exercising moral leadership, 6. as the servant-leaders of the Southern people 7. in organic local communities.
STEP BY STEP Let’s take the statement apart step by step. The goal is to “create a climate of public opinion conducive to Southern independence.” Before we can get to Southern independence, we must first create the necessary precondition for independence. The Southern people must want it. How many people do we need? Do any of you know how many historians estimate supported the American Revolution? Between 10 and 15%, and occasionally up to 25% when the Continental armies were especially successful. Mike Crane can show that with a few more than 20% of the electorate you can control the outcome of elections. From 1992 through 2001 the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina carried out Southern Focus Polls. They showed that from 5% to 16% of Southerners believe that the South would be better off as an independent nation, if it could become independent without war. We in the League of the South must move Southern independence from the realm of an impossible pipe dream to the point where people say, “Well, it’s a good idea and right, but not possible,” and then to “Independence is the ONLY solution.” And we have to make the League the leader of that movement for Southern independence. HOW? How are we going to reach these goals? 3. “By delegitimating the empire.” That’s a big word, what does it mean? It means removing the cloak of legitimacy from the ruling tyranny. It means transferring loyalty away from every imperial institution and toward authentic Southern institutions. What are institutions? Courts, schools, media, every prop that supports the empire. Whether you are aware of it or not, chaos is emerging in this country. The 300 year trend toward centralisation and empire has peaked, and in the next centuries power will flow away from the center to localities. The war in Iraq will go badly, and George Bush will be utterly discredited and rejected, along with the Republican Party and the Evangelicals who have entered into an unquestioning and unconditional alliance with Bush. In five years, you can say the words “conservative” or “liberal”, “Republican” or “Democrat” and they won’t draw any more loyalty out of a crowd than the words “Whig” or “Federalist” do today. In every heart, loyalty will be leaving the empire. People will be looking for something to believe in, and we in the League must transfer their loyalty to Southern independence. As loyalties submerge in chaos, we must seek out others with whom we can make alliances, people who share our goals. Here is just a partial list: Anti-corporation people Environmentalists Clean food movement Farming and what I call the “New Agriculture Home Schoolers Alternative health Communitarians Peak energy Tax protesters Many of these people are New Age or even leftist, but you ought to remember the old Southern proverb, “Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then.” I am not asking you to marry these people, or even take them home to supper, but I am asking you to keep your eyes open to embracing them in alliances where we share goals, and we share many goals. They are not wrong about everything, and you may have much more in common with them than you think. I used to write about environmentalism, and I thought these people were all crazy. But recently the issue of aerial spraying came up in our county, where two paper companies own hundreds of thousands of acres. When they want to spray pesticides or herbicides, they just fly over and spray everything, and the state exercises no control at all. A lot of local people believe that the spraying has made them sick, even killed them with cancer. So my son and I went with an environmental group to Nashville to lobby the legislature to pass an aerial spraying bill. And listen, those people were not all crazy. More, we had a common goal, to help our people and to prevent corporations from poisoning them. As loyalties enter into chaos, the League must build alliances with others who are transferring their loyalty away from the empire. 4. “by creating alternative, legitimate, popular institutions. a. “Institutions” does not mean buildings, but every social organisation that runs things -- courts, schools, media, universities, all organs of government, culture, and social order which the people accept as having authority by right. They have authority because (the people believe) they ought to have it. b. “alternative” means existing outside but parallel to existing imperial institutions. Not underground, but above ground and parallel in competition. The prime example is home schooling. You couldn’t name a single statist institution stronger than public education. It is literally the jugular vein of the state, and consumes 40 to 60% or more of every state’s budget. It is the largest welfare program in the country. Yet home schooling has, over the past 35 years, come from nowhere to completely delegitimate public education. Today even public school teachers admit that home schooling is better. They must, because home schoolers outperform public school students, so much so that now universities are going out of their way to recruit homeschoolers. Yet when homeschooling first began, parents literally went to jail for homeschooling. The state waged all out war against homeschooling, but twenty-five years later homeschooling has completely discredited public education today. Another example is alternative cancer therapies. There are people who have completely given up on the mainstream cancer therapies of cut, burn, poison, and they achieve astounding results. One doctor in New York successfully treats nearly 70% of the cancers presented to him with only diet and supplements. Once these people have been helped or cured, in their minds mainstream medicine has been discredited forever, and they’ll tell you so in a hurry. Yet another example is alternative health therapies in general. Polls show that way over half of Americans use alternative health therapies. They already don’t trust mainstream medicine, and put their money where their mouth is. (A national poll commissioned by the American Academy of Family Physicians found that 34% of Americans believe in sticking with traditional medicine as practised by licensed physicians, 24% say they believe there is a lot of benefit to be found from non-traditional medical therapies, and 40% say they believe there may be value to alternative therapies, but believe in talking to their physician about them. http://www.aafp.org/x21999.xml. In other words, 66% don’t take traditional medicine at face value.) c. “Legitimate” means having the force of law without the threat of force. Everyone recognises and does not question its authority. People give it their loyalty of their own free will. d. “Popular” does not mean “favoured by the public” but genuinely springing from and belonging to the people. Not imposed from above. 5. “Exercising moral leadership.” Fearlessly expressing and fighting for morality in public life. Leaving no doubt where we strand. Taking hold of the hot potato, and not being afraid to call it hot. An example is that black church and pastor in Atlanta a few years ago that got in trouble for disciplining their children by whipping them. The League should have jumped up and said, “We’re not in favour of abuse, but every parent has a moral right and duty to discipline his children, by whipping if necessary.” Exercising moral leadership means denouncing and condemning the immoral, whether the corruption is in the government or in the people. Moral leadership is not “Sharptonism” -- like the notorious ‘Rev. Al Sharpton, running to every controversy and pouring gasoline on the flames to raise money for yourself. There’s a difference between oral leadership and moral leadership. Exercising moral leadership does not include exploiting others’ wretchedness, but ending it. 6. “As the servant-leaders of the Southern people.” This is the principle of Christ and the Christian life. If you want to be chief of all, you must first become the servant of all. How do you think Moslem fundamentalists captured the hearts of the Muslim world? By their superior ideology or theology? Not at all. They went into areas and built schools and clinics, and showed the people that they had their best interests at heart. Then the people were willing to be led by them. The Southern people must see and experience that we serve them, that we put our money where our mouth is, then and only then will they listen to us when we lead them into Southern independence. Credibility is like that. You can’t claim it or demand it, you have to earn it. 7. “In organic local communities.” a. A community is a fellowship of the locality that grows out of living together in reciprocal love. It is what modernism has destroyed, isolating each of us from the other as it turns us into interchangeable cogs in the industrial machine. Community aims to reconnect all the atomised individuals. b. Local means that the community is real, not abstract. Local pictures real people on real dirt, and not just any dirt, but this dirt that our fathers and mothers for generations have hallowed with their lives, work, sweat, and blood. Our land, and nobody else’s. Our town. Our county. Our state. Our country. c. An organic community cannot be imposed from above or outside. It is not artificial or gotten up, but grows from the people themselves, and their bonds of kinship and nearness to each other. This then is the strategy for the League of the South: The League of the South seeks [Goals] 1. To create a climate of public opinion conducive to Southern Independence, 2. Making the League the leader of that movement [How?] 3. by delegitimating the empire 4. through creating alternative, legitimate, popular institutions, 5. exercising moral leadership, 6. as the servant-leaders of the Southern people 7. in organic local communities.
Memorise this statement. Write it down and tape it to your bathroom mirror. Ask yourself every night before you go to bed, “What have I done today for the League of the South? What have I done today for Southern Independence? What can I do tomorrow?” Every chapter and individual activity must be measured against this strategy. Does it fit the strategy? If not, then why are you doing it? If it doesn’t advance the strategy, then it is a waste of time. KEY TO THE STRATEGY The key to the strategy and the basic unit of the League of the South is the local chapter. Your local chapter, with its leaders and members, will make or break Southern independence. Not Michael Hill. Not Clyde Wilson. Not Franklin Sanders. You. You must lead. You must organise. You must initiate. And more than that, you must involve your women. They are half our army, and much the better half. They are amazing organisers, and they know how to get things done. While the men are still standing around smoking and talking, the women are already half way through. We must involve women in our local chapter work. WHAT CHAPTERS MUST DO Local leaders must choose and follow through with local campaigns, because neither national nor state leaders are in your shoes. They aren’t on the spot to see opportunities while you are. Below I have listed several areas where chapters can look for projects and campaigns. Remember that this list by no means exhausts the possibilities, it merely suggests a bare few. CHARITABLE Do you know somebody who has suffered a devastating disease and needs help? If you live in a small town or rural area you know in all the stores there are always cans on the checkout counter with pictures of somebody who’s had cancer and needs help. I saw one a few days ago soliciting donations to pay for the funeral of a 14 year old boy. These are opportunities for the league to help. Hold yard and bake sales. Go door to door soliciting donations. Do you know some widow who’s about to lose her home? Help her keep it. What about poor children who need summer programs with mentors? Your local sheriff and DHS can give you a long list of mistreated or neglected children whom they can’t help. Can your League chapter help them? I know a Christian man in Mississippi who runs a truck farm. He went to the sheriff and offered to take teenagers out to his farm and teach them how to work in the open air -- and pay them to boot. The sheriff loved it and the kids loved it, too. Whatever and whoever needs help, League members as servant-leaders ought to identify and attack. Remember this, too: always build a mailing list. You ought always to have a petition or something for people to sign and leave their addresses. You are building a mailing list, and it will be your chapter’s most valuable asset. SOCIAL & CULTURAL TV and air-conditioning has sealed Southerners off form their neighbours. The League must give them a reason to come out, to have fun, and to learn to love their neighbours. If you check around in your area you’ll find that somewhere there are Friday night jam sessions for amateur musicians. You walk in there with ten folks, and everybody will notice. You walk in there with three who play instruments and they’ll love you. Here’s another idea: hold a Confederate ball with a period band but without requiring period dress. You remove one of the big roadblocks to people coming, but you keep all the fun. Every year at our farm we do that, and they dance barefoot in the grass half the night. Everybody from 3 to 103 has a great time. And these events are self-financing. For our Hoedown, we charge people an entry fee, but that doesn’t cover the cost of everything. So we have sponsors who make up the difference. It doesn’t cost any of them over $100 - $200, and we have a great show. Leverage -- we are a guerrilla army, and we have to leverage every effort and every cent. Would you believe that you could get fifty high school and college kids to meet together for Southern dance classes every two weeks? Well, a friend of mine in Memphis has just that going. Sometimes he has live music, but usually it's recorded, and he has a dance master. What kind of program would it take for you to get fifty kids that age out every other week? Does your town or city hold a local festival? Start one, or help with an existing one. If you show up at the organisers’ office with ten or twelve volunteers, they’ll love you. Here’s another idea: the teacherless writing class. Get together 5, 10, or 25 people every week to read aloud something they have written themselves. The only rule is, you may not disparage your own work. You can’t say anything like, ‘This is not very good” or “I haven’t really finished this yet.” Read it aloud, and let the others criticise it. You’ll be amazed what quality of writing comes from plain Southern people, and what a window it opens into their souls. Here’s another idea: stage a Saturday hedge school on agrarianism or some other topic. Last spring Clyde Wilson graciously taught a hedge school on Reconstruction and sixty-five people attended, two-thirds of which had never been to a League affair before. Most were home schoolers. ECONOMIC Stop feeding your enemy! Do you have a “buy local” campaign? You can have 5,000 bumper stickers printed up that say, “Buy local -- Shop Lawrence County first.” How do you think local business owners will respond when you show up with those and ask them to give them to their customers? Or put one on their front door, or a small state flag sticker, to identify them as a locally owned business? You’ll have to carry a stick along to keep them from kissing you. Work to better your local economy as the League. Right now, the flow of money that once stayed in your community as it moved from hand to hand -- from farmer to grocer to shoe shop to hardware store -- is being vacuumed out by Wal-Mart and Home Depot and Burger King and sent to New York.. They have a 1% cost of capital while we locals have a 16 - 25% cost of capital. We are a colony. We have to reverse that flow. Get people to pull their money out of Citibank and Bank of America and Regionsbank and put it into a locally-owned bank. Then let the banker know why all these new depositors are coming in, and tell him you expect him to keep that money circulating locally. Our people are mired down in debt. Your chapter can offer a half day debt reduction seminar. I have the name and address of a man who will come in and put one on. It’s astonishing, but by the end of the day everyone will walk out of there with a plan that will get them out of debt in 3 - 7 years, and that includes paying off their mortgages. What about local farmers? We saw a great campaign from a Montana county to encourage commerce with local farmers. They printed up bumper stickers that say, “Who’s your farmer?” Then they printed up county maps with the locations of every farm that sells produce, milk, butter, eggs, meat, and cheese to the public. You reckon the farmers liked that? And suppose down in the corner it said, “Courtesy of Bedford County League of the South”? Would that mean any publicity and new members for you? POLITICAL Every one of us has been taught that politics is our salvation, and the state is the messiah. That’s the curse of our age. Problem is, it’s not true, and politics at the wrong level can simply drain off your energy without ever producing any results. Tip O’Neil may have been an obnoxious yankee, but he was right about this: All politics is local. Your League chapter has to always be on the look out for local issues, and even create them. After all, why are you letting somebody else set the political agenda in your county? Why aren’t you setting it? League chapters ought to always lead the charge against tax increases. Under no circumstances should you ever support any tax increase or bond issue. STARVE THE BUREAUCRATS AND POLITICIANS, don’t feed them! Look at development and zoning issues. Are local farms disappearing? Can you help? Is your local government subsidising foreign businesses that ruin local businesses? I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard that in Savannah, Tennessee the local government gave Lowe’s one million dollars (in tax breaks or whatever) to build there. If I had been the owner of a local hardware store, or lumber yard, or paint store, I’d have grabbed my pitchfork and gone looking for a politician. And there are loads of other local issues: roads, prison, environmental (aerial spraying), property rights, even opposing the Patriot Act. Lots of local governments have passed resolutions saying they won’t support the Patriot Act. Sure, the people behind that are liberals, but they’re right so we ought to work with them on this issue. Our political goal must be to Relentlessly Roll back Regulation. Regulations keep our people from prosperity. Regulations have been installed to protect corporations and the wealthy from competition – competition from our people. And always, always remember to use petitions to gather names and addresses for your mailing list. When you have a mailing list with 5,000 names, I guarantee local politicians will be calling you, you won’t have to call them. OTHER IDEAS League members ought to belong to and lead local organisations, from volunteer fire departments to civic organisations. The key is servant-leadership. Once you have won the people’s respect as servant-leader, then and only the n will they listen to you. Then you can lead them to Southern independence. All of these ideas are just a tiny sample of what can be done. Chapter leaders, sit down and decide what programs you’ll try. Plan carefully, follow through, work to completion, then analyse your failure and success. And you will have failures. Learn to treasure them as teachers. Remember that every program has three parts -- planning, follow-through, and feedback -- and it’s not done right until all three parts are complete. For every problem, every complaint, every need, every controversy, ask, “How can we turn this to benefit Southern independence? How can we show ourselves as the servants of the Southern people?” Before you go to sleep to night, and every night, ask yourself, “What have I done today to bring Southern independence closer? What can I do tomorrow?” I’ll tell a trick my son taught me. Make yourself a promise to spend at least 15 minutes every day working for Southern independence. You’d be astounded how much you can do with just a little time applied consistently. Of course, you may have listened to all this and thought to yourself, “He’s the greatest megalomaniac since Julius Caesar. Look how few people are here. How are we going to do all this?” You are looking at the wrong thing. You see the might of the empire, its strength, its ruthless cruelty and power, and you think, “Southern independence is impossible. They’ll never let us go.” But I ask you to look not on the seen, but the unseen. In unseen truth, the empire is like glass, fragile, and ready to break. It is universally hated outside this country. It has overreached itself everywhere. The empire looks invincible. So did Nineveh. So did Babylon. So did Rome. And in a single day, they fell. Southerner, get ready for your day!
God save the South!
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