Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 24: Reactionary Catholic neo-Confederacy

Pius X (Andrés Jacinto Longhin [1863-1936]): Symbol for Catholic fundamentalists ("traditionalists")

Via Edward Sebesta's blog Anti-Neo-Confederate (
Article on Thomas Woods at DePaul University 04/19/07), I see this article about the pro-Confederate inclinations of a guy who Sebesta identifies as the associate editor of Latin Mass magazine.

I don't know if this is the same kind of reactionary Catholicism with which Mel Gibson and his Holocaust-denier father are associated. But it's clearly a Catholic fundamentalist publication. (The title is a big clue right off the bat.)

The article to which Sebesta links is Neo-confederacy a possibilty? by Euan Hague The DePaulia (undated but apparently from April 2007). Hague writes of Woods:


Woods is the author of a 2004 book entitled The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History which the Boston Globe described as "ultra-reactionary extremism." A lengthy essay in the New York Times by Adam Cohen stated that the intent of this book by Woods is in "distorting the past to promote dangerous policies today." Cohen continues, explaining that "if the 14th Amendment, which guarantees minorities 'equal protection of the law,' was never properly ratified – as Mr. Woods argues – racial discrimination may be constitutional after all." ...

Our upcoming speaker, Thomas Woods, was a member of the League of the South and contributed to their publication Southern Patriot on more than one occasion in the 1990s. For example, in a 1995 essay Woods claimed that the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship rights to former slaves and provides us with equal protection guarantees, was "wholly incompatible with a federal system" giving "ill-begotten authority" to "militant egalitarians."

The League of the South has been described by theanti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center as a "hate group" at the forefront of a neo-Confederate movement "increasingly rife with white supremacists and racist ideology." Mr. Woods has subsequently become involved with a group of radical reactionary Catholic scholars whom, the Southern Poverty Law Center demonstrated in a lengthy article in their Intelligence Report magazine published in Winter 2006, reject recent Vatican teachings and "may form the largest group of hard-line anti-Semites in America."
This is a reminder that what neo-Confederacy is really about is not preserving "heritage" or honor the memory of Confederate soldiers and whatever. It's about white racism and white supremacy.

Hague also provides a link to
The New Crusaders by Heidi Beirich Intelligence Report Winter 2007, which uses the term "radical tranditionalists" for this brand of Catholic extremists.

Woods also
has a column that runs at the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com Web site. The titles of Woods' column reflect the rightwing isolationist position of the Lew Rockwell crowd as well as some other hard-right types. I have occasionally linked to articles at that site that I thought were worthwhile, though I identify it as a neo-Confederate Web site when I do.

They publish some columns by people like Gabriel Kolko, Tom Engelhardt, Jude Wanniski, Jim Lobe, and Eric Margolis who are critical of the Iraq War and American unilateralism but who also are not advocates of neo-Confederate ideology or pseudohistory, so far as I know. Gary North, who has a column there, is one of the best known advocates of the extreme fundamentalist Christian Reconstruction movement. Some of the links they have at their "Columnists & Commentators" page are actually links to other Web sites.

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