UPDATE: So far as the morning of 5/18/2014 I have not heard back from Hiter or the SCV regarding these questions. Hiter's letter strongly urged me to ask questions and so I have. Perhaps I will hear back. I will be updating the date in the UPDATE until I hear back. I may not be updating it as frequently since they haven't emailed me back even as to whether they received my questions.
I sent the following email to Dr. Thomas Y. Hiter, head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Vision 2016 effort and the SCV Chief of Heritage Defense.
Email of 4/21/2014 follows:
Dear Dr. Hiter:
Since you have strongly suggested in your letter to me post
marked March 25, 2014 that I ask the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV)
regarding questions I might have about the SCV, I am submitting these 15
questions to the SCV. I look forward to a timely reply.
I had other questions, but I think these 15 questions are a
good start. Please note I am copying these to the SCV Chief of Heritage
Defense with this email since perhaps it is his authority within the SCV to
answer these questions.
Sincerely Yours,
Edward H. Sebesta
QUESTIONS
FOR THOMAS Y HITER AND THE SCV
1.
The prefix “neo” means new in a case
where something is a new version of something in the past. For example there is
neo-Classical architecture, music, and art. Today a group of people who claim
to have the “principles” and “ideals” of the Confederate soldier, which is part
of The Charge to the SCV, are certainly not surviving Confederate soldiers, but
are new holders of their beliefs. Wouldn’t neo-Confederate be a proper
recognition that these are new Confederates?
Question:
What is the SCV objection to the term “neo-Confederate”?
2.
The states which are considered as
being former states of the Confederacy vary with different groups and
individuals.
Question:
Which states does the SCV consider former states of the Confederacy?
3.
The SCV has a program called Vision
2016. It is described in an article “Our Southern Vision,” by Thomas Y. Hiter,
SCV Chief of Heritage Defense, in the Nov. /Dec. 2011 issue of the Confederate
Veteran, official publication of the SCV, on pages 10-11. In reading the
article it can be perceived that the SCV has a political agenda though it is
partly stated in terms that the non-member might not understand.
Hiter
reports that in February 2011 the General Executive Council adopted “The
Vision” statement. This vision statement sets goals for the year 2016 reunion
of the SCV of membership growth, and from the statement, “… and is widely seen
by others as the pre-eminent authority on Southern heritage and American
liberty.” The reference to “American liberty” might be understood that
they are going to have a historical interest in American concepts of liberty
and the Constitution, however reading further it becomes apparent that there is
a political component.
Hiter
in bold face has a statement of belief of the SCV, “We believe in God, home, family,
heritage, duty, liberty, freedom, self-determination, self-government,
patriotism, truth and self-defense,” and further asserts that “most
Southerners” believe this and that the actions of the SCV “can make a
difference in achieving these things.”
It
is subsequent to this statement that Hiter it becomes more apparent that it is
a political agenda.
After
the statement of belief Hiter writes, “In other words, we believe in our
heritage. Now there are other facets of the SCV than Heritage Defense.” He then
lists the usual “heritage” activities of the SCV and then states, “But all in
all, over and above that, we stand ready to fight all over the battles which
President Davis predicted we would fight when the Cause they fought for once
again rears its head and calls for attention and eventual victory.”
To
persons outside the neo-Confederate movement this reference to Confederate
president Davis may be obscure. Davis asserted that the issues of the attempted
secession were ideological and that the issues would arise again in the future.
Davis said:
“The principle for
which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time
and in another form.”
This
quote is commonly referred to by neo-Confederates as being from an 1871 address
to the Mississippi state legislature. I haven’t found the historical reference
for it. Hiter is explaining with this reference to Davis prediction that the
SCV is preparing to get involved in “battles” over principles.
Hiter
becomes even more clear that it is a political agenda in his statement about
media awareness of the SCV.
Today they know us,
but are a bit confused about who we are and what we want. Some confuse us with
the Klan, or some other undesirable group. Others think we are reenactors or
some other worthwhile but essentially benign, association.
We are neither. We
are the descendants of the men who gained our freedom from English despotism
and who fought a bloody four-year-long war against Yankee despotism for the
same reason, and who have no intention now of surrendering to modern
one-world-socialist despotism now!
Here
Hiter declares that the SCV isn’t just an association unengaged in the
political questions of the day, but instead they are going to be ready to fight
future political battles.
More
ominously Hiter refers to a yet potential armed conflict:
Now it is our turn to
step into the breach and show the world the same God-given truths which
motivated the patriots of 1776, motivated those of 1861, and that we stand
today to advance the same cause they stood for then.
Happily, we are not
called, yet, to arms in defense of our liberties or our lives.
In
online presentations Hiter states that the goal of the SCV is to reclaim
“American liberty,” which again implies a plan of action to achieve a goal.
Question:
What is “American liberty” and what is the agenda of the SCV to “reclaim
American liberty”?
4.
The SCV sells and endorses the movie
“Birth of a Nation” which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and has been selling it
for sometime as a Confederate gift. In the Confederate Veteran the SCV
has endorsed in a book review Michael Andrew Grissom’s book, “Southern By the
Grace of God” which portrays the KKK as saviors of the South during
reconstruction and recommends the books of Thomas Dixon. The SCV sells this
book as a “Confederate” gift. The SCV sells this book online, in their catalog,
and in the Confederate Veteran.
Question:
If the SCV is against the KKK why does it sell pro-KKK material?
5.
The SCV sells and endorses a book
“South Under Siege” by Frank Conner in which he argues that the 20th
Century Civil Rights movement was a Jewish conspiracy to an attack the
South. Here are some quotes from the book:
From page 391:
Thereafter, the German Jews and
Russian Jews cooperated to the extent necessary to direct the postwar Southern
black-civil-rights movement in the U.S (as we shall note), and oversee the
destruction of the traditional white Southerners as a people.
The American Jews seem to have reached
a compromise position between the Reformed Jews’ desire to stay out of
government and instead run the people who run the U.S. (and the world), so as
to retain their moral superiority; and the Russian Jews’ desire to take over
the government and run the U.S. (and the world) themselves.
From page 393:
Until after the turn of the 20th
century, anthropologists had routinely recorded genetic as well as cultural
differences between races and ethnic groups—that being the whole point of
anthropology. The highlighted differences among races hand include those of
intelligence. But as Kevin McDonald points out in The Culture of Critique, a
German-Jewish-immigrant anthropologist named Frank Boas changed all that. At
Columbia, Boas arbitrarily claimed that biological differences between the
races were miniscule—that environment alone shaped the behavior of the
different races and ethnic groups (a la Rousseau). A number of other Jewish
anthropologists swiftly adopted the Boas’ position; and soon the Jews dominated
the field of cultural anthropology. As MacDonald points out, by 1915 the Jews
had gained control of the American Anthropological Association; and by 1926
they were chairing the anthropology departments at all of the major
universities.
Question: Why is the
SCV promoting anti-Semitic books?
6.
In the April 2008 issue of the Chaplain’s
Corp Chronicles, a publication of the SCV’s Chaplain’s Corps, is a review
praising “Antebellum Slavery: An Orthodox Christian View,” by a Council of
Conservative Citizens leader Gary Roper, reviewed by Michael Andrew Grissom who
praises the book. The view of the book is that the Bible justifies slavery.
This book is sold by the SCV in the Confederate Veteran as a
“Confederate” gift and in the SCV catalogs.
Since
2001 the SCV has also sold in the Confederate Veteran, as either
“Southern Gifts” or “Confederate Gifts,” books which are defenses of antebellum
slavery such as “Myths and Realities of Antebellum Slavery” by John C. Perry,
“Myths of American Slavery” by Walter D. Kennedy as well as other defenses of
slavery such as Albert T. Bledsoe’s “Liberty and Slavery.”
The
SCV’s latest catalog, an insert in the Sept. /Oct. 2013 issue of the Confederate
Veteran, as well as the “Confederate Gifts” bookstore section in the
Sept./Oct. 2012 issue of the Confederate Veteran sold “Myths of American
Slavery” by Walter D. Kennedy with his condemnation of the Southern Baptists
for their apology over slavery and claims that abolitionists were
anti-Christian.
Question:
Does the SCV feel that the Bible defends antebellum slavery?
7.
Starting in the Vol. 1 2001
Confederate Veteran to the Sept./Oct. Confederate Veteran catalog insert, as
either a “Classic Southern Reprint” or a “Confederate Gift,” the SCV has sold
the book, “The Legal & Historical Status of the Dred Scott Decision,” by
Elbert William R. Ewing which is a defense of the Supreme Court Dred Scott
decision. One key part of the Dred Scott decision was that persons of African
descent inherently weren’t citizens and had no rights.
Question:
Does the SCV think the Dred Scott Decision was right or wrong?
8.
The Southern Mercury was
published by the Foundation for Preserving American Culture, Inc. which is
listed on its masthead that it is “An educational foundation of the Sons of
Confederate Veterans, Inc.” In the Vol. 4 No. 4, July/Aug. 2006 Southern
Mercury is an article titled “The Tolerance Scam,” pages 8-9, 30-34, by
Michael W. Masters, who has been involved with the Council of Conservative
Citizens (www.cofc.org). The editor for this
issue is Frank B. Powell, III, who is also the editor of the Confederate
Veteran.
The
article isn’t so much about the Southern Poverty Law Center as an attack on the
civil rights movement as a Marxist conspiracy, fear mongering about immigrants,
and an attack on the very concept of anti-racism itself.
From
Page 30
Using the wedge of
anti-racism cultural Marxists orchestrated judicial and legislative changes
over the course of decades ¾ e.g. Brown v. Board of Education
in 1955, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Immigration Reform Act of 1965.
… The cultural Marxists relentlessly hammered away at Western cultural norms
using the sledge of anti-racism as a battering ram to bring down the walls of
traditional Western culture.
Given
the type of books that the SCV endorses and sells it appears that there is a
public face and private face of the SCV regarding racism.
Question:
Given the type of books the SCV endorses and given that the SCV’s educational
publication instructs its readers that anti-racism is a tool to destroy Western
civilization, can the SCV’s claims of being anti-racist be taken seriously”
9.
Along with the books mentioned in the
prior questions the selection of books the SCV sells raises issues as to how
the SCV selects the books it decides to sell. For example, on unpaginated page
35 in the Vol. 2 2002 Confederate Veteran Patrick J. Buchanan’s book
“The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil
our Country and Civilization,” is offered as a “Classic Southern Reprint,” with
the endorsement, “Bursting with facts, from which the reader can draw his own
conclusions. Should be required reading for every American voter.” This book
isn’t about the Confederacy and it doesn’t present itself as a southern issue,
but it is offered as a “Classic Southern Reprint” with the SCV’s endorsement of
the book.
Question: What is the
decision making process in the SCV’s selection of books it offers for sale?
10.
In the Sept. /Oct. 2003, Vol. 1 No. 2,
pages 10-14, Southern Mercury Frank Conner has an white
supremacist article “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here.” In it, African
Americans are asserted to have low IQs, a fact which has supposedly been
covered up by a liberal conspiracy. In a section of his article titled,
“Liberals Create a False Public Image of the Blacks,” Conner writes:
Previously,
anthropologists had routinely recorded the notable differences in IQ among the
races; but at Columbia, a liberal cultural anthropologist named Franz Boas now
changed all of that. He decreed that there were no differences in IQ among the
races, and the only biological differences between the blacks and white were of
superficial nature. The liberals swiftly made it academically suicidal to
challenge Boas’ flat assertion. Meanwhile, the liberals in the media heaped
special praise upon black athletes, musicians, singers, and writers – and treated
them as typical of the black race. The liberals were creating a false image of
the blacks in America as a highly competent people who were being held back by
the prejudiced white southerners.
The 1954 Supreme
Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is denounced by Conner as
“patently-unconstitutional.” Conner also sees the landmark civil rights
legislation the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as
“patently-unconstitutional”. Civil rights legislation is denounced by
Conner as being part of a liberal conspiracy, which he calls “Reconstruction
II.” He explains: “Black civil rights was simply the best moral weapon with
which to destroy the white Southerners as a people – just as it had been in the
19th century.” The creation of Jim Crow is defended. Conner calling
African Americans “a childlike people” and that “the white Southerners had
disenfranchised and segregated the blacks, in perhaps the mildest reaction
possible at that time to the black’s transgressions.”
Conner sees civil
rights and efforts against racism as a means to destroy the South and America
stating:
Thus
reinforced, Reconstruction II is steadily shredding the traditional white
society – first in the South and then the rest of the nation. But the liberals
are in a big hurry to replace Christianity with secular humanism and limited
government with socialism.
This article was not
an isolated example in the Southern Mercury. In another Southern
Mercury article, Vol. 2 No. 1, pages 5-7, 32-33, “The Enemy’s Strategy,”
the Frank Conner writes:
The
liberals overran the South’s main defenses during the civil rights movement of
the 1950s and 1960s, and outthought and outfought and intimidated and
demoralized the white Southerners so badly then that most of our people reacted
by pretending that this war is not even happening.
Nor are such
sentiments confined to just the Southern Mercury. In the March/April
2012 Confederate Veteran, in the cover article by Boyd Cathey, “The Land
We Love: Southern Tradition and Our Future,” pages 16-23, 56-59, civil rights
is held to be an attack on the South. Boyd states, “Southerners have understood
perforce that the races must live and work side by side, and hopefully
harmoniously, but that did not imply legal and social equality for all, either
black or white.”
Cathey also believes
that the “Southern republicanism is anti-egalitarian” and as a consequence
everyone didn’t “have some unqualified right to participate in or rule
over the commonwealth. Participation in government wasn’t based on the modern
concept of ‘one man, one vote.’”
Cathey perceives the
1950s and 1960s civil rights movement as an attack on the South:
The
decisions of the Supreme Court, the triumph of the civil rights movement which
in some ways was a frontal attack on constitutional republicanism and the
rights of property, and the triumph of political correctness and cultural
Marxism, all signaled the beginning of a “Second War of Northern Aggression”
aimed at totally reshaping and restructuring our culture and at rejecting the
principles and beliefs our ancestors.
The SCV also sells
and endorses books such as the “South Was Right!” by James Ronald Kennedy and
Walter Donald Kennedy which denounce the Voting Rights Act.
Questions: What is
the SCV position on the mid-20th century civil rights movement, court
decisions, and laws? Is there any civil rights legislation of the 19th,
20th or 21st century of which the SCV approves?
11.
SCV chaplains in the SCV Chaplain
Corps use the terms ‘sodomites’ and ‘sodomy’ when referring to and
condemning gays.
H.
Rondel Rumburg, past Chaplain-in-Chief of the SCV, in the March 2007 issue of
the Chaplain’s Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans,
pages 4-8, condemns those who would support historical apologies by the
State of Virginia for past wrongs stating that “these same people need to
confess their own offenses to God and to the people they have mislead,” among
the things Rumburg considers offenses, is that of being, “guilty of protecting
sodomites, thus spreading AIDS.” In another article in Sept. 2009 issue of
the Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles, unpaginated, pages
10-13, Rumburg laments that after the Civil War “Deconstructionists” worked
to bring humanism to the South which he claims has had disastrous results,
among other things such as “an enthroning of sodomy as a preferred lifestyle.”
Former
Chaplain-in-Chief Alister C. Anderson gave the Invocation delivered at the
Confederate Evangelistic Sesquicentennial Service on February 25, 2012 which
was reprinted in the April 2012 issue of the Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles,
pages 12-15. In it he enthusiastically praises “Southern ancestors” that
they were “manly men who preached about ‘tough love’ and who would not condone
the ministry and preaching of non-Biblical, cheesy, whinny, quiche-eating,
effete, effeminate pastors who were afraid of their own shadow,” which
presumably is a criticism of contemporary pastors. Further, Anderson worries,
“O Lord Jesus Christ, could the radical, despotic, contempt for women, Jihadist
Muslim critique of our supposedly Judeo-Christian civilization be true?,” and
“O Lord, are we a narcissistic, selfish, self-centered, spectator-oriented,
voyeuristic pornographic culture that is possessed with the desire for elicit
[sic] sexual activity, fornication, and sodomy?”
In
the Sept. /Oct. 2009 Confederate Veteran Chaplain-in-Chief
Cecil A. Fayard, Jr., in the Chaplain’s Comments section, pages 12-13, 45,
asserts that America is in trouble. Fayard says that America has become
immoral, "We have sown immorality," he writes and "We live in a
very loose society, a wicked nation morally. All types of unspeakable and
deplorable acts are being committed by deviant men and women." Fayard also
states as a sign that America is in trouble is that “One school curriculum in
America teaches acceptance of homosexuality in the first grade…”
Michael
Masters in the previously mentioned Southern Mercury article, “Tolerance Scam”
sees the campaign for Lesbian and gay rights as a Marxist conspiracy against
society writing:
And just as the
Bolsheviks inflamed the masses to violence against the Russian aristocracy,
today’s cultural Marxists harness the massed numbers of a new proletariat –
composed of people of color, feminists, homosexuals and other disaffected
groups – to secure social acceptance and the numbers sufficient to convey
political power.
In
the Vol. 6 1999 Confederate Veteran, in the column, “Chaplain’s
Comments,” pages 60-61, Chaplain-in-Chief Alister C. Anderson tells the SCV
membership:
My brother
compatriots. I ask you to remember that we are soldiers in the Army of God and
are organized along the military lines of our ancestors. We are called to
discipline ourselves so that we can train and teach our posterity about the
true history and moral foundation of our ancestors’ lives. I ask you to
remember that the spiritual discipline within our brotherhood is essential for
the success of our missing and in a larger sense is crucial for the survival of
our Republic in these dreadfully immoral times.
Question:
Is the SCV opposed to legal protections against discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation, same-sex-marriage, the elimination of laws against same sex
relations, or gay and Lesbian clergy?
- The Nov. /Dec. 2012 issue of Confederate Veteran
cover article is, “Lincoln’s Band of Tyrants.” In this article President
Lincoln’s preservation of the Union during the Civil War is held to have
advanced a communist agenda against states’ rights. Lincoln’s preservation
of the Union is supposed to parallel Adolph Hitler’s creation of the Third
Reich. The essay concludes that, “Lincoln, Marx, Engels and Hitler are
indeed a strange but deadly ‘Band of Brothers.’” Kennedy further asserts
that the communist and Nazi dictators of the 20th century are held to
be inspired and instructed by Lincoln.
In the March/April 2008 issue of Southern
Mercury is an article by Alan Stang titled “Republican Party: Red from
the Start,” in which the Republican Party is asserted have had Communist
influence from the beginning. Stang discusses complaints made by supporters of
Ron Paul that the Republican Party has lost its way and needs to return to its
original principles. Stang rejects this arguing that the Republican Party did
not “go wrong,” did not “go left,” and further stating:
It has been wrong from the beginning,
from the day it was founded. From the beginning the Republican Party has worked
without deviation for bigger, more imperial government, for higher taxes, for
more wars, and for more totalitarianism. From the beginning, the Republican
Party has been Red.
By “Red,” Stang means communist. Stang
thinks that if Robert E. Lee and Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson had been better
informed about the issues of the Civil War he would have “hanged our first
Communist President [i.e. Abraham Lincoln]”. Stang explains:
Lee and Jackson did not fully
comprehend what they were fighting. Had this really been a “Civil” War, rather
than a secession, they would and could easily have seized Washington after
Manassas and hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals.
Question:
Aren’t these articles comparing Lincoln to Hitler and calling him a communist
as well as alleging that the Republican Party has been part of a communist
conspiracy from the beginning, and asserting that Robert E. Lee and Thomas
Jackson would have hanged Lincoln if they were better informed fairly extremist
beliefs?
- Why is the SCV restricted to persons descended from
Confederates? If a person has a positive view of the Confederacy why not
have them be members instead of auxiliary members? What is the necessity
of being a descendant? Is the SCV setting themselves up, intentionally or
unintentionally, as a hereditary cast of Southerners who are more southern
than others?
- Why only male members? This is the 21st century and not
the early 20th century. True the name is Sons of Confederate Veterans, but
names can be changed. The SCV has changed its name before. The SCV allows
a person to join with proof being a descendant and paying dues. The UDC
has more restrictive policies in which you have to be asked in or have a
sponsor. The UDC isn't an alternative, but even if they were, why not open
up to women instead of confining them to an auxiliary group The Order of
the Confederate Rose?
- The original name of the SCV was the United Sons of
Confederate Veterans (USCV) similar to the names United Daughters of the
Confederacy and United Confederate Veterans. In the book “Ghosts of the
Confederacy,” LSU Press, Gaines M. Foster states that the name of the USCV
was changed because its members were horrified that the initials were the
same as for the United States Colored Volunteers.
Question:
Why did the USCV drop "United" from their name?