League of the South denounces the Kennedy brothers' "The South Was Right!"

Hell has frozen over!  Beelzebub is putting on ice skates. Lucifer is throwing snowballs. Satan is putting on an overcoat, mittens, and a stocking cap,

Michael Hill, president of the League of the South has written a lengthy essay condemning the book, "The South Was Right!" by the Kennedy twin brothers, Walter Donald and James Ronald.

http://leagueofthesouth.com/a-plausible-lie-a-critique-of-the-south-was-right/

This was one of the founding books of the modern neo-Confederate movement.  Hill's criticism is to a large extent, as much as anything Hill would say could be, is correct.

The book "The South is Right!" is a defense of the Confederacy against charges of it being a racist enterprise.

The importance of this public condemnation isn't clear. The League of the South is a remnant organization and Hill and company, however many that might be, are desperate to get some notice for their organization. However, it might be a wedge strategy taking advantaged of a much more racially polarized environment, and the Sons of Confederate Veteran has been radicalizing and they read Frank Conner now, a really scary book which sees the civil rights movement as a Jewish conspiracy against American society.

Also, with Confederate flags, statues coming down, Confederate names being removed it might be that the neo-Confederate movement doesn't see much value in trying the old "Heritage not Hatred" song and dance.

Hill is somewhat hypocritical. The League of the South for years used to deny having any racial agenda. What is the cliche, "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

There were two important books starting the neo-Confederate movement: "The South Was Right!" by the Kennedy twins and "Southern By The Grace of God" by Michael Andrew Grissom. Grissom has been more openly racist with his books, but has been in obscurity. The Kennedy twins books sell. However, I think there is a phase change going on in the neo-Confederate movement and Hill might have picked up on it. When I mean a phase change I mean a discreet break between one mode of things to another, like ice to water or water to steam.

Neo-Confederates may laugh, but Michael Hill might be a future Commander-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Okay, you can laugh now, but we live in the time of Trump. In a time of racial polarization the SCV may get pulled in a racist direction.

Regardless this is a good development. It is infighting of a serious nature among neo-Confederates. The League of the South will be a racist force pushing on the Sons of Confederate Veterans to be crazy like themselves. It could really discredit the neo-Confederate movement.

League of the South allowing it to be used by a foreign power against American interests. UPDATE:

I was reading this interesting article about Putin and Russia at the New York Review of Books in the latest issue. You can read it here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/how-he-and-his-cronies-stole-russia/?insrc=hpma

In place of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle slowly put into place a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilizing support on a new and spectacular scale. Once the KGB had retaken the country, in other words, it began once again to act like the KGB—only now it was better funded and more sophisticated. Today’s Russian “political technologists” make use of their state-owned media, including English-language outlets such as the TV news channel Russia Today; armies of paid social media “trolls” who post on newspaper comment pages, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites; fake “experts” whose quotes can be presented with fake authority; and real experts to whom Putin’s officials have granted special access, or have simply paid. Former Western ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi—all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support.

Using these different sources, the Kremlin began putting out messages designed not necessarily to make Russia look good, but rather to undermine the Western establishment and Western institutions, including the European Union and NATO. Using both money and information, they seek to empower the Western far right, the anti-establishment left, and the international business community all at the same time. Thus Russia Today supports Occupy Wall Street. A Russian oligarch organizes a meeting in Vienna attended by the French National Front, Hungary’s nationalist political party Jobbik, and Austria’s Freedom Party.3 Whispering campaigns, conducted in the world’s financial capitals—especially Frankfurt and the City of London—hint at the dire things that will happen if sanctions against Russia are not lifted. In an article recently published by The Interpreter, an online publication dedicated to exposing Kremlin disinformation, the journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss argue that:

since at least 2008 Kremlin military and intelligence thinkers have been talking about information not in the familiar terms of “persuasion,” “public diplomacy” or even “propaganda,” but in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.4

In understanding this we can see why Russian media has been interested in giving League of the South President Michael Hill and some others a platform in their media. Recently the League of the South was exultant in the fact that they were on Russian media.

http://leagueofthesouth.com/league-president-interviewed-on-russian-tv/

The Russians may not take the League of the South very seriously but want to assist any group that they feel could harm the United States of America and in the case of giving League of the South media access they are covering all their bets.

It would suit the Russians very well if a real secessionist movement would gain some traction in the United States.

At some point what the League of the South is doing is treason.

UPDATE:

This is another item of the Putin government supporting the neo-Confederate movement in the United States.

http://leagueofthesouth.com/the-league-of-the-south-takes-its-southern-nationalist-message-to-moscow/

League of the South President Michael Hill is pleased to announce that he spoke via Skype at an Anti-Globalist conference in Moscow on the topic “The Right of People for Self-Determination and Constructing a Multipolar World.”

I am trying to find out some information about the conference. This is a YouTube video of it. Doesn't seem like a major affair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688xDoLgAY4

The same video can be found at:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/12/14/390167/moscow-hosts-antiglobalization-conference/

I don't know if the Putin government is giving the League of the South any financial resources, but being on Russian TV and being invited to conferences certainly must encourage the neo-Confederates and maintain moral when their agenda doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Also, it has the potential to raise their prestige in the eyes of other extremists and help them recruit members and retain members.

I have not indication so far that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Abbeville Institute are connecting with Russian groups as part of an anti-Western effort.  The people at the Rockford Institute have been in contact with all sorts of reactionary groups in Europe and been sympathetic to reactionaries in Eastern Europe, but I haven't really paid too close attention to this. I think I will need to pay more attention to it in the future.

This article in the Dec. 2014 issue of Chronicles certain shows that they are supportive of Putin and his regime in Russia.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2014/December/38/12/magazine/article/10826302/

The support for neo-Confederates by the regime in Moscow is a disturbing development and needs to be watched closely.

"Gawker" has article on League of the South

Gawker, an online news source, had an article on the League of the South. It is online here:

http://gawker.com/inside-the-american-id-chilling-with-the-south-s-new-s-1547070777

A reporter for Gawker went to a League of the South protest against immigration and Republican Florida U.S. Senator Marcio Rubio for his policies regarding immigration. The League of the South billboard with the word "SECEDE" has attracted local attention which is what billboards are designed to do, but in this case there is extra attention since you don't often see a billboard urging secession.

Link to League of the South web page on demonstration.  Link to Facebook page on demonstration.

Link to League of the South web page about the billboard.

What is of notice regarding the billboard is that the League of the South has the money to pay for it. Billboards cost a lot of money. I thought the League of the South was just a remnant of former self and would be just fading away over time. They have a physical headquarters also.  So they seem to be persisting, perhaps growing..

They also seem to have become activist group rather than a perpetual study committee.

Adam Weinstein also notes how the League of the South manages the media.

The way I met Hill was this: I started talking to Snuffy Smith with the Liberian flag, and three minutes later, Hill came urgently striding over like a recess teacher on the playground. "Media?" he asked. "Talk to me. Talk to me."

Michael Hill actually denied being neo-Confederate to the reporter. Which shows that neo-Confederates will say anything if it is expedient. Weinstein reports:

As suspect as that talk may sound, Hill insists his group is not neo-Confederate: "We're not so blind as to think that we can turn back the clock and have things the way that it was 100, 150 years ago, and we don't want to do that. We're men and women who live in the age that we've been placed, and we're not romantic dreamers of some idyllic past or something like that." 

Hill's Facebook page suggests otherwise. In late January, for example, he posted a note celebrating the birthdays of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. "[L]et us emulate them and continue the honorable cause that motivated these two noble Southern men—the survival, well being, and independence of the Southern people," he wrote.

The following day was MLK Day, so Hill added another thought. "Note: If you wish to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. please go elsewhere. He is not one of us," he wrote of the Atlanta-born Southern preacher.

The read learns that the neo-Confederate movement can be less than candid.

Weinstein reports Hill Facebook posting the next day where Hill makes his views clear: 

On this day when the racial propagandizing of America reaches it[s] ugly zenith, I offer a simple photo graph of Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1952 and ask you to contrast it with the same city today. Or with Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham, etc, etc. When will we stop believing lies and turn this situation around for the very preservation of our civilization?

Weinstein is perceptive enough to see how neo-Confederacy could have popular appeal and that people should not just laugh them off:

Perhaps this scene reinforces the League's reputation as a comical fringe element, a gaggle of old racist Lost Cause types who dream of the Confederate battle flag again gracing their statehouses, who lament the Union's retardation of their familial livelihoods. And their manhoods. "There were more men in America in 1776 than there are today," Hill recently wrote on Facebook. "[I]t can be changed, you know. Just 'man up,' as they say!"

But intellectual elites and newsmen caricature this movement at their own peril. One of the most famous Southern revivalists of the last century wrote a conservative manifesto titled "Ideas Have Consequences," and in America, in 2014, the League of the South's ideas are not without consequence.

Beyond its race-tinged Dixie jingoism, much of the League's public rhetoric is in line with a wider American attitude. It emphasizes truly small government—the dictatorship of the individual, the republic of the family, the overthrow of the cultural and bureaucratic forces that the League believes threaten our insular networks and affinity groups.

This dovetails not simply with neo-Confederacy and conservatism but with a broader, bipartisan disillusionment with government and mass media—the contemporary ethos that elevates selves and loved ones above the din of 308 million meatsticks screaming, stamping, belching, reaching nothing but the most tenuous consensus on anything enduring. Get government out of the way. Abolish artificial ties with strangers. Focus on the immediate, the personal, the deeply felt—"faith, family, and folk," as the League puts it.

In the recent decade we have seen neo-Confederate ideas slip into the mainstream such as nullification. Weinstein realizes that the neo-Confederate movement has a potential to be a serious problem. 

Richard Weaver who wrote "Ideas Have Consequences" also wrote a key founding book of the neo-Confederate movement, "The Southern Tradition at Bay," edited by M.E. Bradford and George Core. Core and Bradford explained in the book that Richard Weaver's conservative ideas were neo-Confederate ideas reformulated to appeal to broader audiences.

The article has, if I understand the indicators by it, 29,000+ readers and has been shared. So it does help people become aware of the neo-Confederate movement and be warned. However, it also helps the League of the South get new members.  However, I think that this article is overall good in that it is an accurate portrayal of the League of the South revealing that they have a racist agenda and also importantly that they try to not represent it to the media. Importantly, Weinstein sees that the neo-Confederate movement could have a broader appeal and is a potential menace.