Is Southern culture better than Northern?

[japanese anime]

as an outsider i have always had a tremendous admiration for the American South. I regard Southerners as the the healthiest, most cultured, civilized, well mannered, hospitable, and tasteful segment of the American population.
it's been proven by American historians that the greatest American writers, musicians, and cultural icons of America have come disproprtionately from the American South. Why is this? Surely it's because Southern culture is inherently better than Northern?
I'd also add that traditionally the South has had the most beautiful dialect in America, a dialect which reminds of me in many respects of upper class British English circa 1930 (of course, like British RP, the traditional Southern dialect is becoming rare today, and on the verge of extinction, thanks to the dominance of the culturally stagnant Northerners). I rarely see people on TV nowadays speak like the old Southerners.

[KerguelenExileDissident]

What culture?

[gooddeath]

as an outsider i have always had a tremendous admiration for the American South. I regard Southerners as the the healthiest, most cultured, civilized, well mannered, hospitable, and tasteful segment of the American population.
it's been proven by American historians that the greatest American writers, musicians, and cultural icons of America have come disproprtionately from the American South. Why is this? Surely it's because Southern culture is inherently better than Northern?
I'd also add that traditionally the South has had the most beautiful dialect in America, a dialect which reminds of me in many respects of upper class British English circa 1930 (of course, like British RP, the traditional Southern dialect is becoming rare today, and on the verge of extinction, thanks to the dominance of the culturally stagnant Northerners). I rarely see people on TV nowadays speak like the old Southerners.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not.

[DonaldT]

I grew up watching Gone With the Wind, so I had somewhat of an unrealistic view of what the southern states of America are currently like. I literally used to dress up in a confederate uniform and pretend I was fighting Union soldiers.

As I grew, I started watching movies which portrayed the south in a different light: 'hillbillies' and Jerry Springer.

In more recent years, I was under the impression that a lot of mainstream American icons and culture originated from the American south and that most southern Americans were polite and courteous in an old fashioned kind of way.

Currently, I'm still coming to terms with the fact that the southern states of America contain some of the most dense areas of negro population, as I unfortunately discovered on the Phora via the picture thread. Which I must say was quite a rude shock.

I'm not really sure what to make of the American south anymore. There are so many different elements to it and it confuses the hell out of me. Those American whites from the south I have met in person are in fact extremely nice people.

[Flying Drumhead Court-Martial]

It's because you support inbreeding that you think this. The classy Southerners were basically just lazy Anglos. The North were and are superior, and I say this as a biased Midwesterner.

The Rebs had it right with some things though. Guess where you would be in Confederate society, Japanese Anime? You'd be in the fields picking cotton.

as an outsider i have always had a tremendous admiration for the American South. I regard Southerners as the the healthiest, most cultured, civilized, well mannered, hospitable, and tasteful segment of the American population.
it's been proven by American historians that the greatest American writers, musicians, and cultural icons of America have come disproprtionately from the American South. Why is this? Surely it's because Southern culture is inherently better than Northern?
I'd also add that traditionally the South has had the most beautiful dialect in America, a dialect which reminds of me in many respects of upper class British English circa 1930 (of course, like British RP, the traditional Southern dialect is becoming rare today, and on the verge of extinction, thanks to the dominance of the culturally stagnant Northerners). I rarely see people on TV nowadays speak like the old Southerners.

[WillieBrennan]

The North were and are superior, and I say this as a biased Midwesterner.


You might want to reconsider that view. I'm sure there were and are now plenty of decent Northerners, but unfortunately the ones who had the most influence were batshit crazy and hypocrites to boot.

Perhaps the most famous Yankee socialist experiment was the one in New Harmony, Indiana, which was renamed from George Rapp’s Harmony by one Robert Owen. New Harmony, founded in 1826, was based on the idea that private property is "absurd and irrational." Owen sought to eliminate private property as well as personal responsibility, the family, religion, and marriage in order to produce his own version of heaven on earth. There were Owenite clubs in various communities in America, and it was the Owenites who coined the word "socialism." Their core belief was the abrogation of individual responsibility. The state, run by people like themselves, should be responsible for everything instead. Man is not responsible for his own actions, they said. Based on such a harebrained philosophy, New Harmony only lasted for two years. Despite the disaster of New Harmony, there were various Owenite copycats, such as Ohio’s Friendly Association for Mutual Interests and the Yellow Springs (Ohio) community, each of which lasted only a few months.

In a chapter entitled "Yankee Utopians" Daniel Flynn describes the huge popularity of Owen’s successor, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, who never came to America himself, although his philosophy did. Like Owen and the others, Fourier claimed to have been personally informed of "God’s Plan" for humanity and generously shared it with others. The plan included the abolition of marriage, of free enterprise and private property, and of traditional religion. It advocated communal living and "free love," which would supposedly "level the erotic playing field for the ugly, shy, and awkward."

Many of New England’s and New York’s leading citizens were devotees of Fourierism. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley extolled Fourier’s ideas on the front page of his newspaper in 1842 and continued to promote them for years.

Fourier’s philosophy came to be known as "associationalism," which was championed in New England by the "Transcendentialists." "From their Puritan forbears," Flynn writes, "Transcendentalists retained moral righteousness" and "the conviction that they were the elect." Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the best known of this peculiar sect, which founded another communistic society called "Brook Farm" in Massachusetts. Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne celebrated these "communitarians" in his novel, The Blithedale Romance. Meanwhile, Brook Farm was populated mostly by "Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates," and "descendants of the Pilgrims."

In true Yankee fashion Ralph Waldo Emerson described various Foureristic fads as vegetarianism, free love, séances, water cures, and temperance as "a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!" Even the insects would be "protected" in the new communistic utopia, wrote Emerson, with a society that stood "for the protection of ground-worms, slugs and mosquitoes . . ."


Fanatical Yankee Utopians (http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo143.html)

[Mora]

They do have better Barbeque in Texas. I can't speak on a North vs. South basis. Except on the barbeque.

[Tchort]

WillieBrennan- I think most people would applaud the works of men who wish to eliminate usury, exploitation and violence from human society (as the utopian socialists wanted- but had no practical or theoretical base to do so).

Southern culture was simply a transplant of European feudal relations- except for the upper class and the few artisans and factory workers. The legacy of the South is one of forced labor- from slavery, to institutional 'Jim Crow' bonded servitude, to forced prisoner labor, to the Company Towns and union-busted trusts and corporations. Southern culture is the product of exploitation among black and white- to give massive amounts of wealth for a very, very tiny few who brought their money over from England.

I just returned from a trip south. The poverty in the rural areas isn't half as harsh as that of the urban areas. Cities like Columbia, SC and Atlanta, GA have huge sprawling corporate towers built next to 1950's era industrial parks and tenemants that look like something out of a movie. The poorest and richest citizens seperated by sidewalks, invisible barriers.

[WillieBrennan]

I think most people would applaud the works of men who wish to eliminate usury, exploitation and violence from human society (as the utopian socialists wanted- but had no practical or theoretical base to do so).

You talkin' about these guys, Tchort?


Accordingly, Sherman wrote to Grant: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children." Writing two days later to his brother John, General Sherman said: "I suppose the Sioux must be exterminated . . ." (Fellman, p. 264).


The great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort [Grant, Sherman and Sheridan] formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching, by The 1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as "the final solution of the Indian problem," which he defined as killing hostile Indians and segregating their pauperized survivors in remote places . . . . These men applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their Civil War experiences, against a people all three despised, in the name of Civilization and Progress

This was Sherman’s attitude toward Southerners during the War for Southern Independence as well. In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife (from his Collected Works) he wrote that his purpose in the war was: "Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the [Southern] people." His charming and nurturing wife Ellen wrote back that her fondest wish was for a war "of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like the Swine into the sea."


link (http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo40.html)


The Founding Fathers of Insider Trading (http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo51.html)

This powerful clique of New England/New York/Chicago business interests "aroused the suspicions of the South," says Brown, since they were so vigorously lobbying Congress to allocate huge sums of money for a transcontinental railroad across the Northern states. Southern politicians wanted the route to pass through their states, naturally, but they knew they were outgunned politically by the political clique from "the Yankee belt" (New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the upper Midwest).

These Northern political insiders, who would form the core of leadership of the Republican Party and later, in some cases, of Lincoln’s army, positioned themselves to earn great riches from the proposed railroad subsidies. John C. Fremont, who would be a general in Lincoln’s army, was a wealthy California engineer who conducted an extensive engineering survey "to make certain that the most favorable route would end up not in San Diego but in northern California, where Fremont himself claimed sizable land holdings." Another wealthy Yankee, Pierre Chouteau, "put his money into a St. Louis factory to make iron rails and went to Washington to lobby for the 38th parallel route."

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas "owned enough strategically located land in Chicago to be a millionaire if his favored route westward through Council Bluffs and Omaha was chosen . . ."

Virtually all of the "leading lights" of the Republican Party got in on the political insider trading game by demanding bribes for their votes in favor of the subsidies. Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens "received a block of . . . stock in exchange for his vote," but he also demanded "insertion of a clause [in the subsidy legislation] requiring that all iron used in the construction and equipment of said road to be American manufacture." In addition to being a congressman, Stevens was a Pennsylvania iron manufacturer. At the time, British iron was far cheaper than Pennsylvania iron, so that Stevens’s "restrictive clause" placed a bigger burden on the taxpayers of the North who, at the time, were already being taxed to death to finance the war.


Congressman Oakes Ames, "who with his brother Oliver manufactured shovels in Massachusetts, became a loyal ally [of the subsidy-seeking railroad companies] and helped to pressure the 1864 Pacific Railway Act through the war-corrupted Congress." (It took a lot of shovels to dig railroad beds from Iowa to California).

During the post-war Grant administration the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Schuyler Colfax (later Grant’s vice president) visited the western railroad routes to attend a ceremony in his honor but, writes Dee Brown, He preferred cash above honors, and back in Washington he eagerly accepted a bundle of Credit Mobilier stock from his follow congressman Oakes Ames, and thus became a loyal friend of the Union Pacific."

General William Tecumseh Sherman was also sold land at below-market prices and, after the war, he would be in charge of a twenty-five year campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians, which was yet another form of veiled subsidy to the railroad corporations. After the war Grenville Dodge, who was also a Union Army general despite his lack of military training, proposed making slaves of the captured Indians and forcing them "to do the grading, with the Army furnishing a guard to make the Indians work, and keep them from running away.

As I said, fruitcakes as well as hypocrites.

Glory Halelujah!

[Monty]

It is probably the least secularized spot on the planet. Too bad the local religion is sports.

[Angler]

There seems to be a higher concentration of patriotards in the South. You see a lot more military-worship there and a lot more young people signing up to do ZOG's dirty work, thinking they're "serving their country."

:ameritard:

[Tchort]

WillieBrennan-

You were ridiculing the early utopian socialist social experiments of the early 19th century. They were among the first to spark what would become scientific socialism, the greatest social contribution made by humanity in centuries.

I find bourgeois exploitation in all of its forms repugnant. This includes its tools of imperialism, militarism, racism and institutional violence.

The North was based on an industrial society- which put it ahead of the South in an economic-social evolutionary sense. Despite this, both societies were involved in massive exploitation and violence.

I don't see how defending Northern utopians makes me a defender of capitalism or genocide.

[Macrobius]

WillieBrennan-

You were ridiculing the early utopian socialist social experiments of the early 19th century. They were among the first to spark what would become scientific socialism, the greatest social contribution made by humanity in centuries.

I find bourgeois exploitation in all of its forms repugnant. This includes its tools of imperialism, militarism, racism and institutional violence.

The North was based on an industrial society- which put it ahead of the South in an economic-social evolutionary sense. Despite this, both societies were involved in massive exploitation and violence.

I don't see how defending Northern utopians makes me a defender of capitalism or genocide.

In the specific case of the American South, Marx and Engels recommended a Northern victory over the Southern elites, to ensure the success of Capitalism and 'move history along', and Engels particularly applauded the tactics of General Sherman, though he wished he would be a bit more bloodthirsty and violent -- Sherman was a wimp compared to what Communists would do in the next century, so he was certainly being consistent.

You may read Marx's 'Civil War' reports at your favourite site, http://marxists.org: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war/index.htm .

Marx actively whipped up the London mob to intervene in British politics, with the political objective of procuring the defeat of the South. He wasn't naive about what he was advocating (Capitalism), and neither was Engels (Genocide). Both of them defended supporting Capitalism and Genocide in this instance, with the aim of destroying the Genos of Southern Culture, by name and species, which is to say specifically, and replacing it with one more malleable to the genocidal and misanthropic conspiracies of Communism, namely the Yankee Racist and Capitalist. Way to go Marx.

In short, if you support the 'advance' of Socialism represented by Marx and Engels, then you support their policies -- which in the specific case of the South was to advance the interests of Capitalism, using the tactics of Genocide.

The net result of this 'greatest advance' was to install in the American South the regime of Black Republican rule, that is, anti-White racist rule on behalf of Capitalism. It *did* however result in a greater awareness of Socialism among the Southern Proletariat. When the Second Klan spread southwards in the 20th century, it was socialist-inclined poor White Textile workers [that is, the industrial advance in the South towards a proletariat, creating which was specifically the policy objective of Marx and Engle's agitation on behalf of Capitalism and Genocide, 'successfully' achieved] who joined the Klan and implemented the Southern regime of Jim Crow. Which is to say, they substituted -- as good members of the proletariat always do -- the race-purity politics of the North for the more mild and beneficent social customs of the agricultural South.

In short, your 'social advance' is little more than an advocacy of Capitalism, Genocide, and Northern style Racism and Apartheid in its practical consequence, on the back of the South. Unless Capitalism, Genocide, and Racism are [i]pro tanto goods, you will have some problem identifying what the specific social advance and superior culture is, here.

Sorry, but in for a penny in for a pound. This one passes the Duck Test.

[Petr]

In the specific case of the American South, Marx and Engels recommended a Northern victory over the Southern elites, to ensure the success of Capitalism and 'move history along',
It was actually Communists, inspired by Hegelian dialectics, who invented the slogan "worse is better" long before revolutionary WNs borrowed it from them.


Petr

[WillieBrennan]

You were ridiculing the early utopian socialist social experiments of the early 19th century. They were among the first to spark what would become scientific socialism, the greatest social contribution made by humanity in centuries.

Yes, but of course in order to try to implement this wacked out vision of utopia they had to enlist the help of the guys with the "practical and theoretical" knowledge, like Lincoln, Stevens, Sherman, Grant, Sheridan and the rest of those greedy, thieving war criminals.

The way I look at it, both Northern and Southern elite was made up of men who ( or whose recent ancestors ) practiced and profited from chattel slavery, held what would now be considered "white supremecist" and "racist" views, liked making money and wanted to expand Westward. The Southerners made no bones about it, whereas the Yankees, having opted for an industrial based society instead of an agrarian one saw fit to rewrite their history and deny their past. In addition they were willing to wage a total war of extermination against their countrymen to try and bring about this new white washed, Puritan utopian vision.

The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy.


Early 19th century New Englanders had real motives for forgetting their slave history, or, if they recalled it at all, for characterizing it as a brief period of mild servitude. This was partly a Puritan effort to absolve New England's ancestors of their guilt. The cleansing of history had a racist motive as well, denying blacks -- slave or free -- a legitimate place in New England history. But most importantly, the deliberate creation of a "mythology of a free New England" was a crucial event in the history of sectional conflict in America. The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers.


By the 1850s, Melish writes, "New England had become a region whose history had been re-visioned by whites as a triumphant narrative of free, white labor." And she adds that this "narrative of a historically free, white New England also advanced antebellum New England nationalism by supporting the region's claims to a superior moral identity that could be contrasted effectively with the 'Jacobinism' of a slave-holding, 'negroized' South."

link (http://www.slavenorth.com/denial.htm)

[Tchort]

In the specific case of the American South, Marx and Engels recommended a Northern victory over the Southern elites, to ensure the success of Capitalism and 'move history along', and Engels particularly applauded the tactics of General Sherman, though he wished he would be a bit more bloodthirsty and violent -- Sherman was a wimp compared to what Communists would do in the next century, so he was certainly being consistent.

You may read Marx's 'Civil War' reports at your favourite site, http://marxists.org: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war/index.htm .

Marx actively whipped up the London mob to intervene in British politics, with the political objective of procuring the defeat of the South. He wasn't naive about what he was advocating (Capitalism), and neither was Engels (Genocide). Both of them defended supporting Capitalism and Genocide in this instance, with the aim of destroying the Genos of Southern Culture, by name and species, which is to say specifically, and replacing it with one more malleable to the genocidal and misanthropic conspiracies of Communism, namely the Yankee Racist and Capitalist. Way to go Marx.

In short, if you support the 'advance' of Socialism represented by Marx and Engels, then you support their policies -- which in the specific case of the South was to advance the interests of Capitalism, using the tactics of Genocide.

The net result of this 'greatest advance' was to install in the American South the regime of Black Republican rule, that is, anti-White racist rule on behalf of Capitalism. It *did* however result in a greater awareness of Socialism among the Southern Proletariat. When the Second Klan spread southwards in the 20th century, it was socialist-inclined poor White Textile workers [that is, the industrial advance in the South towards a proletariat, creating which was specifically the policy objective of Marx and Engle's agitation on behalf of Capitalism and Genocide, 'successfully' achieved] who joined the Klan and implemented the Southern regime of Jim Crow. Which is to say, they substituted -- as good members of the proletariat always do -- the race-purity politics of the North for the more mild and beneficent social customs of the agricultural South.

In short, your 'social advance' is little more than an advocacy of Capitalism, Genocide, and Northern style Racism and Apartheid in its practical consequence, on the back of the South. Unless Capitalism, Genocide, and Racism are [i]pro tanto goods, you will have some problem identifying what the specific social advance and superior culture is, here.

Sorry, but in for a penny in for a pound. This one passes the Duck Test.

Unlike Hiterlites, Maoists, Trots and the like, I have no orthodox hero-worship as regards Marx or anyone else. Subscribing to parts of or even most of Marx's body of work hardly makes me a torch bearer for everything he did or said during his lifetime. Lenin was responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities of the 20th century, most of the atrocities the neo-Nazis attribute to Stalin originated with Lenin. However, much of his earlier work (mainly between the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917) is of infinite value to the international working class (culminating in the formation of the Third International). The ideology known as Leninism is as bourgeois as Fascism- the failure of the German revolution and the increasingly dire situation of the Soviet Union during the civil war eventually led Lenin to turn a legitimate worker's state into a state capitalist imperialist bloc on the same terrain as the West.

Socialism is not a prophecy- it isn't a messianic certain-to-happen event that if some prerequisites are met capitalism will fall. I don't believe that 'speeding up' the elimination of pre-capitalist economic relations in backward nations/areas will inevitably result in making socialism a reality faster.

Things aren't so cut and dry.

Yes, but of course in order to try to implement this wacked out vision of utopia they had to enlist the help of the guys with the "practical and theoretical" knowledge, like Lincoln, Stevens, Sherman, Grant, Sheridan and the rest of those greedy, thieving war criminals.

What are you talking about? The figures you list are Union militarists and bourgeois politicians, none of whom were socialists or had anything to do with the early 19th century commune-experiments. There was never any attempt to make utopian socialism a reality on a grandscale in the US, and it was never supported by the bourgeoisie, its politicians or its military.

Just because some people who lived in the North of the US tried to manifest utopian socialism on a small scale does not mean that the goal of the Northern US and all of its industrialists and militarists and politicians and the citizens to create such a system.

[WillieBrennan]

I suggest you go back and reread the first article I posted entitled "Fanatical Yankee Utopians".

We're not talking about the rank and file Northern working man, it describes the Northern elite prior to the War Between the States.

Many of New England’s and New York’s leading citizens were devotees of Fourierism. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley extolled Fourier’s ideas on the front page of his newspaper in 1842 and continued to promote them for years.

"From their Puritan forbears," Flynn writes, "Transcendentalists retained moral righteousness" and "the conviction that they were the elect." Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the best known of this peculiar sect, which founded another communistic society called "Brook Farm" in Massachusetts. Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne celebrated these "communitarians" in his novel, The Blithedale Romance. Meanwhile, Brook Farm was populated mostly by "Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates," and "descendants of the Pilgrims."

Even when the Yankees embraced abolitionism it was rarely, if ever, because of any concern about the well-being of slaves. As Professor Wilson writes: "abolitionism, as opposed to antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners . . . was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth

A large number of prominent New Englanders who would hold key positions in the Lincoln administration or in the U.S. Army in the 1860s participated in the "delusional schemes " of "this muddleheaded lunatic" [Fourier], writes Flynn. In addition to Greeley, this included Charles Dana, who would be Lincoln’s assistant secretary of defense; Robert Gould Shaw, the leader of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Infantry Regiment during the War Between the States who spent his childhood at Brook Farm; the abolitionist Theodore Weld; and William Henry Channing, the chaplain of Congress during the War Between the States.

link (http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo143.html)

[Mailman]

The Rebs had it right with some things though. Guess where you would be in Confederate society, Japanese Anime? You'd be in the fields picking cotton.

Uh - not really. Refined Southerners used to consider the Japanese as sort of the Southerners of Asia. Definitely culturally superior to the rest. I still do. It was the Chinese who were thought of as a big gaol full of coolies to be led around by the nose. Kind of like what Americans have become.

Is Southern culture better than Northern?

There was culture in the North?:hurl:

[Rebel]

YES! I love the south was born and raised here. I am living in south dakota for the next 2 weeks and then we are back to my beloved south. I hate the yankee states with a passion the people are rude,the drivers are horrible this is the only place I have seen where its people do not realize 1 you can turn on red 2. the center lane is there for a reason! I can't get sweet tea or good pecan pie there is no huddle or waffle house within 50 miles. I seriously hate it here I hate its people I hate the whole region! The south is so much more laid back and relaxed and its just something you have to experience.