Southern Confederate Hegelians and Marxists
PGA Weblog ^
Posted on 2/18/2021, 8:30:54 AM by ProgressingAmerica
There is a cancer among most conservative websites that devalues and glosses over the importance of history. This glossing leaves a conservative in a position to assert that x is true, because they heard it or saw it or read it somewhere. But then we look foolish, I look foolish because while yes, x is in fact true, what I read didn't carry the necessary follow through. That's how truth becomes a lie while lies remain true. Case in point is this article from The Federalist which glosses over what is arguably the most important fact of the article. The article points out:
Southern intellectuals found the argument they were looking for in the thinking of the German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Wait, what? Full stop. What did you say? Is this true? If so, how did you even complete the article with a straight face without detailing this? Thats a huge deal! This busts so many myths that dozens of books could be written about it if one chose to do so.
Now, the Civil War isn't my fight. If I've talked with one person who finds the era fascinating, I've talked with two dozen of them. They're "everywhere", in the sense that "they" actually have an established title: "Civil War Buff". You know of any "Progressive Era Buffs"? Yeah, I'm the only one and I know it, and I'm fine with that. I only have a tangential interest in this instance because of the lies that progressives tell. Progressivism is my main area of interest. But here's the problem and why it gets my attention. We're led to believe by Civil War buffs and professional historians alike that the Confederacy was this pinnacle of conservative thought or at least deeply conservative in its outlook.
There's just one problem. There's no room for Hegel nor Marx in conservatism.
This is too big of a contradiction and there's too much of it that can be referenced to ignore it. Now, to get back to the Federalist article I did go looking around in some of the sources I have access to, but the copyright firewall was strong with this one. Many historians have glossed over the fact that Hegel did in fact hold quite a big sway with southern slaveholders, and I get the distinct feeling that these historians want that fact erased from the books. It doesn't fit the narrative. The south MUST be remembered in connection with conservatism and this Hegel thing is just a distraction from what the historians know to be true. It was extremely difficult to get names, speech titles, books, and more to independently verify this fact, but I did find one. The usual web of footnotes pointing to another historian who points to another historian was momentously annoying. But historians do this as a tactic in order to shroud history they dislike while using direct footnotes to promote history they prefer.
This is of course why I have such a beef with ideological historians, which is pretty much all of them, but I'll save that for another day. Were there Hegelians in the South? Yes there were. And Marxists too, which during the course of researching this I remembered that I had once posted about Fitzhugh in a similar one-off post at the time. Fitzhugh wrote that "A Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism." Now doesn't that conservative to you? /sarcasm
Looking back that post makes a little more sense to me in its actual historical context. The natural course of Hegel is ------> Marx. When asking the question of how George Fitzhugh could come to a place of being pro-communism, it's because the intellectual generation that preceded him were reading Hegel. This viewpoint of idealizing Hegel even made it into the United States Congress. In a speech in 1860, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II said the following:
I propose, just here, to read from Hegel's Philosophy of History, an imperishable monument of human genius, in which the author holds "freedom to be the essence of humanity, and slavery the condition of injustice." And what does he say?
"The negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality, all that we call feeling, if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character." (Page 97.)
"The undervaluing of humanity among them reaches an incredible degree of intensity. Tyranny is regarded as no wrong, and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper.... The devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant with the general principles of the African race. To the sensual negro, human flesh is but an object of sense, mere flesh." (Pages 99, 100)
After describing many other characteristics, the author concludes "slavery to have been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the negroes. The doctrine which we deduce from this condition of slavery among the negroes, and which constitutes he only side of the question that has an interest for our inquiry, is that which we deduce from the idea, viz: that the 'natural condition' itself is one of absolute and thorough injustice, contravention of the right and just. Every intermediate grade between this and the realization of a rational state retains, as might be expected, elements and aspects of injustice; Therefore, we find slavery even in the Greek and Roman States, as we do serfdom, down to the latest times. But thus existing in a State, slavery is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence, a phase t of education, a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it." (Page 104)
Now, it is fairly common knowledge that Karl Marx was a racist as was Che and many other hardcore communists. But I will admit I never thought to examine if Hegel was also on that list. It's quite clear though that he too is there.
But the real issue isn't yet another quote that won't go anywhere if obsessively used in twitter tweets. The issue is how on earth do we arrive at a place where the southern confederacy is constantly cast as a bastion of conservatism when deep examinations of their ideological works unearths collectivism, Marxism, and Hegelianism?
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3935704/posts