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WHO ARE WE AND WHAT DO WE WANT? by Franklin Sanders originally presented at the Forrest/League of the South/Montgomery 2003 Montgomery, 8 March 2003 Alabama L.o.S state meeting It’s always intimidating to come to a state where the motto is, Audemus jura nostra defendere. It’s all the more intimidating because of the word order, that emphasises “We dare.” There’s just something a little pugnacious, a little intimidating about that. I’m always worried I might step over some invisible line and go back home with a bloody nose. 100 YEAR GOALS
THE REASON FOR THIS SPEECH
First, let’s consider who we are not. We are not conservatives. Now that may shock some of you, but think about
it a second. What have conservatives ever conserved in your lifetime?
Answer? Not a blessed thing. Not one principle, not one right, not one
piece of property, not even one life. For all their puffing and blowing
and posturing, conservatives have proven themselves completely feckless
and ineffectual. While they puffed and blew, forty-five million dead babies
have piled up to heaven. If conservatives can’t stop murder, what
can they stop? We are not libertarians. We recognize that there is more to freedom than simply the freedom to do whatever you want as long as it hurts nobody else. We are still what James Henly Thornwell called 135 years ago, “The friends of ordered liberty.” What does that mean? That human liberty is not absolute, but subject to the law of God, that the creature depends wholly upon the Creator. We reject both anarchy and tyranny, both individualism and collectivism. We understand that neither the individual nor the group is ultimate, but the rights of each must be balanced. The citizen does not exist without the commonwealth, nor the commonwealth without the citizen. Society has, and must have, structure and hierarchy. We are not the White Folks Liberation front. We are not founded on racial hatred or race theories. We are not the Klan with college degrees. We don’t say one thing on race and mean another. We believe that government enforced quotas and legislated discrimination can never achieve racial harmony and reconciliation. That is possible only under the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are not constitutionalists. While the United States Constitution of
1789 was an epochal exercise of skillful statecraft, it failed in 1861.
It was intended to “form a more perfect union,” but that union
failed. It was intended to protect diversity within unity, but it failed.
Since then a tyranny has worked to impose uniformity onto unity. Who are we then, and what do we believe? In Michael Hill’s words from the last (January - February 2003) Southern Patriot, “[We are] the very descendants of those who settled it and fought for it from colonial times until 1865. We were born here, and by God’s grace, this is our land.” We are the people scorned and oppressed, milked and murdered, by the mighty -- by Puritan tyrants and Stuart tyrants and English tyrants, by English dragoons in Scotland, by rack-renting English landlords in Ireland and Scotland, by kings and nobles in France and England. We are the sons and daughters of the people who made a covenant with God and crossed that ocean and climbed the Blue Ridge and watered the land with their sweat and their blood and fed it with the bones and bodies of wives and husbands and children. We are the children of people who fought Indians and Frenchmen and British and Yankees, and Reconstruction and poverty and boll weevils and pellagra and hook worm and everything else hell and Yankees could throw at us - and survived it all by the grace of God. We are the people whom Providence has hammered into this land like a mighty iron stake, and we cannot be pulled out. We are the children who say, “My people have been here 400 years, and nobody is running me out.” Now do you understand who we are -- and how few of us know it? WHAT DO WE WANT? Any man who sets out to change society’s status quo had better beware. No matter how bad things are - how corrupt, how tyrannical, how immoral and degraded - they can always get worse. Men ought to approach such changes with humility, with fear and trembling, lest they make a bad mess worse. Most of all we must avoid violence. The Scriptures warn us against revolution. My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: But who are the Revolutionaries? We were content to live - a separate Christian people with our own language and culture and ways - in union with them as long as they left us alone. All we ever asked was to be left alone. But they haven’t left us alone, and they will never leave us alone. They will never stop until they have erased every vestige of our Christianity and our South and our Southernness from our land and our children, or until we have our own, separate country. What do we want? We don’t just want a “better deal.” If
that’s all you want, get a government job where you’ll get full
benefits and an inflation adjudged wage raises every year. What do we
want? We want out. We want our own nation. We want a new nation, a nation
obedient to God. We want liberty, not license. We want our own nation,
because we are our own people. O God, our Father,
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