This short address by self-proclaimed Southern Nationalist and League of the South member, Harold Crews, came across my YouTube feed this morning. It’s actually quite interesting. Crews’s argument is straightforward: As a member of the SCV he fully supports the goal of the Confederacy in its bid for independence as a slave-holding nation with white supremacy at its center. Crews wants others within the SCV and those who are active in Southern Heritage communities to acknowledge the impossibility of maintaining a “dual identity” as both Southerners and Americans.
The most interesting aspect of Crews’s argument is his claim that SCV members and others are mired in “escapism” in the past. They’ve become seduced by a distorted (Lost Cause) view of the Confederacy and have failed to make the necessary connections between its stated purpose and the challenges that white Southerners supposedly face today. At the center of it all, according to Crews, is the threat that whites face from the Obama administration and secular America. Crews seems to be saying that if white Southerners, who embrace Confederate heritage, really understood their history than they would be Southern Nationalists. After all, diehard Confederates were certainly Southern nationalists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gefEND9ZtvA
Crews could have taken his analysis one step further by pointing out that there is an ongoing tension between Southern Nationalism and Confederate/Southern Heritage. Brooks Simpson and others have explored this in reference to the Southern Heritage Preservation Group Facebook community, which has had some difficulty coming to terms with this internal tension. We’ve also seen it in the Virginia Flaggers as well.
In the meantime, the Sons of Union Veterans now has a presence in South Carolina and Georgia.
The Department of Georgia and South Carolina was chartered in 2008 and now boasts about 100 members, according to Brian Pierson, camp commander for Camp 10. “Our mission is to, basically, keep the memory of the boys in blue,” Pierson said. They do that by focusing on patriotism, good citizenship and history.
–Civil War Memory
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