Today, of all days, is when the Confederate flag should be proudly on display. We fly a large 4′ x 6′ Confederate flag (the “standard” flag is 3′ x 5′) year-round at our home. Today is when we will replace the now-faded flag with a new one, and respectfully dispose of the old flag that has served so well. It will be neatly folded, placed on concrete paver, and burned. Cremation or burial are honorable ways of disposing of a flag that is no longer in presentable condition. If burning or burial cannot be done for some reason, another way of disposing of a tattered flag is neatly folding it, wrapping it in something, and then placing it in a trash container. It should never just be tossed in the trash as though it were just a scrap of cloth.

For the past several years, we have hosted a Confederate Independence Day dinner for friends. Unfortunately, we had to call it off for this year due to my wife having surgery on her hand. Next year though, we will resume our annual Confederate Independence Day dinner.

Officers from the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office display their unmanned aerial vehicle in Spring, Texas. Photo: Vanguard Defense Industries

Restaging a well-known painting by Norman Rockwell. Photo: (unknown artist)

Enforcing the rule of law is, of course, one of the main requirements of a free and civilized society. We understand that society includes those who have no respect for others or for the rule of law, and there must be a system in place to deal with them. The question is – where do we draw the line between the legitimate need for civilian law enforcement and the heavily-armed paramilitary forces that have now become routine in much of what used to be “the Land of The Free”?

There is a huge difference between the mission of the United States Marine Corps in Afghanistan and a local police department, but you wouldn’t know it from the way many police departments are now being outfitted. The military essentially exists to kill people and break things. Their mission is to take and hold territory with violence or the threat of violence. A civilian police force, on the other hand, should have as its mission the enforcement of laws as an integral part of the community. There is no way that men outfitted as the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Officers shown above could possibly be considered “part of the community”. Everything about their appearance and their equipment is designed to set them apart from those they are assigned to protect.

We are left with only two choices to explain this trend:

1. We have truly become a Police State and the role of the police is no longer enforcing the rule of law in a civilized society, but serving as enforcers for an out-of-control government of tyrants.
2. There are elements of our society that no longer meet the working definition of civilized human beings and must be dealt with as animals or an invading army of barbarians.

Neither choice is a pleasant one to consider.

We have added a collection of reprints in PDF format that will be helpful to anyone wanting to learn history from those who were there. Following is a list of the documents that are now in the Confederate Colonel Resources collection:

A true vindication of the South.pdf
Abraham Lincoln – A History.pdf
Abraham Lincoln was he a Christian.pdf
Abraham Lincolns religion.pdf
An anthology of the epigrams and sayings of Abraham Lincoln.pdf
Black Republican Ideas.pdf
Class struggles in America.pdf
Constitutional problems under Lincoln.pdf
Crimes of the civil war.pdf
Democracy in America 1.pdf
Democracy in America 2.pdf
Emancipation.pdf
Facts and falsehoods concerning the war on the South.pdf
Frauds and falsehoods of the Republican party.pdf
History of an attempt to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln.pdf
Is Davis a Traitor.pdf
Karl Marx his life and work.pdf
Lincoln – Mott.pdf
Lincoln addresses and letters.pdf
Lincoln and prohibition.pdf
Lincoln the Freethinker.pdf
Lives and speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin.pdf
No Treason 1.pdf
No Treason 2.pdf
No Treason 3.pdf
Northern rebellion and southern secession.pdf
Political debates between Lincoln and Douglas.pdf
Political fallacies.pdf
Rebellion in the North.pdf
Richardsons defense of the South.pdf
Speeches arguments addresses and letters of Clement L. Vallandigham.pdf
The 15th Amendment.pdf
The Abraham Lincoln myth.pdf
The Britannica answered and the South vindicated.pdf
The Confederate Struggle and Recognition.pdf
The Negro problem.pdf
The Real Lincoln.pdf
The South vindicated from the charge of treason and rebellion.pdf
The Washington despotism.pdf
The four acts of despotism.pdf
The life of Abraham Lincoln.pdf
The life of William H. Seward2.pdf
The murder of Abraham Lincoln planned and executed by Jesuit priests.pdf
The real Lincoln from the testimony of his contemporaries.pdf
The soul of Abraham Lincoln.pdf
The truth about socialism.pdf
The_Medical_world.pdf
The_Negro-The_Southerners_Problem.pdf
The_Religion_of_Abraham_Lincoln.pdf
Truth of the war conspiracy of 1861-1.pdf
Truth of the war conspiracy of 1861-2.pdf
Unconstitutional Acts of the Present Govt.pdf
Union–disunion–reunion.pdf
Was Abraham Lincoln an infidel1.pdf
Was Abraham Lincoln an infidel2.pdf
Was Lincoln a Christian.pdf
Was Lincoln an Agnostic.pdf
Will Canada be Lost.pdf

These reprints are available on the Resources page or by going to the Reprints section of Confederate Colonel. The source for these files is archive.org . We will be adding more as we find other useful documents. If you have other titles to suggest that report from a Southern viewpoint (there is no shortage of the “Northern viewpoint” already), please do so.

America the Barbarous: New Pentagon Policy Sanctions Women in Combat

by Elijah Brown and Wesley Strackbein, Vision Forum staff writers

America has become a nation of barbarians.

For more than a decade, women representing the U.S. armed forces have been dying in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have reported on this fact numerous times at Vision Forum, previously highlighting a 2004 front page New York Times article which featured a gruesome cover image of a wounded female soldier, blood running down her leg, with three men surrounding her, screaming. Rather callously, the Times titled the article, “A Routine Burst of Chaos Leaves a G.I. Wounded.” In writing the piece, journalist Dexter Filkins in no way keyed in on the fact that the wounded G.I. was a woman — he reported the story as if she had been any other male soldier hit by enemy fire.

While the Pentagon’s official policy has been to exclude women from being assigned to most units “whose primary mission” is “direct combat on the ground,” the reality has been far different, as was noted in a 2008 USA Today editorial which we previously cited on our website:

On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s policy on women in combat looks like this: Women risk their lives as truck drivers, mechanics and medics attached to combat units. At checkpoints, they do a job that men can’t: search Iraqi women. They fire rifles and lob grenades. And when they are struck by the IED blasts and suicide bombers that characterize this war, they are wounded or killed just as surely as their fellow soldiers.

In other words, the written policy is divorced from reality.

Now policy has caught up to practice, as last week the Department of Defense announced a formal change in policy to “allow Military Department Secretaries to assign women in open occupational specialties to select units and positions at the battalion level . . . whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground.”

This will open nearly 14,000 “combat-related positions to female troops, including tank mechanics and intelligence officers on the front lines,” as the Washington Post summarized.

While American servicewomen have been in harm’s way for more than a decade — with nearly 200 coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq in body bags since 2001 — the Pentagon’s new policy now authorizes women to be officially attached to combat units on the ground, the very goal of which is to engage the enemy in battle.

This is a first for the United States of America, and it is a cause to mourn as our nation’s leaders — in the name of “empowering” women — are now self-consciously placing women in combat units to be shot at and killed as men.

What are we to think of a culture that openly welcomes our mothers and daughters being assigned to the heat of battle to have their limbs severed, their faces scarred, and their consciences seared as they lie beneath a flag-covered casket? Does this “enlightened policy” represent the fullest expression of Woman, as feminists would have us believe?

Not hardly. It represents an abolition of womanhood and the perversion of God’s design. It represents a deeply-rooted rebellion against the natural roles and functions by which God has distinguished manhood from womanhood.

Women are to be cherished as the weaker sex, not exploited to fill the roster of an army. Combat is the province of men, and God calls on men to protect women and children. Men fight when their homes and communities are threatened by wicked regimes and lawless rogues who would despoil their loved ones. When necessary, men carry weapons into battle and give their lives to preserve the liberty and sanctity of those they hold dear.

It is barbarians who place their women in the midst of war’s brutalities to fight as men. This is what pagan tribes in Scotland did before they were Christianized and embraced the “Law of the Innocents,” written by the evangelist Adomnan, which forbade sending women into battle.

Though America possesses advanced weaponry and great military might, we have become a nation of barbarians.

It is high time that we as a people repent of our barbarism — that we cherish our women as women, and call on our men to act as men.

— Elijah Brown and Wesley Strackbein, Vision Forum staff writers

This essay is being discussed on the Vision Forum Facebook page.

Tim Manning

Mr. Manning has kindly granted us permission to re-post his essay here on Confederate Colonel.

I am thankful for my fb friends that support and agree with me on so many important social and political problems. Sometimes I am thankful for those who disagree me if for no other reason than it helps me to build character and patience. The problem that most old-time Southerners have is that there is a profound loss of good manners and civility in our beloved Southern States. We do not expect northerners to act like gentlemen and ladies, but we still maintain a higher expectation of fellow Christians and fellow Southerners. The problem has gotten to be that the process of yankeefication has polluted our Southern culture. Too many people no longer know the difference between good manners, moral character and business etiquette. I see that this is making reasonable dialogue on controversial topics very difficult for some people as I see it manifested on my fb pages.

At the heart of yankee Khazar Marxism, the sorry excuse for what yankees call a “culture”, is the disempowerment of the citizenry creating high levels of personal anxiety, frustration, financial insecurity and penned-up anger. In the farming communities that prevailed until after 1900 AD in the united States most people met and did business with less than three dozen people in their small rural farming communities. Centralization of government, a totalitarian goal of the Lincoln administration, removed the possibility of self-government and placed great political power in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of elitist in a system of the raw exercise of power and control which we refer to as an oligarchy. Fewer and fewer people gained a level of ungodly control over massive numbers of people, their wealth, their culture, their religion and their jobs.

In the early history of this country had people called each other names in the manner that some do on my fb pages, the matters would have been readily settled through a formal dual or a mutual beneficial visit to a corn field without the deleterious benefit of a second, courts or attorneys. The media and the U.S. Government even promotes this effeminate form of personal sniping and name calling which a large portion of our population finds this entertaining on the evening news. How long will we permit this denigration of our culture?

Yankee business etiquette is maintained for form and personal financial benefit. Southern good manners are maintained as the simple outflow of a moral, honest and upright personal character. Respect for human rights and human dignity is dead in most of the USA with only remnant pockets of good manners remaining in portions of the Southern States. God Bless the South.

The article not only discusses the reasons why it is so important, but why such a simple thing often seems so difficult. I know that I often have to remind myself of this and make a real conscious effort to make good eye contact when talking with others. I suspect that I am not alone in that.

Here are some of the key points. Be sure to read the full post.

Numerous studies have shown that people who make higher-levels of eye contact with others are perceived as being:

• More dominant and powerful
• More warm and personable
• More attractive and likeable
• More qualified, skilled, competent, and valuable
• More trustworthy, honest, and sincere
• More confident and emotionally stable

 

Why Eye Contact Is Vitally Important for Creating Positive Connections with Others

• Our eyes were made to connect.
• Our eyes reveal our thoughts and feelings.
• Eye contact shows attention.
• Eye contact creates an intimate bond.

Read the entire post here. This is indicated as “Part 1″, so watch for Part 2.

Today’s post at Art of Manliness is titled “Ace Your Exams: Study Habits of The Gentleman Scholar“. Let me quickly point out that one does not have to be a full time high school or college student to benefit from this post – it applies to anyone with the natural curiosity and hunger for life-long learning that is a mark of the Southern gentleman. In my own case, I know that I need to put more effort into studying God’s word. I have made a number of attempts to seriously study The Bible, yet I never seem to gain traction – I end up wasting time, wandering off on other topics, and just never studying The Bible as I know that I should. The same thing applies to my need to stay up to date with the latest technology and trends in programming languages – my business depends on it, yet it is so easy to get bogged down in the details of running a business that I can quickly lose sight of the long term needs. In other words, I need to learn better study habits. I suspect that you do, too.

Here are the key points from the AOM post. Be sure to read the entire post and become a better Southern gentleman scholar.

• Time & Energy Management
• Reading Assignments and Homework
• Make the Most of Class Time
• Getting Extra Help
• Create an Outline or Study Guide
• Memorizing
• Self-Testing: The Master Key to Academic Success
• Study Groups
• Great Resources on Improving Your Study Skills

The Cumberland Sound was commissioned in 1944, the war ended in 1945, and the ship was decommissioned in 1947. What a short life for a ship with a crew of over a thousand. The Cumberland Sound was a sea plane tender. She was one of those unheralded service ships that kept the fleet going. You don’t see sea plane tenders in the war movies, and the men who served on them don’t have tales of glory to tell. They simply did their job and they did it well.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to take a glimpse into the past to see how men served. More than that, I hope you can come away with a greater appreciation for the importance of the unseen work that must be done. A leader understands that leadership means service to others.

Do we really understand where our blessings come from? How many times do we off-handedly say “God bless you” without giving any thought to the fact that God HAS richly blessed us.

I want to point out one of the reasons that we have the freedom to celebrate Thanksgiving to our God – the men who have fought and died to preserve our freedom. As I was clearing out some of my father’s papers to clean up for our Thanksgiving Day dinner, I found a reminder of the sacrifice that generations past have made. This is the Thanksgiving Dinner menu for those aboard the U.S.S. Cumberland Sound, AV-17 in 1944.

Part of the crew of the U.S.S. Cumberland Sound, AV-17. My father is the officer in the front row on the right.