Scoutmaster – by Norman Rockwell

The Boy Scouts is no more, but there are still boys. There are still vast woods and lots of sticks with which to build fires. There are still plenty of good men who want to introduce boys to manhood. One doesn’t need a corporate-funded super-organization to take a pack of boys into the woods and learn about survival. It’s time to begin anew.

I have titled this post “Boy Scouts Version 3.0″ to identify what comes next. I was fortunate enough to have been a Boy Scout during version 1.0 – before political correctness did what it always does and destroy the traditional culture. I was in Scouting in the early 1960’s. What we are seeing now is version 2.0, but it won’t be long before 2.0 will be so different from 1.0 as to be unrecognizable as the same organization. In time, the Boy Scouts will be much like a church that decides it is more important to please Man than to obey God. The good people begin to leave as the worldly people take over. The process accelerates until it becomes little more than a social club for nice people.

What happens to those who leave because Scouting has become what it was intended to protect boys and young men from? The Thinking Housewife is correct:
• There are still plenty of good men who want to help boys become men.
• There is no requirement for a massive organization and corporate sponsorship.

It is time for the Scouting equivalent of Home-schooling.

Ten Ways to Teach Your Children a Biblical World View is just what the title says. Be sure to read the entire article, and consider making Raising Homemakers a part of your regular reading list – especially if you have daughters. The ten points are:

1.   Start at the starting point:  Read the Bible–a lot.
2.   Read literature/history texts written by authors who have a biblical worldview.
3.   Eat together at least once a day and talk about current issues around the dinner table.
4.   Watch movies that encourage conversation regarding issues/how the Bible relates to those issues.
5.   Use a course or materials specifically written to teach worldview.
6.   Consider sending your older child to a worldview camp or conference or attend one as a family
7.   Create an atmosphere in your home that honors biblical thinking.
8.   Attend a church where the Word of God is consistently, faithfully taught.
9.   As your child gets older, transfer spoon-fed biblical teaching methods to self-directed bible study
10. Choose an education that backs up what is being taught/has been taught at home.

Here at Confederate Colonel, we mainly concern ourselves with Southern culture and how to preserve and defend it against an ungodly and hostile world. There is a reason that The South is also referred to as The Bible Belt. While there have always been plenty of non-Christians in The South, even they generally understood that Southern culture is firmly rooted in The Bible. Christianity and Southern culture are inseparable.

Take full advantage of resources such as this to make sure that your family understands the precious gift of God’s grace. That understanding is not magically absorbed from parents – it must be taught. Of all the things that parents and grandparents can pass along to the next generation, the love of God is the single most important thing. The eternal fate of your family – and of all mankind – depends on it.

When I was in high school, math was still taught using a slide rule. As I started college, the portable calculator was just starting to make its presence known. Only the wealthiest families could equip their students with the most basic of calculators (the rich kids always sat near the power outlets so they could plug their calculators in). The school had a “calculator room” where there were about a dozen keypads wired to a large unit (made by the Wang Corporation). Students had to wait their turn to use these calculators – or use the “old fashioned” slide rule (a.k.a. “slip stick”). The speed of change was incredible. By the time I graduated, battery-powered calculators were cheap enough to be owned by just about every student, and slide rules were quickly forgotten. In the span of just a couple of years, the knowledge of how to use a slide rule had disappeared from the public education system. Crude though it may seem, this is the technology that designed the Apollo program and landed men on the moon. It is what produced all the calculations used in the design of the Boeing 747. It is what was used to design every skyscraper and every piece of machinery up until the early 1970’s.

Without computers, the only way to design something to scale is to use paper and pencil and drafting instruments. In high school and college, drafting was strictly a paper design effort. Even several years out of college, my job of designing material handling equipment for a textile mill in North Carolina was done using conventional paper drafting. Later employment called for facilities design using AutoCAD software.

The skills that built our technological society are rapidly disappearing. I am among the last of the generation that used the pre-computer technology that has become little more than a curiosity in a museum. What would happen if something like the Carrington Event that happened on September 1, 1859 were to destroy the electronics that keep our world running? It has happened before, and at some point, it WILL happen again.

What can be done?

I have been collecting a few slide rules over the past few years, as well as instruction books to teach others how to use them. I recently purchased a fairly complete set of home schooling books, teacher’s guides, and workbooks from Keepers of The Faith. Included in the package is the complete set of McGuffey Readers, spelling, phonics, writing and grammar, a set of math books, and various other school books.

On a recent trip to the ECHO library, I made a list of various books that I thought one would need to rebuild at least some level of technology. When I got home, I searched through used book stores and added those books to my library. In some cases, they were only available in PDF format on-line, so they were printed out and bound.

Most of the books I have were purchased used or were being discarded and just waiting to be picked up. That small investment in time and resources is our insurance policy. It is there to make sure that, no matter what may happen to our complex and fragile system, our grandchildren will receive a good education. The next time you hear of someone discarding an old set of encyclopedias because they “need the room and it’s easier to look it up on Google”, take advantage of the opportunity to provide for the education of a future generation. When the Roman Empire collapsed, it led to the Dark Ages. Imagine what would happen should the current global empire collapse.

Following is from the home page of The Christian Enclave:

Lester Roloff, in his radio broadcasts, would use a variation of The Lord’s Prayer by saying “…Thy will be done on this piece of Earth, as it is in Heaven.” While we cannot change the world, we can change that small part of the world where we live and work and worship and witness.

Think in terms of living in an enclave of Bible-Believing Christians surrounded by the rotting corpse of the world. The scriptural inspiration for the name, and the concept behind it, is found in Judges 14:8. “…and he turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion.” This picture of the church as existing within the rotting corpse of a lion is, in effect, a Christian Enclave.

The same principles found in what I described as “Enclaving” also apply to those of us trying to preserve and strengthen our Southern culture. We work to influence that over which we have influence and separate ourselves from that over which we have none. Our families, our homes, our land, our churches, our friends – these are areas where we have the ability and the duty to mold and shape life to conform to what we know is good and right.

There are those who might advocate physically relocating, either to another country or concentrating in a specified part of America. This was the goal of the Free State Project. Their goal is to convince conservatives and libertarians to New Hampshire in order to concentrate political power to meet their goals. New Hampshire is hardly a viable solution for Southerners. Abandoning our homeland is nothing short of total surrender and could never be viewed as a solution.

Another approach is that of the League of The South. The LoS idea is basically to rebuild a new confederacy as a separate nation. There is more to it than that, of course, and I don’t mean to intentionally over-simplify it. While I believe that the LoS is lead by sincere men who truly believe that it is a viable plan, my own experience tells me otherwise. We won’t get into the details in this post, but my argument against this is that politics does not happen in a vacuum. Just as we will see the Tea Party movement being infiltrated and corrupted and shifted from its noble goals, just as we saw the “Moral Majority” diluted and coerced into meaninglessness, so too would a new Southern nation be overtaken by other powerful and unscrupulous forces. If it succeeded, it would bear little resemblance to what its founders (the LoS) had intended.

So what is the answer? It varies by individual, of course, but what we are advocating here at the Confederate Colonel project is some degree of separation from the rest of the world. The world has its “culture” and we have “Southern Culture”. The world celebrates the Hedonistic lifestyle and we advocate following the example and teaching of Jesus Christ. The world twists the definitions of “Marriage” and “Family” to the point of meaninglessness, and we adhere to the way that The Bible and Western civilization define those words. The world sees the symbols of the Confederacy as standing for evil, while we know that they stand for all that is right and good and just. The world sees our Confederate ancestors as “rebels” who fought against their country while we understand that they fought for their country – the Confederate States – and for what America might have been had the vision of the Founding Fathers not been corrupted by the Northern lust for power.

We live in the world, but we are not of the world.

The following is an article from the Southern National Congress. We don’t typically get into modern-day secession movements, but the concept of individual secession is very much a part of Confederate Colonel. Taking our children out of the public indoctrination centers (public schools) and taking our families out of “social gospel” churches and into those few churches who truly believe that The Holy Bible is the literal word of God, are two steps that anyone can do.

I should also point out that I tried to contact the SNC for specific permission to reprint this, but received no reply. In fact, I have tried to contact them at least a half dozen times over the past year or so by email and their “Contact Us” form, but have never received a reply. For all the good writing I see coming from that organization, I have no hope of them accomplishing much if they refuse to reply to those trying to help. It grieves me to see yet another opportunity for Southern advancement crumbling before it even gets started.

By a Texan currently living abroad

Some years ago I listened with keen interest to a speech by a professor from Alabama speaking about how Americans had tried “State Secession” twice. It had worked once and it had failed once. While we all look forward to the time that we might go for “the best of three”, there remain some things that one can do as an individual. They fall in the category of Individual Secession. Individual Secession comes in many flavours and the applications are as diverse as the people who implement it.

For some, it begins with taking our children out of government indoctrination centers, and arranging for private or home school solutions. That is as much an act of secession as anything else, and has been resorted to by literally millions of parents at this point. Believe me, it concerns the Central Planners, when those fertile brains are removed from their dominion. (It’s always touching to see their “concern for the children.”)

Others have walked away from churches which teach false doctrines, or left social clubs and even jobs over issues they feel are inimical to their family or the entire country. In fact, it’s an American tradition to quit when you don’t like the way things are going – to just walk away. That’s why songs like, “Take This Job and Shove It”, resonate with the American working man. Indeed, “I was lookin’ for a job when I found this one,” was a theme long before it was a song.

In 1865, and for a decade following, Southerners emigrated from the South in such numbers that it constituted one of the great migrations of Western Civilization. Much has been written of the fact that the American West draws its independent nature from Southerners who had no intention of living with the boot of Yankee occupation squarely on their neck. Most of them fled west to Texas and beyond.

Tens of thousands, however, went to different countries. Not a few went to England and Scotland. Many thousands went into Mexico. Between ten and twenty thousand went to the most famous settlement of Americana, leaving an interesting cultural impression upon the region, where ante bellum cotillions are still danced, and the most Southern accents you can imagine are still spoken by the older descendents. Most, however, returned to the US, and found their way west. The primitive conditions and foreign cultures were difficult on all, and the distance from families was not worth the price, especially when locals were not necessarily welcoming of these strange new immigrants.

Where did we all come from in the first place? There is not a single American or European (or Asian or African, for that matter), who does not descend from an immigrant at some point. We are a nation of immigrants, legality notwithstanding. And those who came, did so under conditions far more difficult than what we face today. They left family behind, without benefit of FaceBook or e-mail for daily communication. They went to a strange culture, often a strange language for a couple of major reasons – the chance to own their own land (private property) and/or the necessity to flee tyranny. (The two are often related.)

In the late 18th Century, Scottish and Irish immigrants found it so difficult to feed a family that they voted with their feet, by walking to the nearest port and booking passage to the colonies, principally to America, and later to Australia and New Zealand. The government became alarmed, shortly after the absentee landlords became alarmed, for the rents simply quit coming in. A royal commission was created to figure out what had happened to all the (formerly servile) farmers and shopkeepers.

As is so typical of governments, they immediately developed a conscience about the conditions in which those poor emigrants had to travel. (Wink, wink.)

In 1803, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Passenger Vessels Act. It was the first of many laws intended to regulate the transportation of immigrants and to protect emigrants on board ships from exploitation by transportation companies (such as exorbitant rates and consequent subjection to poor sanitary conditions). The Passenger Act required improved conditions relating to hygiene, food and comfort for passengers travelling to North America. However, this law was not always followed by transportation providers and the spread of infectious diseases such as typhus continued.

This act was established under humanitarian pretences, but the more practical and desired effect was to raise the cost of passage to prevent as many as possible from leaving. Landlords who feared the emigration of their population lobbied extensively for this piece of legislation, and where one could previously travel to Canada for £3–4, the price for the same passage was in some cases raised to £10 or more. The ability to move abroad was subsequently limited to a small class of people until it was repealed in 1826.

As one South Texan recently told me, when I asked him, what would your ancestors say, who came from Europe 150 years ago to claim this ranch and build a homeland for generations. His response was startling in its intensity. He said, “My family came here to escape government oppression and to find cheap land. I’ve had enough government meddling with my property and confiscatory taxation. I’ve found cheap land in another country. If my family lived here with me now, I guarantee you, they would be helping me pack!” He now owns a ranch in Argentina. (I asked him about the socialist government there, and he said, “It could be bad, if they were efficient, but they’re so incompetent that they practically don’t exist. I can live with it.”) Reminds me of Will Rogers’ famous quip, “I should think the last thing you want is all the government you pay for!”

Someone told me recently that 4,000 Americans a week arrive in Panama to make it their new home. Obviously, many are retirees, choosing to get better value for their dwindling dollars there than they can back home. But many of the people leaving the US these days are simply fed up, and no longer convinced that they can do a thing in the world to change things here, and willing to make the effort to start over for the sake of children and grandchildren.

All of that to say, “Things are at a head.” None of us are surprised that a crisis is coming – it’s the common core belief of a huge section of Americans today. And some are preparing creative ways to secede, right where they are. They are opting out of government systems, disappearing from the traditional and moving into alternative forms of buying and selling their goods and services. These things need a lot of discussion and development and debate. Whether it’s food production and cooperative buying, or alternative health programs, or herbal medicine, or contract labor, etc., there is a healthy underground economy out there that is (a) invisible, and (b) helping prop up the sick and dying economy.

If you decide to become an expatriate and leave the country, you’re in good company. Follow your own path, knowing you’re not the first, nor the last. (Chances are, you’ll be back.)

The Os Confederados are the descendants of Southerners who left the military occupation of their homeland to seek a new life in Brazil. While they have, over the years, been largely absorbed into the Brazilian culture and people, they still preserve some of their Southern ancestry. In April 2009, I sent an email to the SCV camp in Brazil asking about the Os Confederados and wondering if it might be possible to duplicate what they have in Brazil over here in The South. Here is his response:

For one thing, it will be very difficult to replicate the Confederate Experience in Brazil elsewhere. For one thing, there are family bonds that are difficult to happen in the US. The community was tightly knit in the past for three reasons: their Confederate heritage, their language, and their religion. However, the main reason seems to be they had a common meeting place, which was also where they buried their dead relatives. It is hard to explain that it survived to this date for other reasons. And it also seems that they (we) are loosing the bonds for the following reasons:
1. There is very little left of the Confederate Heritage. They know very little about the War, and most do not know their lineage to their Confederate Veteran Ancestors.
2. No one speaks English any more due to their ancestors. I am one of the few last surviving descendants that learned English at home. This prevented our SCV Camp of having many members.
3. The religion has also turned into a majority of Catholics. There are still Protestant services, but to a less extent and with nearly no connection with the local Methodist, Baptist, and Presbiterian churches.

So, all that is left is a common place to meet. It has turned into a community group with the major objective of maintaining the Cemetery to avoid that it is taken over by the local city authorities and turned into a public cemetery.

I am sorry to state things so crudely, but they are the facts, and you are welcome to visit us and see for yourself.

My website is part of an attempt we engaged in with a group of SCV officials to revive the Confederate Heritage in the community, but the results fell very short from out expectations.

So, if you intend to use us as a benchmark, please be sure to make sure that you should adapt to your local conditions.

Kind regards,

Daniel

Here are some more resources on the Os Confederados:

WashingtonTimes.com article

Associated Content article

University of North Texas article