By Boyd Cathey
October 2, 2026
Let me recount some personal history: growing up in mostly-rural North Carolina, most of my friends and especially their parents could go on a bit about their family backgrounds, about their familial histories. Most of my friends-like me-had great-grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers who had served in Confederate ranks back during the War Between the States, 1861-1865. Pride in family and in our ancestors was taken for granted, a devout appreciation we all shared.
Especially during the centennial commemorations of the early 1960s, most of us youngsters took an intense interest in all the various events, the re-enactments on a large scale and the ceremonies attending the anniversary. Our imaginations were filled with stories of heroism, sacrifice, honor, tragic defeat and attendant suffering, unrealized dreams, and legends and traditions passed down intact to us. Public schools back then actually encouraged this fascination and interest in history and the characters and personalities in it who seemed, almost like magic, to come alive once again.
Indeed, it had been scarcely a decade since the last Confederate veteran had passed away in 1959 ! Many of us could recall that. And our parents ? They had grown up surrounded by the ever-decreasing ranks of those valiant veterans, listening to first-hand accounts of the great and heartbreaking epic that was the War for Southern Independence.
My grandfather on my mother's side was Henry Johnson Perry. Granddad Perry was born in Raleigh in 1877 and lived until 1962. As a young boy I remember well him recounting to me standing hatless on old Fayetteville Street in North Carolina's capital on May 30, 1893, a sixteen year old apprentice, dressed all in black, with thousands of other citizens reverently paying tribute to the former president of the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis, whose remains were carried by horse-drawn caisson from the railroad station to lie in state under the rotunda of the historic North Carolina State Capitol, en route to his final resting place in Richmond.
Granddad's father, Josiah Hunter Perry, an official with the old Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, had been forced in April 1865 by General Sherman to conduct him and his staff by rail over to Bennitt Station (now Durham) to receive the surrender of General Joseph Johnston. Waiting for the surrender to occur, he sat under a cherry tree and carved a "peace pipe," a relic I still have and which continues to remind me of my history and my ancestor.
Granddad's grandfather, Robert, had served many years in the North Carolina legislature in the 1820s and '30s and, after the death of his first wife, had married the granddaughter of Isaac Hunter, the founder of Raleigh, his son Josiah being born in 1834. All that family-all that history-danced through my imagination sixty-five years ago; I could visualize it, I could see it in my mind's eye. It was real, it was present...and despite the many years that have elapsed, it still is.
Pride in one's ancestry...pride in what the late Southern writer and historian Mel Bradford termed "remembering who we are"...was integral to defining what we valued and held dear in life. We were intimately related to our ancestors, they were part of us. Their blood coursed through our veins. Their memory was not that far removed. Their examples stood before us as models to emulate, a challenge for us to uphold their honor and their noble efforts to defend home, family, and the rights vouchsafed to them by their fathers and ancestors...who had cobbled together the older American confederation from its roots in Europe.
In any nation, in any people or civilization worthy of the name, such an appreciation is natural, part of the national and cultural psyche. It is indeed quite normal for a people to recall its past, to celebrate its successes and heroes, to lament its defeats and hardships. These are part and parcel of what define and make us, as Bradford states, "who we are." Deprive a people of its history, of its traditions, of its inherited culture, and you deprive it of essential ingredients of its very existence. It becomes a mass of rootless individuals, of automatons, subject to the latest whim or the most persistent and enticing siren voice of some powerful ideology or, in modern times, of George Orwell's Big Brother and its extensive tentacles in and incestuous partnership with the communications industry, education, and the media.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky has one of the three brothers in his novel The Brothers Karamazov declare, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Stripping people of their faith and then denuding them of the essential characteristics which define them is and has always been the work of revolutions, whether of the Cromwellian attempt in the 17th century, the fanaticism of a Robespierre in France in the late 18th, or the genocide of the Marxists in Russia and China in the 20th. As now, in our day the lunatics who run our schools and colleges, dominate our churches, run our entertainment, spout our daily news, and control our politics, whether it be the Democrats or the Republicans, do the same with unalloyed frenzy. They make the spectre of "Big Brother" look like a Sunday school teacher.
Quoted in my dissertation, presented years back (1975) at the University of Navarra in Spain, Spanish Carlist philosopher Juan Vazquez de Mella stated it this way:
"Who has ever seen 'the individual,' if not defined by his family, his region, his profession, his language, his inheritance, his faith ? Removed from these defining characteristics the individual is an abstraction, and a political system based on an abstraction must either end in despotism or revolution." [Mella, "Discourse in the Congress of Deputies," February 27, 1908, in Obras Completas, vol. 8, p. 150]
For the past couple of centuries we have seen the almost unrestrained growth of a revolutionary cancer within society. What has been termed by counter-revolutionary authors as a "demonic movement against God and man," this contagion draws its force intellectually from the concept of the Idea of Progress, that is, that history unfolds irresistibly in one direction-which its votaries denominate "progressive"-which encompasses the ineluctable advance and triumph of essentially secularist and globalist ideas. The object of these modern revolutionaries has been to expropriate and sloganize the idea of "progress" and weaponize it as their meme for conquest. Under the leadership of the self-anointed heads of the Revolution oppressed peoples will be led to victory, to that utopia where there is no want, no poverty, no sadness, where everyone is equal and happy.
Historically, it has been the South in the American confederation which has been the most resistant to this revolutionary radical change and thus a primary target. In spite of-or perhaps because of-the tragic loss of what one writer has termed a "second war for independence" (1861-1865), we Southerners were deeply aware of their inheritance. It was the South with its hierarchical culture, its regionalism, and its devotion to custom and traditions inherited from the European ancestors who settled originally in Virginia, Maryland, and Louisiana, which was our patrimony. The late distinguished professors Eugene and Betsey Genovese, in their mammoth magnum opus, The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge University Press, 2005), have written movingly about this profound sentiment in the old South, a characteristic which in so many ways defined my region, my state, my community, down to the very family in which I grew up and was nurtured by.
Such sentiments-such expressions by Southern writers and essayists-gain no sympathy from prominent members of the current dominant American "conservative movement"-figures such as Rich Lowry, who edits National Review, or an historian Victor Davis Hanson, or a Ben Shapiro, and any number of others. These "neo-conservatives" applaud the eradication of any visible sign of Confederate and Southern history, which they disavow as reactionary or racist. Their positions only abet the appetite of the radicals. In the end, they become useful minions of the Revolution.
Whether a Kerensky and the Social Revolutionaries who helped usher in Lenin's rise to power in Russia, or the Girondins who believed they could somehow harness the revolutionary fury in late 18th century France, moderation and attempts to placate the madness and hysteria of revolutionary zealots are doomed to disaster. Half-measures never work.
There is a whimsical episode in the superb historical film, "Waterloo" (1970), which illustrates exactly the position of Establishment Conservatives and their "opposition" to the fanatical tsunami of violent revolution: an illiterate private in the Welsh Guards who has engaged in plunder and stolen a young pig, cautions the pig not to squeal, not to alert those around him of his plunder (a capital offense under military rules). "Be quiet," he tells the pig, "and I'll only eat half of you!" Confronted by shrill and seemingly overwhelming demands by a noisy nucleus of dedicated leftists, authorized conservatives and Republicans respond to the revolutionaries in the same manner: "Only kill us half-way, but please, oh please, don't call us racists!"
The attacks on Southern traditions and symbols are essentially an effort to erase Southern identity and memory and cannot be dissociated from a broader, international offensive by our modern revolutionaries to overthrow the civilization founded by the Rocking Cradle in Bethlehem two millennia ago and consecrated by the Emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century A.D.
In the contemporary South the great success of the revolutionaries has been to atomize much of society, deprive large portions of it of those inherited traditions, those customs, those beliefs-those memories-which have given it substance and continuity, which have served as its shield and buckler. Instead of what Southern writer Richard Weaver called a communitarian "social bond individualism," life centered around family and church, and indelibly defined by region and custom, the modern revolution breaks and severs those bonds, isolates individuals, and renders them subject to the social decay and dislocation which an omnipotent managerial state, in league with international capitalism, utilizes to advance its vision of a future society.
Is it possible that we can return to those principles and that belief which once motivated and annealed our ancestors ? That spirit, that wisdom-so beleaguered and despised nowadays-is still there for those who sincerely seek it. Scraping away the ugly revolutionary dross we have the opportunity, albeit with great difficulty and sacrifice, to recover those memories, rekindle them, and draw from them strength.
In his work, Requiem for A Nun (1951), Southern novelist William Faulkner says of his fellow Southerners that for them, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
One of the most remarkable poems of the 20th century is by the incomparable Southern Agrarian author Donald Davidson. Titled "Lee in the Mountains," it summons us once more to the battle lines and to eventual victory, if we have faith and an unshakeable commitment to our cause. For, in the end, God will not forsake us. We must be like Gideon's small army and General Forrest's "critter company."
Sense the confidence that springs from our Christian faith and which Davidson reminds us of:
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.