A Yankee is a creature without a civilization. Having no people, no breeding, no past, he roams the earth by instinct, tearing down the civilizations built by others who, unlike him, lovingly cultivate human society.
Being unwelcome in England due to his penchant for religious terrorism, the Yankee was exiled across the sea where he immediately set about destroying the civilizations he found here. He ran wild against the Wampanoag and the Iroquois. He put the Lakota and the Navajo into camps, where they remain. He later crossed another sea, imprisoned the Hawaiian queen, committed genocide against the Moros, napalmed the Vietnamese in their farming villages, and put the torch to the cultural treasures of Japan. Having practiced looting and pillaging in Atlanta, he put his well-honed skills to use in Baghdad, the ruination of museums and relics following wherever he directed his gaze.
A kind of eternal Ostrogoth, a Viking in a peacoat, the Yankee is a scourge upon the planet, a pox surely sent us for atonement for our sins.
And yet, for all that, the Yankee is nevertheless a human being. With patient tutelage he, too, may be brought into the world of gentility and manners. His is not a hopeless case, no matter how large loom the depredations of his tribe. Tarzan, after all, joined the ranks of men, despite his simian upbringing. Romulus and Remus were raised by a she-wolf. Even Curtis LeMay, had someone taken the time to instruct him, might have put down his club and spear and sat at the table with the civilized.
The United States is a long experiment in this very thing. Our Yankee cousins, inflicted on us as God gave the Philistines to the Hebrews, are a test and a burden, but also a chance to do real charity and teach the wayward how to live like human beings. From age to age the South has tempered the Hun-like nature of the Yankee, patiently bearing with him and quietening him in his atavistic fits. We taught Yankees to read, and even to write. Reading our literature, they softened a bit, as a hippopotamus might lie down for a nap if made to listen to Schubert.
The Yankee has ever been anxious to take up his weapons and bathe in the blood of innocents as his ancestors did. We know firsthand, unfortunately, how the Yankee behaves when war gets into his head. But even a raging Yankee may be soothed and tamed, with time. American history is the history of the South trying to teach the Yankee to behave like a gentleman. We have not always succeeded, but we have tried.
Now, at this late hour of the republic, we find that the Yankee has apparently thrown off the mantle of civilization with which we tried so hard to clothe him. He began by throwing out Southern literature and arts from his trade schools (which he does not hesitate to call “universities”). He no longer wanted to hear what words sound like when they speak truth and valor and grace. He wanted only the old tribal feeling of hate and battle. He tested it all out on his trade school campuses and now, emboldened by the encouragement he has received from the Yankee-captured town named for the greatest Virginian, he fans out across the continent, as he has so many times before, hell-bent on destroying whatever Southerners have labored to build. Like a betrayed teacher we watch in horror as our charge rampages like a berserker, foaming at the mouth and crying out the slogans taught him by the trade school Marxists.
Down come the statues, of course. You will notice that Yankees are not targeting libraries, so few of them being yet able to digest difficult texts. Statues are much easier to understand. But beyond that Yankees love defacing private property, they having no concept of the thing themselves. They also hate greatness of character, theirs being the ideal that the most violent, the most depraved shall rule. Most of all the Yankee hates order and gentility, and so they range the cities of the plain looking for some scrap of civilization to demolish. Lee, Jackson, Jefferson, all are defaced. Revealing his utter ignorance, the Yankee even lashes out against statues of the 54th Massachusetts, against Lincoln and Grant. (Did you think the Yankee was learning any history in his trade schools?)
When the mechanized police forces, which the Yankees also love, arrive to contain them—because some Yankees, it is true, would rather grub money than steal it, and so the shops must stay open and the moneychangers must remain unmolested—the barbaric hordes cry out in glee. The smoke of the ensuing melee fills their lungs like opium. They are hash-eaters feasting on the nightstick and the tear gas canister. They express themselves in grunts and spraypaint, tearing to pieces the civilization that we tried to give them.
Alas, to no avail. The South is cancelled, now. The Yankee has thrown it out, seemingly forever. Behold America without the South. Behold the Yankee left to his natural inclinations, his old blood-remembered practices coming out and driving him, half-entranced, to plunder and burn as he has a thousand times before. The Yankees proved ruder than any civilizer could tame. Tarzan, we’ll recall, eventually went back to live among the apes. The Yankee, too, goes back to his roots, the Cromwell in him emerging like a crocodile out of a fog.
We weep for what will come next. God help America, God help the world, while the Yankee is loose and un-whispered-to. The only rein the Yankee has ever known, the South, is thrown off. The beast now runs wild. Turn on the TV and see what is going on.
The United States was a long struggle for civilization and peace over the brute ruses of our Yankee cousins. That struggle seems finished. But now that the separation is final, fellow Southerners, let us do what we ought to have been permitted to do long ago. Let us give up this Sisyphean chore and leave the Yankee to his barbaric inclinations. Let us secede from the Yankee’s hellish country and rebuild our civilization, in peace, with all men of goodwill our neighbors and every one who aspires to human decency our friends.
Everyone who loves his home and wants to protect and preserve his heritage is a partner. There are Southern natives of Michigan and Minnesota, California and Maine, who labor patiently at the arts and at husbandry. It is not a paradox but the deepest truth of America that anyone in the North who holds America dear and loves his family and homeland is a fellow Southerner. Likewise, the South, thronged with Yankees, has largely forgotten what it means to cherish, to forgive, to clear weeds from the heart and give thanks for even the hard things. We have been under Yankee capture for far too long. We all need to learn to be civilized.
Black and white, yellow and brown, red and sable, come, let us live like God intended, bearing with one another, being Christians, helping one another, not nursing hatred in our souls.
Because America without the South is too terrible to contemplate. If the Yankees are done trying to learn their lessons—if they have lit out to wallow in their own filth in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco—then it is useless for us to go on standing at the chalkboard, speaking to an empty room. What is done is done, and Lord knows we tried to effect a peaceful separation one hundred and sixty years ago. This day always had to come. It is time to end the experiment in the civilization of the Yankee—one might as well try ikebana on the moon—and to turn our attention to our long-suffering homeland. Let us welcome to this home all Americans who want to do what might still be done, if only the Yankee can be kept at bay.
Our hope now is in the South. One country, two systems no longer. Cast out the Yankee, my friends, send the carpetbagger back to Boston, and let us live like civilized men once more.
