Melvin P writes: "The Southern ideology and culture, with its deep seated expressions of personal guilt and remorse is fused with a cavalier demeanor that allowed and provided the ideological framework to fight on the wrong side of history - and also, produced a distinct body of literature with writers like say Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, who are not my personal favorite. The warrior class of our state and country has as its ideological center this Southern ideology of "my country right or wrong" or fighting the good fight without considerations as to what is justice."
This is aptly put. Too often Marxists dismiss claims of regional ideologies, or the persistence of historically superceded ideologies, as idealist in the Weberian sense. I don't have statistics but it's pretty widely conceded that the "warrior caste" in the U.S. is drawn disproportionately from the former slaveholding states, especially those where the slave regime was harshest (i.e.) the Gulf states of Lousiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama. At the anecdotal level, when US Army General (ret), Alexander Haig, temporarily acted as president when Reagan was shot, my Lieutenant Colonel (USMC) cousin from New Orleans, sounded the alarum that he and his officer corps peers knew a pro-Soviet coup was afoot due to the prescence of "the traitorous liberal, Haig." I always considered cousin Lar' and his USMC buds to be proto-fascists. Historian of the U.S. South, Bertram Wyatt-Brown wrote an interesting book on the duelist tradition in the cavalier South-- "Southern Honor", I believe is the title. One would think that a regional ideology rooted in slavery would not have survived southern industrialization following WWII and the demise of the Jim Crow system. But It seems it does survive, concentrated in its expression in specific social spaces, like the US military-- especially in branches like the USMC where fanatical devotion to "my country right or wrong" pairs with overt white supremacy to reproduce the shock troops for whatever "Pickett's Charge" imperialism requires. Aryan Nations graffitti in Baghdad? Why who woulda thunk that? Bob M _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
