Modern Yankees Use the Historical Propaganda Model Created by the Soviet Communists

It is verboten in most places across the United States to say anything favorable about Southerner leaders who either personally embodied or fought to defend – with pen, sword, or by political means – authentic Southern tradition.  The institutions of the Left (media, academy, Hollywood) and the Right (talk radio, governments of Red States and counties/parishes, Fox News) seem to be in a competition with one another as to who can heap the most abuse upon traditional Southerners.

There are psychological and spiritual reasons for this constant anxiety of most of the Yankee-influenced elite in the US to discredit the South, reasons that are illuminated remarkably well in a book on the communist takeover of Russia, Spiritual Sources of the Russian Revolution, by Metropolitan Mitrofan Badanin (available online free of charge here; translated into English by Archpriest Anatole Lyovin).

In the latter part of his book, Metropolitan Mitrofan points to a similar anxiety of the communists towards the memory of the Christian kingdom that existed prior to their rule.  He writes,

‘The Bolshevik government, on the spiritual level, was always afraid of anything connected with the memory of the Romanovs. So much so, that it tried to flee from it truly ‘as devil flees from the smell of incense’.

‘When people proposed to Stalin in 1927 to issue a collection of essays concerning the execution of the Tsar, Iosif Vissarionovich (Stalin) sharply snapped: ‘From now on, not even one word about the Romanovs.’ The only such book, published in 1926, was forbidden, confiscated, and put away in special closed archives. That ‘taboo’ was kept strictly in force all until 1974 when the government allowed the publication of ‘ideologically fully vetted’ opus of journalist Mark Kasvinov entitled, ‘Twenty three steps down.’ (We should point out that the author died suddenly right after the publication of this book.)’

The communists felt guilt and inferiority before the greatness of the Christian culture that came before them in Russian history, and this led them to distort history for the sake of discrediting their godly predecessors and of glorifying themselves:

‘That ontological fear of the Bolsheviks is the outcome of persistent feeling of spiritual defeat and the necessity to find some kind of justification for the crime which they had committed. The open Satanism and the mockery of Christian holy things which took place in the first days of the revolution as well as undisguised rebellion against God during the Lenin-Trotsky rule later on began to be clothed in pseudoscientific form of Marxism-Leninism and dialectical materialism. At the same time, the true scientific study of history was forbidden. History of the time before 1917 ceased to exist. Later the study of history was in a way restored, but only within the narrow framework of the ‘Short course on the history of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’ which was personally written by Stalin in 1938.’

Thus was birthed that iniquitous thing, historical propaganda:

‘The concept of the historical development of Russia which was presented in the ‘Short Course’ had a deep influence on historical studies which formed in the USSR in XX century, and, of course, gave birth to a never before seen phenomenon – historical propaganda.’

In such propaganda ‘ . . . is given material “officially examined by the Central Committee of the Communist Party with Party’s interpretation of the basic issues in the history of Marxism-Leninism which does not permit any other arbitrary interpretations.’’’

These factors driving the behavior just described of the anti-Christian communists are very much at work in the modern Yankees (and those who share their worldview in all parts of the US) who are never sleeping in their desire to obliterate Southern culture.  They see the nobility of the gentlemen and ladies of the South and the virtues of her plainfolk and know that they are in the presence of men and women more honorable than themselves.  They burn with envy and seek some way to damage their reputations and exalt their own.  Hence the unrelenting campaign to tear down statues and memorials and ‘recontextualize’ antebellum homes; hence the lies and smears directed at traditional Dixie’s leaders – Lee, Maury, Davis, Forrest, and others; hence the attempt to re-write history to exalt Yankeedom and belittle the South.

The effect on Southerners has indeed been horrible.  Many of them, young and old, men and women, as a result of Yankee use of the Soviets’ historical propaganda tool, despise their ancestors, believing them to be monsters, and the civilization they established to be a stain on the history of the United States.  These deracinated Southerners try very hard to be ‘good Yankees’, ‘good Americans’.  In doing so, they lose any sense of identity as they become caught up in the increasingly frenetic and frenzied pace of social change demanded by the Yankee version of the Soviets’ dialectal materialism:  scientific materialism.

Yet there is room for hope amidst this dark gloom.  Despite the best efforts of the communists to destroy any trace of the previous Christian society in Russia, they failed.  Russians, after multiple generations of brutal torture, executions, brainwashing, and the like, still look with longing on the ancien régime.  Turning once more to Metropolitan Mitrofan, he says,

‘Hundred years have passed since this tragedy in the life of our nation occurred and the ancient monarchic dynasty was forced to cease its rule. Why is it then that even until the present day many Russians very clearly keep their feeling of nostalgia for those times, nostalgia for that spirituality, for that image of Imperial Russia, for those notions of honor and duty, and for its army and navy that were the best in Europe?

‘This inexplainable yearning remains in spite of the fact that the entire ideological work during the past decades on the part of godless authorities was directed, and even more, was concentrated on all sorts of discreditation of prerevolutionary Russia, on openly cynical and mocking defamation of everything that was in any way connected with the House of Romanov and its form of rule.’

The human being, being created in the image of God, has an instinctive attraction to what is God-like, to what is Good, True, and Beautiful.  Russians saw through the lies paraded before them day after day, month after month, year after year, saw the gleaming of the virtues of their Christian ancestors through the poisonous haze of atheistic communism, yearned for them, and are now reacquiring them after having removed the yoke of the communists.

Because of these things, we have hope for the South.  Every day, a little more of the Yankee project of global domination becomes discredited – through disillusionment with Yankee scientific materialism, through the discovery of the real character of Yankee heroes like Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, John Brown, Hillary Clinton, and others (and even earlier ones like the Pilgrims), through dissatisfaction with the oppressive government apparatus erected by the Yankees on the ashes of the original union of States that is crushing in the burdens it places on people and intrusive in its ability to observe nearly every aspect of people’s lives.

Every day, the nostalgia for the humane, Christian order of the traditional South grows a little stronger as dissident voices like the Abbeville Institute, Reckonin’, Folk Chain of Memory (Chase on Substack), A Memoir of the Occupation (Enoch Cade on Substack), and other web sites are discovered and shared, as the virtues of the South – honor, duty, order, piety, good humor, Christ-loving, martial valor, and others – are discovered anew, as the sacramental joy of being part of the creation, and not a miserable, faceless piece of some industrial dynamo, bursts forth again.

The atrocities of the Yankees, like the Soviets, have been justified for years by mountains of lies and propaganda.  The fall of communism was presaged by a renewed interest in their opposite, in unchanging Truth, Jesus Christ, by the Russians, the dying embers of their faith stoked by the inspired preaching of priests like Father Dimitry Dudko, a sign noticed by some men in the West like Father Seraphim Rose of California beginning in the 1970s.  Now, many places in the South – from universities to churches – are seeing an increasing number of people, especially young people, showing a similar renewed interest in Christianity.  If that interest is more than an evanescent fad, it bodes well for Dixie.  As history has shown, the Church is the only foundation on which a durable independence and existence for any people can be built.  Not even the fiercest assaults of the devil and his demons can overcome the Church:  ‘The gates of hell shall not overcome it,’ teaches the Lord Jesus, Who is her Head (St Matthew 16:18).  The forces of satanic communism did not overcome her; nor shall the forces of the diabolically inspired Yankee imperium overcome her.  Let us wait ‘a little while longer’ (Revelation 6:11), and plead for forgiveness, deliverance, and restoration from the Lord, the Giver of good things to those who ask with a pure heart.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Walt Garlington

Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer (and, when able, a planter). He makes his home in Louisiana and is editor of the 'Confiteri: A Southern Perspective' web site.

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