One Friday night recently, my wife and I were watching the local late night news cast here in Ft. Worth, TX. During the program the news anchor had a segment that showed a fairly large group of people at a rally. They were lamenting the fact they had lost their nation and wished to reclaim it. Everyone had little flags of their lost country and were waiving them and singing and chanting for their former homeland.
Their story is a familiar one. Once they were a united nation and over time the North and South decided that they were no longer compatible. The South broke away and formed it's own country. The Northern nation did not want the Southern nation to part, so they attacked the South in an attempt to force them to stay within the previously formed nation. The South eventually lost and was forced to rejoin the Northern nation. Today these two nations are still a "united" country even though the people of the South still face discrimination and persecution.
What was so interesting about the whole story is that the news was showing these events in a positive light for the people of the South, even lamenting the fact that these people had lost their homeland. The unfortunate part of all this is that they were not talking about the American South, but SOUTH VIETNAM. The news was subtly attempting to stir the emotions of the viewers in favor of these displaced people living in the U.S. who were wanting to reclaim what had been stolen from them by brute force.
One can see how the power of the press can easily bring a populace around to a particular way of thinking. One can also see how the press can be rather sympathetic to one cause and ignore or even discredit another. The cause of Dixie is not unlike that of South Vietnam. The difference is that the American press chooses to discredit the Southern cause while embracing the South Vietnamese cause. This kind of hypocrisy is typical of the modern media in America.
Southerners must continue to create, develop and promote media outlets that offer the Southern view of things and doesn’t try to brush the facts under the carpet. No one in Vietnam is going to be allowed to advocate the Southern view of things without being attacked, and the same is true on this continent. The written and spoken word is very powerful.
We should use the media to our benefit and stop allowing it to be used to our detriment. Southern advocates such as The Southern Partisan (magazine), The Edgefield Journal (newspaper) and Dixie Rising (radio and TV) are organizations that should be praised and promoted by Southerners to other Southerners. If we don’t support our public voices, then who will? By creating our own media outlets, eventually the established media will be forced to cover our issues more fairly or be seen for what they are, tools of the liberal elite.
Jeff Adams
May 3, 1999