Genocide of Southerners

Genocide of Southerners

Thomas Allen

To destroy the culture of an ethnic group is to destroy that ethnicity — just as deliberately killing members of an ethnicity leads to the destruction of that ethnicity. Both scenarios result in genocide or attempted genocide.

Now, let us look at some definitions of genocide. These definitions show that what has been happening to Southerners since the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation has been genocide.

1. John Cox: “Genocide aims to not only eliminate individual members of the targeted group but to destroy the group’s ability to maintain its social and cultural cohesion and, thus, its existence as a group.”

2. The Armenian Genocide Museum: “[Cultural genocide is] acts and measures undertaken to destroy nations’ or ethnic groups’ culture through spiritual, national, and cultural destruction.”

3. Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary: “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.”

4. Merriam-Webster, legal definition: “acts committed with intent to partially or wholly destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”

As these definitions clearly show, Yankeedom and the oligarchs have been trying to genocide Southerners for more than 160 years. The following outlines this genocide.

The genocide of Southerners began early in Lincoln’s War with the wanton killing of children and women. Lincoln’s army killed them directly and indirectly through starvation. Moreover, Lincoln’s army deliberately destroyed public buildings, private houses from stately houses to slave quarters, churches, and cultural sites. Their deliberate destruction of Southern life and culture had nothing to do with war. Such deliberate destruction was genocide.

This genocide continued through the First Reconstruction as Republican bureaucrats and politicians further destroyed Southern culture and Southerners. Carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Blacks backed by the Union army looted and otherwise destroyed the South. So successful was their war to destroy the South through impoverishment, that Southerners needed more than a century to recover. 

Following the First Reconstruction, the genocide subsided somewhat and Southerners began to recover their culture. This era was when Southerners erected most of the statutes and memorials to their heroes.

With its Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling, the Warren Court began the Second Reconstruction and signaled the renewal of the genocide of Southerners. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized miscegenation, became highly important weapons in the genocide of Southerners.

While genociding Southerners via miscegenation, the Yankee oligarchs through their agents — primarily scalawags, carpetbaggers, and Blacks — attacked the culture and symbols of the South. A major casualty was the Confederate flag. Among other casualties were songs such as “Dixie” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” and most songs that contained the word “slave” or praised the South. Statues and memorials of Southern heroes were torn down. Even streets, buildings, institutions, and military bases were renamed to remove references to Southerners. The cultural genocide of Southerners is almost completed.

Although the genocide of Southerners during the Second Reconstruction (1954 to present) has not been one of physically killing Southerners, it has been rapidly destroying their culture and heritage. Once an ethnicity’s culture is destroyed, it is dead though its people may continue to live.

Most people seem to believe that for genocide to be real, it must occur over a few years — a decade at most. They are wrong. Assyrians have been enduring off-and-on genocide and ethnic cleansing longer than have Southerners. Muslims have been trying to genocide Assyrians longer than Yankees have been trying to genocide Southerners.

The genocide of Southerners began with the deliberate and wanton killing of Southern civilians during Lincoln’s War and continued during the First Reconstruction. During the Second Reconstruction, the genocide of Southerners has focused on erasing their culture and to a lesser extent via miscegenation.

Copyright © 2024 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More Southern articles.