Thoughts on Southern pride and making heritage a part of your identity?

The South has fuck all to be proud of. The place is a third world shithole.

Southern heritage is about being some spooky fucks that revolt so they can be even more class cucked.

Serious response, then.

Regional pride is even dumber than national pride. Even then, there's nothing about being Southern worth being proud of.

Roots are for vegetables and, as a "Southerner" myself, the last thing I want to be reminded of is my "roots" or "heritage".

Alabama guy here. It's all stupid shit. People buy into it for the same reasons they do nationalism. It's really the same shit.

This kind of regional pride still exists in the south in particular due to the overall shitty handling of reconstruction and the lasting impact of the civil war. Southern economy remained a mess until something stupid like the 1980s. Still awful for workers, but that's just capitalism in general.

While the civil war itself WAS about slavery, to most southerners it was about an outside force invading to infringe on their rights generally, not just their right to own slaves. Northern politicans didn't actually give a shit about freeing slaves. They were concerned about being overtaken by southern industrialization which, in combination with slavery, would've dominated the nation. Poor southern farmers were manipulated with the usual bs. Sherman's march and reconstruction left a sour taste so abandoning that identity was even harder. Wondering why people felt this way is like bombing Iraq to shit and wondering why they hate the US. Or course in the case of the south the actual wounds have long since healed, but the memory for some stupid reason still lives on.

Comments like these aren't helpful. Really on the same level as stormniggers talking about Africa or the middle-east. The south has a long history of extreme economic exploitation that, coupled with a shitty education system and race baiting politicians, has left people with a lot of misdirected anger.

I think it is also worth pointing out that not all of this southern pride bs is motivated by racism. Most young people in the south are anti-racist like the rest of the country. I think people buy into it in part because the south gets treated like a punching bag. Always the butt of other people's jokes. I don't think it is fair to shit on the south for southern pride when the rest of the country can't stop sucking Uncle Sam's fat cock. Really all the same shit.

The stuff you're mentioning is pretty spooky so I don't think those in particular are compatible with Marxism/Anarchism. You can, however, admire southern culture they way you would any other culture. Like you can love the food, music, dialect, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. One of the coolest things about living in America is the cultural diversity.

There's the food, some of the music, and traditions around social gatherings and that's about it.

It's a heterogenous group but the Southern idea of morality is pretty sickeningly traditionalist and they tolerate a lot of other insane/dangerous ideologies for the sake of not stirring the pot. Their desire to rebel comes from their desire to go full fucking reactionary (or in some cases primitivist+guns).

The yanks should have done a better job of reconstruction, and guillotined all the aristocrats.

Yeah, so long as it's the whites doing it to preserve the status quo.

Love of "the South" is just white idpol as a reaction to being fucked up and then abandoned by the North. If you can condense the more neutral elements of the culture along with a universalizing message of equality, you might have something worth protecting. As it is, anyone wanting to instill "Southern philosophy" as it has existed in the minds of whites is so hypocritical it's not even funny.

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This, totally. Coming from Australia, there's an issue with the whole "Bogan pride" thing here as well, where working-class Australians, sick of being looked down the nose by edgy middle class people, go beyond embracing their class and go full socially- and racially-conservative.

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The South is just shit. Terrible weather, terrible scenery, terrible people.

All those qualities are found to a much higher degree in rural Cascadia and Appalachia.

The south really has nothing to offer except decent BBQ.

Southern pride is just the South's way of compensating for how much it sucked in the past. That's why you don't see Northern Pride.
Heritage is usually just code for the inheritance of spooks or nostalgia.

But only in the Appalachia range from New York to Kentucky. Once you get into Alabama and the Carolinas, it's all shit.

The confederate battle flag actually serves a useful purpose by immediately identifying class cucks that have been cucked so hard they continue to support a cause even 150 years later that would have had their ancestors basically in serfdom to the megarich landowner class.

skepticalanimegirl.jpg

This
Fucking this

W E W
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I think we have a bingo!

Speaking as a Texan, it's bullshit. Most of the moralfags are hypocrites who are fine with "degeneracy" so long as they don't get caught and the "rebellion" they support is hyper classcuckery. Even if thay weren't true, making where you were born or live an integral part of your identity is gay as fuck.

Yes, yes. There are plenty of reasons why it is awful, but the fact remains that it is awful. Have you ever been there? I've lived there. What's really crazy is that all of the stereotypes are true. You would think that they were exaggerations, mean-spirited jokes at the South's expense. They're not.

The cities like Dallas, New Orleans, Biloxi, Pensacola, and Mobile are filthy. The air is so polluted that you can literally see it. The sidewalks are lined with rubber gloves and used needles.

Then you get out to the suburbs where coal power plants sit in the middle of residental neighborhoods in the shadows of decapitated mountains. The water is so foul that it makes kitchens and bathrooms stink. Trailer parks are across the road from pre-fab mansions.

What gets me is that the South was not the only economically exploited resource extraction node in the United States. The West Coast, for example, was long used for mining, lumber, farming, and hunting and fishing like the South was. Politics was all about race there for decades. Oregon actually specifically banned black people in their constitution, and Seattle chased the Chinese out of Washington with torches and pitchforks. The South was even industrialized a hell of a lot earlier. Why is the West Coast clean, well-educated, and full of wine-sipping snobs while the South is an ugly shithole full of illiterate rednecks?

I used to live in Biloxi. The water between the coast and the barrier islands was muck-green and filthy. The beaches were filled with glass and cigarette butts.

Fuck I hate the south

It would have solved so many problems if they had left Sherman in charge of the reconstruction. He would have killed all of those bastards and given the freed slaves each forty acres and a mule.

I think that it only exists to be contrarian to anything remotely progressive.

[picture of Max Stirner looking condescending]

Not to mention plenty of wood ash as to help fertilize their fields.

idpol is cancer

The flag in your post is also the wrong flag. The confederate battle flag was closer to a square. You can't even get your history correct, you fucking faggot.

REEEEEEEEE TRAITORS TO THE UNION GET OFF MY BOARD

Silicon Valley, the Gold Rush, the Great Dust Bowl, Pacific immigration hub and US imperialism in Asia, Hollywood, etc. There are some historical similarities but a great many differences based on the underlying material conditions (geography, resources, economical relations) of each area.

Frankly, any revolution in the US must rely on the "ugly shithole full of illiterate rednecks" because the "wine-sipping snobs" of the West Coast are the largely contented professional classes (i.e. milquetoast petty-bourgeois liberals) and bourgeoisie. The latter group has no revolutionary potential, but the former, much like the uneducated and illiterate Russian peasantry, very much does.

If we were talking about pretty much any other country in the world, yes, but the white working class of America just seems so fucking assbackward its hard to imagine it ever playing any kind of central role in a revolution. Not that there are no potential revolutionaries amongst them, just that as a whole they will be very much on the sideline, if not aligned with bourgeoisie in a revolution. (then again I'm not from Burgerstan so I'm probably not best qualified to comment)

If we were talking about pretty much any other country in the world, yes, but the white working class of America just seems so fucking assbackward its hard to imagine it ever playing any kind of central role in a revolution. Not that there are no potential revolutionaries amongst them, just that as a whole they will be very much on the sideline, if not aligned with bourgeoisie in a revolution. (then again I'm not from Burgerstan so I'm probably not best qualified to comment)

There's huge potential here, but it's going to take a big despooking and a market crash to grow it. The former is somewhat happening in regards to race and church, but we've got a lot of work to do to get them ready and willing.

I don't know about that. I seem to recall Richard Wolf taking about how the programmers in Silicon Valley were doing syndicalist stuff without realizing that is what they were doing. Then there is the relatively strong labor movement on the coast with a long and surprisingly red history. Meanwhile, the entire South remains vehemently anti-union, and the working class there is shrinking into non-existence as they become lumpen.

I'm from dixie, and I love the South. It's the most beautiful place in the United States in my opinion. To some extent I even favor a confederacy with more rights for individual states over too much centralization (in a socialist context of course), but the CSA is a lost cause. No amount of romanticism will bring it back, and the league of doughey middle aged gung ho ATV riding men who watch duck dynasty and fox news are hardly the brave soldiers of dixie who fought for the CSA.

Revolutionary activity isn't an unconscious act, and most major Silicon Valley corporations either work for or are part of the military-intelligence apparatus.

Most programmers are also libertarians or liberals, especially the more well-off ones working for major tech companies. In a revolutionary situation, there would be almost no way to appeal to them because they're basically satisfied with the way things are. They'd oppose anything beyond basic reformism.

For all their flaws, most Southerners are not and can change if given some way out that seems to work (something neither of the main parties has bothered offering). They're only backwards because they're forced to be backwards by liberals who couldn't care less about them and consign them to being incurable bigots and conservatives who pretend to care but screw them anyway.

Without anything better, they look toward petty nationalisms like "Southern pride," right-wing Christianity, and racism—that is, identity politics, mirroring left-wing identity politics in the North and West. These belief systems are all political opiates, and, as such, they speak to the great amount of misery suffered by Southerners. That doesn't mean the beliefs are right, of course, but it does indicate a desperate need for something more in the South than what currently exists.

All of the carcinogens in the air do make for lovely sunsets.

Isn't it? Were the wealthy landlords who would become the European aristocracy as the Roman Empire collapsed aware that they were creating revolutionary change in the slave society of the Mediterranean? Were the Italian bankers who instituted bourgeois rulership in the Italian city-states aware that they were overthrowing feudalism to establish a new mode of production? I put it to you that it is those unconscious quantitative changes that produce the qualitative changes that are realized in revolution.

Revolutionaries frequently had worked for the old order. Workers work for the people who have work to do.

So are most southerners. The only difference is that they are impoverished.

Yes and no. The material changes and changes in economic relations resulting from them did create the conditions for revolution, but no, those classes did not overthrow themselves in the end but, instead, the formerly subaltern order (the slaves, the bourgeoisie) did. The revolutions were not unconscious activities.

It isn't whether they worked for the old order by itself that's the main problem but the fact that they're working for it and generally satisfied with working for it. Satisfied people are not desirous of immediate change.

Largely no. Libertarianism doesn't have a major presence in the South. Liberals (in the U.S. sense of the label) also don't, unless we mean that in the more general sense, although I didn't.

They kind of did, especially in the case of slave societies where the old slave holders spent centuries killing one another while the aristocrats subtly rose to power. The bourgeois gangsters who displaced the feudal lords in Italy played at being lords themselves and only affected the republican ideology that guys like Machiavelli published. It was not until Cromwell and the Long Parliament beheaded Charles I that the aristocracy realized that revolution was underway. Hell, Parliament did not realize that they were having a revolution until Charles' head was on the block.

I don't know how satisfied these people are. The cost of living on the West Coast cities is unbelievably high. If you haven't lived there, you would be completely floored. For all they make, it is only enough. Forget income. It's all about class.

Isn't Gary Johnson doing fairly well there? I heard that he was, but that was from libertarian sources.

Of course. The only difference between "liberals" and "conservatives" is that they have their idpol upside-down compared to one another.

Not really, no. If I put a sword in front of someone who wants to kill me and he does, no one would say I committed suicide. Perhaps I had a death wish, or perhaps I was stupid or otherwise oblivious, but it's not the same as suicide.

Similarly, laying the groundwork for revolution isn't the same thing as revolution. The subaltern class overthrows the previously dominant class in society using the tools of the society they organized but not while being part of that dominant class which organized it. The two are distinct and shouldn't be confused.

Workers at Silicon Valley companies are among the most highly compensated tech industry employees in the world. They also report high job satisfaction.

I would agree. I'm only pointing out that Southerners are for the most part impoverished workers and have greater revolutionary potential than the petty-bourgeois of the West Coast and North. Many people in this thread have rejected the South for reasons that are cultural and have nothing to do with an analysis of class.

There's little libertarian organization in the South I'm aware of. Johnson might garner votes from Republican free marketeers who hate Trump or people who like his pro-drugs, anti-war message, but he has no real constituency among workers.

Not entirely, no, which is why I wanted to draw the distinction. "Conservative" as a label can express more fundamental dissatisfaction with society than "liberal" can as it has become a byword for "the type of well-to-do people who rule and hate us" within the South. That's part of the reason why Clinton's "deplorables" comment gained so much traction.

stupidest fucking thing on the planet.

To clarify, as many people in this thread dont seem to understand, theirs nothing wrong with having an identity, its an unavoidable part of being a human being, however using identity as a marker for politics to further that identity is at best unproductive and at worse genocidal.

Born and raised in Alabama.

Just because some southerners fall in line with a stereotype doesn't make them a universal fact. Most people in the south don't match the retarded stereotypes. Would it be okay to be racist against black people just because some match the racist stereotypes? Your line of reasoning is fucking stupid.

Poverty and shitty politicians that don't give a shit about people naturally result in filthy cities full of addicts. Not like this is exclusive to the south. What's your point? Not every part of the south is depressing.

I love how in your mind the south is full of filthy addicts and a destroyed environment while the west coast is clean and educated. Have you ever spent an ounce of time outside an, I assume, upper class suburb? There are massive ghettos, widespread drug addiction, and even some rednecks(classist af term btw) outside the urban areas on the west coast. None of this shit you're bitching about is exclusive to the south. Also worth mentioning that while the labor movement actually managed to gain ground in the west, in the south they were repressed to an extreme. To this day we have the shittiest labor laws in the country.

Honestly, you come across as some rich snob looking down on poor people. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Best beaches are on the short stretch of coast in Alabama and in Florida. Clean white sand and usually the water is nice. There are times where the plant life gets a bit out of control though. I honestly don't know why anyone would visit the beach in Mississippi, particularly around Biloxi of all places.

What about people like me who were raised in wealthy families, identifies as Marxist-Leninst, and greatly admire Dixie and the honor culture encompassed within it? I also believe in traditional values but I'm completely accepting of other cultures and lifestyles.

I was talking about the place, not the people.

I must have had a way of finding those parts then.

I know that you proud southerners love to pretend that the people who talk shit about the Dirty South are some ivory tower-living, non-working elitists, but the fact of the matter is that those kids with the rich daddies do not believe that the South is as awful as it actually is. It's the people who have had to live there who are doing the actual shittalking. Get out of your state, and see what the rest of the country looks like.

That I can confirm. The Redneck Riviera has the best beaches in the U.S. apart from maybe Clearwater. Now, the towns adjacent to the beaches are not exactly Lahaina, but they are good for a party.

Because it is close. Who wants to drive hell and gone to Panama City on the weekend? Besides, I don't know how much shit there changed after Katrina, but back in the day they had a bunch of casinos on stilts in the water where the guys from Keesler would spend their bonuses.

Yes, but your idea of modern Dixie culture is hilariously far off.