Southern Nationalism, National Socialism and the Jewish Question

I’ve never been interested in “NS.”

I have always written from a Southern perspective.

Yesterday, I highlighted some of the differences that I see between the “NS” fandom and Southern Nationalism, but I barely scratched the surface of it when it comes to the Jewish Question. I would say the heart of our disagreement is the stories that we tell ourselves about the past.

The “NS” fandom is convinced that “IT’S THE JEWS!!!” White people are in racial and cultural decline in America and Europe because of the Jews. That is the long and short of their worldview. It takes about five seconds of interacting with these people to realize that they are in the grip of an all consuming monomaniacal obsession with Jews that borders on parody. I have been informed in the comments, for example, that Jews are behind Levi Strauss blue jeans and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Maybe there is some truth to that but what does it say about the mindset of the people who are vexed by it?

Here is how I would respond to this narrative:

For the vast majority of our history, there wasn’t a “Jewish Question” in the South. Jews were a tiny minority that settled in the colonial South. South Carolina had the largest Jewish population in America at the time of the American Revolution. By and large, Southerners did not perceive Jews as a bunch of bomb throwing utopian revolutionaries who were trying to overthrow our social order. On the contrary, Jews tended to assimilate and integrate well into Southern culture. Jews were also slave owners. Jews also supported white supremacy. Jews also identified as White people and Southerners.

The Confederacy is a hilarious example of this inconvenient truth. Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, was Jewish. He was the first Jewish senator. He was the first Jew to hold a Cabinet position in America … appointed by President Jefferson Davis to serve in the Confederate government. Judah Benjamin resigned his U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana and supported the Confederacy. He wasn’t alone in this. Sen. David Yulee of Florida was the first Jew elected to the House of Representatives. He also resigned his U.S. Senate seat from Florida and supported the Confederacy.

Here is an excerpt from Sen. Judah Benjamin’s resignation speech:

“And now, Senators, within a very few weeks we part, to meet again as Senators in one common council chamber of the nation, no more forever. We desire, we beseech you, to let this parting be in peace. I conjure you to indulge in no vain delusion, that duty, or conscience, or interest, or honor, impose upon you the necessity of invading our States, and shedding the blood of our people. You have no possible justification for it. I trust it is from no craven spirit, or any sacrifice of the dignity or honor of my own State, that I make this last appeal, but from far higher and holier motives. If, however, it shall prove vain — if you are resclute to pervert the Government, framed by the fathers for the protection of our rights, into an instrument for subjugating and enslaving us, then, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the universe, for the rectitude of our intentions, we must meet the issue you force upon us as best becomes freemen defending all that is dear to man.

What may be the fate of this horrible contest none can foretell; but this much I will say, the fortunes of war may be adverse to our arms; you may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and firebrand may set our cities in flames; you may even emulate the atrocities of those who, in the days of the Revolution, hounded on the bloodthirsty savage; you may give the protection of your advancing armies to the furious fanatics who desire nothing more than to add the horrors of servile insurrection to civil war; you may do all this, and more, but you never can subjugate us; you never can subjugate the free sons of the oil into vassals. paying tribute to your power; you never, can degrade them to a servile and inferior race; never-never, never. …”

Here is a fascinating excerpt from Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights on how southern Jews reacted to the demise of the Confederacy and Reconstruction:

“Notwithstanding the general response of southern Jews, a number of individuals expressed vehement opposition to the new social order. According to David Yulee, the Reconstructionist policies of the Republican Party were an unwarranted assault upon the proud people of the South that would provoke “a conflict that will end in the extermination of one of the races.” Outrage at the enforced imposition of equal rights for African-Americans was shared by many southern Jews. J.H. Levy of Savannah wrote to his daughters in March 1868 that federal troops would not listen to local leaders, their sole purpose being “to direct and change” the region “to negro ascendancy making in time the south unfit for white people, should we not be fortunate enough to succeed so that common sense & common decency reverse the country from disgrace.” “Our political situation here is now altogether frightful,” Meyer Goldman’s son wrote to a friend in October 1874. “It seems that negroes are streaming into Louisiana from other states far and wide, and are building up here the so-called ‘Republican Party,’ and are also stirring up much trouble.” Almost every office in the state government, exclaimed Goldman, was occupied by an African-American, and those whites who did hold power were the most base and corrupt of their kind. The situation had become so intolerable that he was closing his law practice and moving north to Louisville, Kentucky.

Other Jews were determined to stand and fight. Driven by anger and resentment, they engaged in acts of terrorist violence against the Republican state governments. A small number of southern Jews, for instance, enlisted in the Ku Klux Klan. Others, including Edwin Moise and H.H. De Leon, were members of the Red Shirts, and organization that used violence to restore Democratic rule in South Carolina. …

Jews actively contributed to the Lost Cause. Like their Gentile neighbors, they constructed elaborate memorials to the Confederate dead. The soldiers’ section of the Jewish cemetery in Richmond offered such solemn celebration, its railings adorned with swords and sabers, wreathed with laurel. Seventeen years of Civil War and Reconstruction only served to strengthen the emotional bond that southern Jews felt for their adopted homeland. Their sense of loyalty to the southern social order remained unshakeable. Newspaper editor Herbert Ezekiel was not alone in his assertion that there was a special kinship between the Jewish people and the South. As he argued, the fate of the former Confederates was akin to that of God’s chosen people, an oppressed minority who had suffered unjustly at the hands of a tyrannical majority. “Like Jews have often been, they were crushed by irresistable odds, but the cause is still alive. … its sacredness will be inviolable so long as the sun shines in this fair land of ours.”

Southern Nationalism was not antisemitic.

There was no demand for antisemitism because there wasn’t a “Jewish Question.”

Jews fought for the Confederacy.

Jews served at the highest levels of the Confederate government.

Jews tended to be more supportive of secession and led Florida and Louisiana out of the United States.

Jews even joined the original Klan during Reconstruction. Montgomery, Alabama was redeemed by Mordechai Moses who ran as “the true White Man’s Candidate.”

Throughout the entire 19th century, antisemitism never took root in the South because every Southerner correctly associated attempts to destroy our social order and turn the world upside down with Northern White liberal fanatics – people like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thaddeus Stevens – who in the Southern mind were the menace of “Black Republicanism.”

This is what partisan American politics was already like in 1864 and 1866:

The Miscegenation Ball at the Headquarters of the Lincoln Central Campaign Club, Corner of Broadway and Twenty Third Street New York Sept. 22d. 1864 being a perfect fac simile of the room &c. &c. 

In all of these heated debates over race around the Civil War and Reconstruction, it never occurred to anyone that IT’S THE JEWS!!! The enemies of Reconstruction, North and South, never saw it as a Jewish plot, but rather as a Republican plot to cling to power because of the demise of the 3/5th clause.

Summary: Another in a series of racist posters attacking Radical Republican exponents of black suffrage, issued during the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial race. (See “The Constitutional Amendment,” no. 1866-5.) The poster specifically characterizes Democratic candidate Hiester Clymer’s platform as “for the White Man,” represented here by the idealized head of a young man. (Clymer ran on a white-supremacy platform.) In contrast a stereotyped black head represents Clymer’s opponent James White Geary’s platform, “for the Negro.” Below the portraits are the words, “Read the platforms. Congress says, The Negro must be allowed to vote, or the states be punished.” Above is an explanation: “Every Radical in Congress Voted for Negro Suffrage. Every Radical in the Pennsylvania Senate Voted for Negro Suffrage. Stevens [Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens], Forney [John W. Forney, editor of the ” Philadelphia Press”:], and Cameron [Pennsylvania Republican boss Simon Cameron] are for Negro Suffrage; they are all Candidates for the United States Senate. No Radical Newspaper Opposes Negro Suffrage. “Geary” said in a Speech at Harrisburg, 11th of August, 1866–“There Can Be No Possible Objection to Negro Suffrage.”

These cartoons illustrate how Northern Democrats characterized Northern Republicans.

In 1868, Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair, Jr. were the Democratic candidates for president and vice president, and they ran on the slogan “This is a White Man’s Country. Let White Men Rule.” They lost every state in New England and the Midwest to Ulysses S. Grant. America ceased to be a “White Man’s Country” when they lost and the 14th and 15th Amendments were ratified by Republicans.

By the turn of the 20th century, slavery had been violently overthrown in the South. Blacks had been transformed into American citizens by forcing Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment at gunpoint. Blacks were voting in Northern states. Most Northern states had passed civil rights laws and overturned their anti-miscegenation laws. Negro worship entered a cultural recession in the Gilded Age, but at the state level Northern states continued to churn out anti-discrimination laws. Blacks had been armed and served in the Union Army to put down “the rebellion.” The federal government wasn’t resegregated until Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner with traditional racial attitudes, was elected president.

John Brown, a fanatic in the grip of “ni***er worship,” went to Kansas to kill Southerners and attacked the federal arsenal Harper’s Ferry in 1859 in order to incite a race war to liberate blacks

It is worth noting here that everything we complain about today – the denial of racial differences, the insistence that “the environment” or “prejudice” explains racial differences, attempts to level all racial distinctions in law and society, the worship of blacks, White racial guilt, the glorification of Noble Savages, and so on – has been with us since the earliest days of the Republic. Previous generations of Southerners knew it as “ni**er worship” or “Black Republicanism” and associated it with the culture of the Eastern states. The same is true of feminism or what was previously known as “Bloomerism.” It was well known in the 19th century South and other countries in Europe that Yankee men had surrendered power in their marriages to their wives who lorded over them and treated them like doormats. Southern intellectuals like George Fitzhugh attributed it to the excessive liberalism and democracy pulsating through their culture. Slavery had stopped the South from going too far down this destructive road.

“The fact was that in less than a generation, the American woman, still discreet in the works of writers like Gaillardet and absent from those of Mandat-Grancey, had taken center stage in French descriptions and analyses. The feminist movement and “suffragism” certainly had a hand in this, at least indirectly. It is hard to confirm, other than militant literature, most French texts written before 1914 do not mention the topic. Le Correspondant, generally attentive to all things American, flippantly evoked “the gynocratic movement,” confirming that in America it had “its most important base of operations. That is where its general staff holds its deliberations and where its assault columns against male tyranny receive their orders.” But on the whole, the French press did not bring up the topic, not even ironically. Most books about America gave it no space at all. Male chroniclers’ probable lack of interest or enthusiasm was coupled with the unshakable conviction that woman was the “real sovereign of the great Republic,” as Urbain Gohier would repeat ten years after Crosnier de Varigny.

North America was a gynocracy. This affirmation was dogmatic or at least axiomatic in France as of the 1890s. The American woman’s supremacy was thus twofold. The superiority of her “type” also corresponded to the empire she had taken over the opposite sex. The same cliche was tirelessly repeated, somewhere between fascination, fear, and reproach: the American woman ruled over the country just as she governed her home. The American man was her servant, or even her slave. The Yankee husband was not master of the house. He was lucky if he was not treated too badly! What Frédéric Gaillardet had once called the “republican duchess” had moved up from the footstool to the throne. And she occupied it as a despot rather than a sovereign.

The omnipotence the French saw American women wielding did not make them laugh, even at the husbands’ expense. This was not time for sly witticisms or colorful pleasantries; this upside-down world did not enchant its explorers. … But it was clear that their heart was not in it – that they feared the American woman was setting a bad example, and a contagious one. …

The author of La Femme aux Etats-Unis firmly believed that “the ‘dame,’ not satisfied with having also conquered the New World, is well on the way to Americanizing the old one. ” One more push and that born dominatrix would substitute the right to flirt for the rights of man and the citizen, because “the freedom to flirt is as sacred and inalienable in the United States as are the immortal principles of 1789 are in our country. …

“Mrs. Flora Thompson wants to colonize France – and probably Europe, too. Here, she is imprudently betraying the secret wishes of the most notorious of her imperialist compatriots, who not only dream of making the Old World the outlet for their industrial overproduction, but also a vacation spot! The question is whether Europe will comply.

On this point, the French clearly failed to get the joke. That Le Figaro‘s correspondent could transform a New York socialite into a Valkyrie of yankeesme speaks volumes about the place American women held in belle epoque France’s imagination. . .

A type within a type, the East Coast American woman, the supreme stage of Yankee femininity, was an icy sphinx: “There is a type of East Coast American woman, neither young nor old, with golden spectacles, I will particularly remember, as I met several examples. She has thin lips, any icy gaze, an impassive face. We can easily see in this New England gorgon the Frenchman’s classic nightmare: an unpleasant cross between the Americano-Puritan and the prudish Englishwoman “with thin lips.” The anti-Miss Betsy …

Ten years later, the 1920s would bring along the Fitzgerald era, of emancipated flappers, short hair, and crazy ideas – a little too crazy for the French. The American girl’s excessively liberated attitude rekindled blame and censure: she still embodied the “type’s perfection,” but now she was tyrannical, egotistical, arrogant, and all the more pernicious because she was desirable and cynically deployed her flagrant sexual freedom. …”

A century after the Civil War, Southerners were still failing to grasp the Jewish Question, and for a good reason. Most Southern Jews didn’t support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. There was never any uprising among Southern Jews against white supremacy and segregation. Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, for example, didn’t see the Jews trying to destroy the Jim Crow South. Wallace supported Israel and repeatedly spoke fondly of all the Jews who supported him during his campaigns for governor and the presidency. Jews also joined the Citizens Councils in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. MLK destroyed Selma to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. The segregated town had three Jewish mayors. Sol Tepper, a local activist, was one of the most outspoken segregationists in Alabama.

Robert B. Patterson, the founder of the Citizens Councils, didn’t see Jews as being the hidden hand behind desegregation. In his words, “Some of these groups are anti-Semitic. However, all of the religious groups, including the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish — have been pushing the anti-segregation issue and it is time for all of us to speak out for separation of the black and white races, regardless of our race or creed.” Wallace and Patterson were correct in failing to see “IT’S THE JEWS” as the problem because Northern Jews, Protestants and Catholics were all outspoken supporters of MLK and racial integration. Catholic priests and Orthodox archbishops marched for integration and locked arms with MLK.

Here is the House and Senate votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here is the House and Senate votes on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Here is the House and Senate votes on the Immigration Act of 1965.

The truth is that both of these laws passed Congress over Southern filibusters because they had overwhelming bipartisan support among both Northern Democrats and Republicans. The Immigration Act of 1965 was passed to honor JFK, America’s first Catholic president, who had campaigned on abolishing racial distinctions in American immigration law because America was a “Nation of Immigrants.” Southerners never bought into “IT’S THE JEWS” because most Northerners supported MLK. Evidently, Jewish media brainwashing didn’t work here, as Southern governors like Wallace, Barnett and Maddox all defied the demands of the Civil Rights Movement and resisted the Kennedy administration. The New Deal coalition collapsed over forced integration and never recovered its previous standing. Georgia added the Confederate Battle Flag to its state flag in the 1950s after the Brown decision in response to what was perceived as the latest Northern attack on the Southern social order.

If you ever visit Selma, stop and think about their civil rights martyrs like the Rev. James J. Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Kansas, who was beaten to death there in 1965.

Here is the Freedom Rider James Zwerg of Wisconsin who was an activist for the Congress of Race Equality (CORE) who was beat up in Montgomery in 1960 for trying to integrate a bus stop.

“Outside agitators” came to the South to overthrow our social order

The Leo Frank case in Georgia in 1915 is notable for being an exception to the rule. It was the only incident of note involving a clash between Jews and Southerners in the century after the Civil War. It is also exaggerated in that there were around 1,300 Whites who were lynched between the 1880s and 1960s. Frank was lynched for being a murderer, not for being Jewish.

It is worth reflecting on why our Southern ancestors were so unsympathetic to Hitler and National Socialism and why the message “IT’S THE JEWS” fell so flat here. Jews were not the people that President Jefferson Davis once labeled “the disturbers of the peace of the world.” Jews were not resented in the South because Jews were conforming to the Southern social order. Southerners had little contact with Jews, the few interactions they did have were usually positive and they associated them with the Israelites of the Bible. They have always thought of Jews this way even before the rise of Dispensationalism.

In 1940, the Jim Crow South was racially segregated. Most American states had passed some type of eugenic sterilization laws. The racial inferiority of blacks was accepted as a fact by nearly all White Americans. The United States had an immigration system designed to preserve Nordics and quell immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The British Empire lorded over India and most Africa and upheld white supremacy across the world. Australia had the White Australia policy. There was no taboo on “racism” in the United States or in any Western country before Hitler. And yet, National Socialist Germany took such an extreme position on race and such a dim view of its European neighbors and this was so intensely polarizing that most racists across the world recoiled in horror from it.

Needless to say, Southerners were not fans of Hitler’s brutal conquest of the Czechs and the Poles and its war with Britain. It was easy to characterize the National Socialist regime as chauvinistic and tyrannical. Southerners had always admired and sympathized with the Poles since Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski played a role in the American Revolution. Pulaski saved George Washington’s life at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777. The original Southern nationalists had admired Joachim Lelewel and Southerners identified with Poland after their own crushing defeat and loss of independence in the War Between the States. I won’t elaborate on Hitler’s agenda of reenacting cowboys and Indians and the Wild West in Poland, Ukraine and Russia with Germans playing the role of American settlers except to say that Keith Woods and Greg Johnson are correct to highlight the role this played in creating the cloud over nationalism. The backlash and burning moral feeling that this was wrong created the cultural atmosphere which caused non-Germans to question existing their racial hierarchies and science.

After thinking about this issue for 25 years now, I do think there is a Jewish Question, but I do not think of it in the same way that most antisemites do. The real issue is that millions of Jews immigrated here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the ghettoes of southern, central and eastern Europe. Those Jews brought with them to the United States the culture and radical politics of southern, central and eastern Europe. Those who came to America earlier via Germany or the Caribbean had a different trajectory. They were not alone in this respect. The same was true of Leon Czolgosz, the Polish anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, or later Sacco and Vanzetti. Previous waves of failed European revolutionaries like the German Forty-eighters had done the same thing. Jews were heavily immersed in radical leftwing European politics which had no real parallel in America where socialism, communism and anarchism had fallen on deaf ears. Like the Italian mob, it carried over from the Old World for really all of the Ellis Islander immigrant groups including the Jews. They all voted the same way too for people like JFK and other liberal Democrats who wrecked the country in the 1960s.

Virtually all of these immigrants settled in Northern or Western cities and bypassed the South which was mired in the malaise of sharecropping and tenant farming at the time. They did not create the problems there so much as they linked up with native born radicals and exacerbated or aggravated preexisting negative trends. Jews did not create the American obsession with individual rights, equality or civil rights. The trope of the Magic Negro has deep roots in Yankee culture that goes back centuries. Jews took this crap which was already present in the culture and put it in film and in television.

“IT’S THE JEWS” appeals to people who don’t want to think too much about their own history and who are too lazy to investigate the origin of modern American culture. It is for New Yorkers who have never heard of the Wide Awakes, the Union League or Sen. Roscoe Conkling. For the most part, antisemites have this hazy view of the past where everything was fine until the Jews came here and ruined it. It is the belief that everything I don’t like is the fault of the Jews and I am not interested in learning much about it.

Historical National Socialism, not to be confused with the mutant “NS” fandom, was in my view too extreme and polarizing, especially on race and foreign policy. It became a foil for Western liberalism. Then it lost to Western liberalism. For the generation which fought in that war and the postwar generations who were the most shaped by it, the memory of Hitler became a substitute for Satan. The Nazis were “racists” and “nationalists” and “antisemites.” As a result, racism, nationalism and antisemitism and anything associated with the Nazis became taboo in the West. It reshaped and strengthened Western liberalism. We’re only now finally getting over it due to the fact that everyone who lived through the war or who were shaped by it are either dead or dying and losing their grip on the culture.

It is time to step over the 20th century and its crumbling taboos, not to breathe new life into them.

Note: According to Greg Johnson, he was told by top revisionists that the Holocaust happened. I’ve never been interested in the issue and have no strong opinion on it. I don’t need to have a historical opinion on the merit of the claims to know that “NS” has always been a ball and chain for us.

Source: https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/26/southern-nationalism-national-socialism-and-the-jewish-question/