Ilario Pantano’s Grand Theft History
In Grand Theft History, Ilario Pantano addresses the culture war between progressives and conservatives for control of the Republic as well as the Marxists historians who are determined to dismantle the America of our Founders in support of the former.
I maintain that the Founders’ Republic
has been gone for a century and a half, no longer visible or viable with the
desecration of Federalism that came with the so-called “ratification” of the 14th
and 15th Amendments whereby the central government usurped civil rights and
suffrage onto itself, both the sole domain of sovereign states; the 16th
amendment which fed and continues to feed the insatiable monster the central
government has become today; and the 17th amendment, by which the people of the
states sold out state rights in return for pure democracy, thus damaging
Federalism every bit as much as did the 14th and 15th amendments.
In the fall elections of 1866, the
people of the victorious North rejected our Founder’s Republic as surely as
they’d rejected Southern rights. What was left has been whittled away
at ever since. Trying to reconstitute our Founder’s Republic given what happened during the Civil War and Reconstruction is, in my mind,
delusional. It’s gone, and I don’t think we’ll see its like again. What made us exceptional was lost, as odd as it may seem to some of you, with
the Confederacy. What replaced it was the post-Civil War (and certainly post-founding) narrative on the virtues of
civil rights and democracy, and we’ve been traveling that common path of
democracies since, and we will meet their common fate, implosion under the
social excesses and economic weight of the mob or empire under a dictator. We
could hope for “imperial,” great, but not exceptional. Some folks, in fact, believe we are already there. What I haven’t
lost is my unwavering conviction that the South was right, and the loss of our
Founders’ Republic correlates directly to the unwarranted war waged against her.
I do not want the basis for that belief lost, too, particularly to future Southerners.
In his book, Pantano defines grand
theft history as the “improper and intentional omission or distortion of
historical fact to the significant detriment of one or more parties.” He begins
his argument by establishing that Southerners had something of value that was
taken away from them, that being their rightful place in American history by
the omission and misstatement of historical facts. He further argues that these
omissions and misstatements were/are intentional. Well, I maintain that the South had plenty of value taken from her long before now, but I won’t haggle over the point. This latest slight simply heaps insult on top of injury, but I'm digressing a bit...sorta.
If the reader (jury) agrees with Pantano’s
argument, the miscreants are condemned to clean up their act, do their duty,
and report the historical record accurately.
It’s less that I disagree with Pantano
on this last point than I believe it is a requirement that cannot and would not
be enforced. Who would enforce it? The reader?
I don’t think so. The powers that be
are complicit with liberal historians’ marginalization of Southern history. In
the minds of those geared to this agenda, they are doing their duty by twisting the history. Revisionism is as old
as history itself.
No, it’s time for partisan action.
We Southerners need to be writing our own history. Of course, a quick perusal of
the bibliography Pantano published with Grand
Theft shows that we already are and always have been. But that doesn’t change the fact
that the academic gatekeepers have left no room in academia for anything but
negative reflection of the South. What we Southerners need to do is quit buying
into it and start reading (and writing and teaching)
our own history books and, for the love of Saint Peter, stop apologizing
for something that was normal, accepted, and for which everyone in this nation
and most of the world was complicit in, including black folk, and had been millennia before the white man ever set foot on this continent. You take away the bad things we all have done and we wouldn’t have survived as a people on this continent, much less built a nation, not to mention we, as a species, would still be living in caves—and still, no doubt, being bad to one another. Why the devil should the South carry the weight of guilt for all history—oh yeah, that’s right, I get it! Our refusal to reject the full promise of our Founder’s Republic (federalism/decentralization) renders us unrepentant on the issue of slavery—because that was the one and only issue, right? Bullshit. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Classic. Except we’re not suppose to note the baby. It’s the dirty bathwater the left has us focused on. But it’s not about the bathwater. It’s about the baby, and it always has been.
The left believes that the only way to achieve true freedom, as they perceive it to be, is by erasing everything the Republic once stood for and pretending it never was. On top of the ruins it will build its brave new Utopian world where civil rights, equality, and freedom for all is defined and enforced by a “benign” central government (the states relegated to satellites, equally benign, of course).
Ain’t it funny how that Utopian monster, no matter how often it defeats itself with its own stupidity, never ceases to raise its ugly head? Granted its appearance is periodic. I attribute that phenomenon to excess prosperity and esoteric minds, freed from the drudgery of honest labor (thanks to excess prosperity), focused on getting even more of other people’s money to fund/control the Utopian agenda. Ha! If they read more history books, they’d know it never works—oh, darn it, I forgot! That won’t work if they read the revised versions.
The left believes that the only way to achieve true freedom, as they perceive it to be, is by erasing everything the Republic once stood for and pretending it never was. On top of the ruins it will build its brave new Utopian world where civil rights, equality, and freedom for all is defined and enforced by a “benign” central government (the states relegated to satellites, equally benign, of course).
Ain’t it funny how that Utopian monster, no matter how often it defeats itself with its own stupidity, never ceases to raise its ugly head? Granted its appearance is periodic. I attribute that phenomenon to excess prosperity and esoteric minds, freed from the drudgery of honest labor (thanks to excess prosperity), focused on getting even more of other people’s money to fund/control the Utopian agenda. Ha! If they read more history books, they’d know it never works—oh, darn it, I forgot! That won’t work if they read the revised versions.
More—on the virtues of the South, that is—next time and thanks
for reading,
Charlsie
