Kentucky
National Review has a new article on poor White Southerners in Greater Appalachia:
“Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. …
There’s a great deal of drug use, welfare fraud, and the like, but the overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two-thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. …”
Note: A year ago, I had planned to research the cultural origins of the Upper South, but I never got around to following through on that project, much less writing my book about the destruction of the plantation system in the Lower South. That’s something that I will start working on again this year.
sounds alot like the downtown eastside vancouver b.c. canada
Hunter, I do hope you get cracking on that project. I’m Scot-Irish myself, so I’d be interested in what you had to say about my kindred.
However poverty often delays development and alien immigration, and keeps property values affordable so that local people can afford to live where they grew up. ‘Never move further than you can still see the smoke from the chimney of the cabin where you were born’ is ideal! Whenever ‘progress’ and ‘prosperity’ come to a poor white county, our culture is lost.
Places like Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia have all kinds of social and economic problems, but it has little to do with race.
Let no one draw Sauron’s or Saruman’s attention to our Appalachian ‘Shire’!
Without the filth from Hollywood and Madison Avenue (Jew strongholds), the rate of crime etc. in Appalachia would be less; as it would be in the rest of the nation and the world.
Folks with ambition get an education and leave, on average; which helps to offset the low birth rate of whites in the occupied territories.
Someone must at some point move against the newspapers.
The snobbish BS is unbearable.
“Places like Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia have all kinds of social and economic problems, but it has little to do with race.”
Makes for some great sex, violence, & drug related TV shows though like Justified and the recent Hatfield & McCoys mini-series. 🙂
The movie ‘Lawless’.
“However poverty often delays development and alien immigration, and keeps property values affordable so that local people can afford to live where they grew up. ‘Never move further than you can still see the smoke from the chimney of the cabin where you were born’ is ideal! Whenever ‘progress’ and ‘prosperity’ come to a poor white county, our culture is lost.”
Really? I prefer fast cars, good whiskey, and modern medical science and so does everybody else you fraudulent neo-Luddite hippy.
“Let no one draw Sauron’s or Saruman’s attention to our Appalachian ‘Shire’!”
I see you have never been to a coal mine. Get a clue, Saruman arrived in Appalachia 150 years ago.
‘I see you have never been to a coal mine’
I have ancestors within two generations on both sides that did coal and slate mining. I know how hard it is, how it shortened their lives, and I’ve heard all about the ‘Sarumanic’ character of the mine owners and bosses, etc. We do come from peasant stock you know. When I used the term ‘Shire’, Rudel, I meant that Appalachia is still racially or ethnically pristine (well, almost, or relatively so in comparison to almost any other region) — not that it is a paradise in all the other senses.
Re: ‘I prefer fast cars, good whiskey, and modern medical science and so does everybody else’:
Driving and flying everywhere, drinking and drugging, and ‘health care’ spending — three follies that absolutely impoverish our people!
Re: ‘neo-Luddite hippy’:
We’re OLD-FASHIONED ‘Luddites’, Rudel. I like what an Amishman I know says: ‘Maybe the reason why all these bad things are happening (to ‘English’ whites) is God is punishing us because we don’t have horses’. Unfortunately I’m still driving a pickup.
‘God is punishing us because we don’t have horses’: He very politely puts it in the third rather than second person.
Finally we’re getting somewhere. You want to write about the destruction of the plantation system in the Lower South…was this a negative?!
The reason we Yankees don’t like the N word is because we don’t believe in slavery, of anyone, black or white, male or female, etc. The southerners desire segregation while the northerners – all along that lateral line – are true separatists who envision a White nation. This is a difference I see more and more as time goes by. The sad part is that there are many decent southerners who part ways with the sick romance some of their confederates have with the planter aristocracy.
I pray for them and us.
Re: NYYankees
1.) Of course.
Among other things, the economy was destroyed, blacks were set loose on the cities, and in some places their Yankee allies put them in charge of the government. It was a devastating blow from which the former plantation belts never recovered.
2.) That’s nonsense.
It was Northerners who repealed their own laws which had excluded free blacks, made blacks into US citizens, gave them civil rights and voting rights, banned segregation, repealed their anti-miscegenation laws, and passed laws which required integration in their own states. That’s on top of impeaching President Andrew Johnson for opposing the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, not to mention using the US Army to suppress the Klan.
3.) The planter aristocracy knew where the Union was headed by the 1850s. They desperately tried to get out, but by then it was too late. Everything that was forecasted by them at the time has since come true.
Nigger, the word, has something to do with slavery? I thought it was an apt word for a low sort of Black.
First rather than second person. Distracted and posted as usual without reviewing first. Sorry.
NYYankees wrote: ‘southerners desire segregation while the northerners – all along that lateral line – are true separatists who envision a White nation’.
But there is more white inter-ETHNIC mixing north of the Line, which is also NOT true ‘separatism’. If the southerners had never fallen for the Talmudic lie of African slavery, their ENTIRE region would be as racially AND ETHNICALLY homogeneous today as their Appalachian sub-region — and if northerners had never allowed a similar depravity to take hold, leading them to mix with millions of imported non-(anti-)Protestant, marginally white wage slaves from the eastern and southernmost fringes of Europe, and Talmudists from eastern Europe, then the north today WOULD be ‘separatist’ as you say, NYYankees.
This article is very depressing . Makes one understand why millions of these poor White folks migrated to Northern industrial cities like Detroit. Okies that went to California. Taking any kind of job in Vegas.
Sheldon Edelson, Neo slave owner will have lots of White slaves to choose from to go along with all the brown ones.
Don’t think these hillbillies are going to vote Libertarian.
Sigh.
Mosin’s remarks on prosperity and progress causing the loss of culture in poor, white communities are ridiculous. It’s the lack of hope that is causing the destruction of the culture in those communities. The folks living there assume life is never going to get any better than what it is now, and as a result, destructive patterns of behavior and belief are reinforced in these communities.
It’s funny that more recent immigrant populations (usually the ones writing for national review)— talk about the “appalachian peasants.”
Back in reality, the Appalachians (by contrast) are the ones alone who experienced the conditions of living known to aristocrats, and therefore evolved attitudes, values, ideas and beliefs more in line with aristocrats, if you think about it, (most people don’t think very much but just repeat tv slogans, as we know).
The Appalachians had LAND, and LAND, without taxation (and even poor farmers sometimes had tenants), and also FULL AMORIAL rights, and could bear arms, which in europe was only often a peerage right. Even to this day, THEY are the ones saying this is (and must be) the BASIS of freedom from governmental oppressions.
It is the basis of the “libertarianism” that many northerners really hate—- but who is the real peasant then? Certainly not the people who want three hots and cot from the mercenary military or some “programs,” instead of PEERAGE RIGHTS (of land without tax and amorial rights, that they are now voting back to the aristocracy alone under their hybrid communist-fascist system).
The Appalachians are in the horrid position of having the INTERNAL life of aristocrats (land, armorial rights, knowledges of foodstuffs, locally grown organic foods, and many other things)—- and yet, POLICY has often wiped out their local economies.
They are more like “poor aristocrats,” where the monied people are “yankees” (in the full meaning of the word—-crass, bellicose, comparative in mindset, corporatist, users, gamblers (stock markets), unable to perceive outside mercantile usury, etc.
Today’s yankees were peasants in Europe, quite often, genuine “serfs,” and far more recently than the Appalachian Americans (who DO NOT WANT to become like the national review peasants).
This is a whole subtext that many at National Review would not even understand, except for the stray “caught between” the various cultures, (by working there, going to school in the northeast, whatever).
The north easterners seem like the peasants, not the Appalachians, and that will remain true, no matter how little money the Appalachians have. If they have held on to the dream of land without tax and armorial rights, aren’t they the real aristocrats, not the peasants?
whoops at “….Certainly not the people who want three hots and cot from the mercenary military or some “programs…” Meant wouldn’t those people be the real peasants, not the Appalachians who cling to guns (armorial rights previously only given to aristocrats), freedom of association and religion (thinking what they damn well please, again the purview of aristocrats), and land (owning your spot where you do what you damn well please and without taxation, so no government secretly, really owns your land—such as the american peasant case is now).
The irony of America—– the “richer” they get in cheesy Wallmart goods, the more they really are peasants.
In other words, the recent immigrants to “america,” were so POOR that they sold their souls for a few rags of cheap clothing, basically. This LOOKS “rich” to them (that’s why they go on and on about “it’s the richest country in the world”—– it is TO THEM).
It’s a GREAT IMPOVERISHMENT to believe “wealth” is only about material goods.
That exposes how incredibly hungry those people are…. right? Like Sean Hannity, or the Fox lineup—– it’s all material, the actual CONDITIONS OF LIVING, on a daily basis (what that is like, how pleasurable it is) is not really on the radar of those people, (listen to them talk)
They do not care (yet) about freedom of association, real community, armorial rights, land without tax, and much more—– they just want Wallmart for everyone. That is their level
New Yorker,
As someone who has been in areas where mass new yorkers descend, I just don’t see that at all. Locals call you the “mexicans before the mexicans,” because they so brag about being diverse and all that. You may not be like that, but the majority are. Also, in the south, many come due to the vast number of military bases (aka “occupation”). Isn’t that what military occupations are—- making military encampments among the people?
Just to add:
Walked by a big-city protest one time, of south americans (don’t know what kind specifically) yelling for “rights.”
One yelled at the Euro passersby “it’s our turn now! It’s our turn!”
This was really instructive. In his perception, society was a matter of beggars getting a “turn” from elite masters (who were up in the buildings above and to whom the appeals were being made.)
All “society” means is “getting a turn” from your masters.
Oh— and ‘the executioner’s face is always well hidden…” The masters to whom one appeals are hidden (thus the endless arguments about who is “really running things”—is it evil jesuits, evil jews, the pope, the queen, the illuminati, the masons, the corporations, the “big business elite,” etc, etc, etc.)
That sounds like the confusion of peasants in a hierarchical system, not people with any real voice or direction.
Appalachians, at least, still understand the reality of Land-based power and arms.
Many in “wn” argue for the “technocratic elite,” like many low-rank military, the Fox type republican, and others. “We have to be nice to big business b/c big business runs things.”
But without land and arms, you might well be mining coal “up a holler” under martial law, like east KY, south WV in the 30s.
And finally, New Yorker—- that is the basis of the “romance” with the “planter aristocracy.” They knew the why of having land and guns.
And sorry I went on—– Appalachia is a topic about which I am passionate.
Williamson, the cat who wrote the story, is in my humble opinion a shithead.
Large parts of Appalachia were destroyed during the Civil War. For example, in West Virginia you had a combination of Reconstruction and Sherman marching through Georgia starting in 1861 and continuing until 1865. That’s one reason you don’t see a lot of old ante-bellum buildings & barns in WV. They were burned down or trashed. The key east – west highway bridge was burnt in 1861. It wasn’t rebuilt until the 1920’s!
In one county in WV where my family lived prior to the Civil War, the Scotch-Irish state legislator went to Richmond and voted against Secession, and against the instructions of the people of his district! So I’m not buying all of this St. Paddy’s day bullshit. LOL. That said there are a large percentage of Scotch Irish Protestants in Appalachia (maybe 30%-35% of the total population), and, they are neither backward or lazy!
Excellent comments as always, Dixiegirl — including: ‘The irony of America — the “richer” they get in cheesy Walmart goods, the more they really are peasants’ and ‘It’s funny that more recent immigrant populations (usually the ones writing for national review)— talk about the “appalachian peasants.” Back in reality, the Appalachians (by contrast) are the ones alone who experienced the conditions of living known to aristocrats, and therefore evolved attitudes, values, ideas and beliefs more in line with aristocrats (…) The Appalachians had LAND, and LAND, without taxation (and even poor farmers sometimes had tenants), and also FULL AMORIAL rights, and could bear arms, which in europe was only often a peerage right. Even to this day, THEY are the ones saying this is (and must be) the BASIS of freedom from governmental oppressions (…) The Appalachians are in the horrid position of having the INTERNAL life of aristocrats (land, armorial rights, knowledges of foodstuffs, locally grown organic foods, and many other things) — and yet, POLICY has often wiped out their local economies’ and ‘no matter how little money the Appalachians have, if they have held on to the dream of land without tax and armorial rights, aren’t they the real aristocrats, not the peasants?’
But truly FREE white men, who are not really peasants, are not aristocrats or overlords either, and they do not ‘adore and love’ an aristocratic, despotic, system. I believe you can understand how I mean that.
‘Mosin’s remarks on prosperity and progress causing the loss of culture in poor, white communities are ridiculous’
THAT is a ridiculous caricature of what I wrote. I wrote: ‘poverty often delays development and alien immigration, and keeps property values affordable so that local people can afford to live where they grew up. To never move further than you can still see the smoke from the chimney of the cabin where you were born, as the saying goes, is ideal! Whenever ‘progress’ and ‘prosperity’ come to a poor white county, our culture is lost’.
SO-CALLED ‘progress’ and ‘prosperity’ (note the quotation marks) are directly associated with the loss of our land, and our identity, and culture — and the ROOT cause of all this evil, according to my understanding, as you well realise, Dalton, is NOT progress and prosperity as such. But when money finally begins to flow it is almost always the signal that we are losing our white communities. But I NEVER said poverty is good in itself. White Appalachia extends northward even to where we live, and I know what those SOUTHERN Appalachian communities must be like. There are some VERY poor little coal ‘patches’ not very far from here, some in the process of becoming ghost towns, but others fully populated with unemployed and disabled whites on welfare and social security and Medicaid. We have helped some of these Appalachian white men (including ex-Roman Catholics) ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’, who were driven down by the System into the very worst poverty, penniless, homeless, etc. — who remained upright, kind-hearted and honest, through it all, still much too honest to accept dependency on the System or more than the smallest private gifts.
“The Appalachians had LAND, and LAND, without taxation (and even poor farmers sometimes had tenants), and also FULL AMORIAL rights, and could bear arms, which in europe was only often a peerage right.”
No, after the Revolutionary War all land holders owned their land in fee simple and were fully responsible to the state for property taxes, eminent domain, etc. Even Nevada and Texas which passed laws granting allodial title to certain homesteaders still retained the right to seize those properties under certain conditions. Allodial title to land has not existed for individuals since almost the Dark Ages.
As for what you quaintly refer to as “Full Armorial Rights,” West Virginians have somewhat less freedom to own automatic weapons than do residents of most other states, so I would say they most certainly do not have “Full Armorial Rights.”
“the Scotch-Irish state legislator went to Richmond and voted against Secession, and against the instructions of the people of his district! So I’m not buying all of this St. Paddy’s day bullshit.”
What pray tell does a Scotch-Irish state legislator ignoring the wishes of his constituents have to do with St. Patrick’s day? Most of the Orangemen I know are Presbyterians. Your obsession with Roman Catholicism seems to have caused you to ride that particular hobby horse into the weeds in this thread which is about Appalachia where Catholics are particularly thin on the ground.
http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/catholiccounties.gif
Excuse me for asking but how do you know Orangemen? Are in the company of Ulstermen frequently?
Rudel, your map link ( http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/catholiccounties.gif ) is instructive. Supposedly ‘Puritan’ white northern areas are NOT.
This map also shows us where most of the trouble lies http://www.patheos.com/blogs/blackwhiteandgray/2012/04/map-of-us-religious-affiliation-by-county/ and the blue is spreading.
Notice the PINK counties in the fourth map here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/blackwhiteandgray/2012/06/the-religious-non-christian-diaspora/
We’re fortunately located in one of the least religiously diverse and less ‘blue’ localities in what has become a mostly blue and diverse state.
@Rudel
I know blarney, when I hear blarney. LOL. Even better, the legislator in question had moved from Philadelphia to Virginia.
I have a good friend with a very familiar Scotch-Irish last name who moved from Philadelphia to Virginia and his kin in all directions are Presbyterians. Anti-Confederacy sentiment was rampant in Appalachia especially in eastern Tennessee and western Virginia As I have well documented here before they sent dozens upon dozens of regiments to fight for the Union and eastern Tennessee has congressional districts that have never sent a Democrat to Congress.
Learn a bit of Tennessee history, they fought an intra-state civil war in 1866 over these issues. Or stick to your ridiculous ideas. You are nothing but a troll and contribute nothing to the interesting historical discussions on this site.
You hallucinate paddy’s behind every tree and bush in an area where they hardly exist. Your continued obsession with riding a Roman Catholic hobby horse makes me suspect that you have Catholic relations. You are worse than Mosin or Fr. John in introducing off-topic religious tangents, although to their credit they at least know a bit of real history..
“Excuse me for asking but how do you know Orangemen? Are in the company of Ulstermen frequently?”
As a matter of fact I do. The recent bad economic conditions in Northern Ireland have caused quite a few to start showing up on our shores. BTW, I know many Scotch-Irish American who describe themselves as such so that they won’t be confused with Catholics who often have similar last names. This is particularly true in Pennsylvania. 90% of the state is in the Appalachian chain (take a trip on the Pennsylvania Turnpike if you don’t believe me) and the center of the state was heavily settled and is still inhabited by the many descendants of colonial Germans (Pennsylvania Dutch) and Scots from both Ulster and those from Scotland who were driven off their land by the English aristos during the infamous clearings.
My response to Hunter/Brad is, who the H brought black people here in the first place? Therein lies the answer really. It was wrong ultimately. The planters are responsible, and I’m sure the jews liked not only the money they got through the slave trade but also the idea that they would be the only mercantile class in the South.
I’ll never get how the southerners on here act like the Yankees caused this fundamental problem. Planter greed brought blacks to this country for the most part. Trying to invoke them as some integral part of a new southern, or White, nation seems counterproductive given their role in creating the issue in the first place. I truly believe the southerners need to get over this compulsion. They need to start envisioning a new future, and stop worshipping some idol of a past that never was quite so ideal.
I will be ignored or dissed in some way for saying this, of course. It needs to be said however. It’s beyond tragic that we as anglo celts cannot unite and re-take our land and country. Our ancestors have fought so hard for so many centuries. For us to squander all of it is obscene. We are the strongest european ethnicity in this country, sometimes I think in Europe as well (I am more germanic than anglo). We are marked for extinction because of our ties to the land and because of our exaltation of the individual. Maybe these things are tied in a way that dooms us in the end. Why are the northwestern europeans the most rugged individualists? How do we ever learn to work together to save ourselves?
Our tribe split or fractured sometime back and it seems the chasms between us are unbridgeable. Only the sadness of our music and our fate unites us.
Re: NYYankees
This thread is about the “White Ghetto” in Appalachia which is over 90 percent White in most places. That has nothing to do with the blacks or slavery because that area was never part of the plantation belt.
Hunter Brad, you wrote at the bottom of the article:
“Note: A year ago, I had planned to research the cultural origins of the Upper South, but I never got around to following through on that project, much less writing my book about the destruction of the plantation system in the Lower South. That’s something that I will start working on again this year.”
Do you really fail to miss the significance of how Appalachia became a White ghetto and the plantation belt? Huh?
I am from that area. What was most interesting, no FASCINATING, about the article were the comments and discussion afterward. And the comments were uncensored — that is until the word “Jewish” or “Jews” was used or implied — then the comments were “moderated”. These desperate actions to protect one particular, apparently special, group against even casual comments while writing articles that slam and reveal ANOTHER groups failings are SO tiresome and SO outrageous.