Merchants of Hate: Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center

by Dr. Boyd Cathey

In the late 1990s what is perhaps the most powerful and professional "anti-hate" civil rights pressure group in the United States — the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — began targeting and attacking the Sons of Confederate Veterans, its leaders, and initiatives. In "exposes" published in the SPLC's quarterly journal Intelligence Report, in training courses offered to hundreds of law enforcement agents across the nation, and in its self-erected position as a "source" for "background" on "hate groups" to national media outlets such as CNN, ABC, and CBS News, this powerful group began lumping the SCV together not only with other respectable heritage organizations (such as the League of the South), but with "the Klan" and skinheads. The SCV was, said the SPLC, increasingly dominated by "neo-Confederates." The SCV"s campaign, for instance, to retain the CSA Battle Flag atop the South Carolina capital building, the SPLC termed "sometimes ugly" and various SCV leaders were called "racists" or "white supremacists."

Why has the Southern Poverty Law Center unleashed these attacks? Just what is this powerful "civil rights" group, and who is its controversial leader Morris Seligman Dees?

*******************

Death of a Nation? The almost forgotten body and soul of the Sons of Confederate Veterans

by Frank Conner

The perennial cry of the true Southerner is: "I just want to be left alone!" But that is the one thing which will not happen. Instead, while we traditional Southerners try to tend to our own affairs, our enemies are publishing angry newspaper-articles or delivering angry speeches via the TV-news programs, accusing us of continuing to fight the "Civil War;" and then—without even pausing for breath, they prroceed to refight the "Civil War," vilifying us for the sin of being true Southerners.

Who are these dedicated enemies of ours; and why are they systematically turning us into the nation's scapegoat and destroying us as a people?

They are the ideological liberals who took control of the US in the 1960s, and who run it now; and they are attacking us nonstop because we are the last obstacle standing between them and their final goal. What is it that makes them so anxious to destroy us? It is our Confederate heritage, which they are determined to obliterate. What—exactly—is our Confederate herheritage?

*******************

2004: The South Strikes Back

By James Ronald Kennedy

"How long, oh God, must your people suffer?" Pleaded the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah as he viewed the sufferings of his people under the cruel yoke of heathen oppression. The time has come for Southerners to ask the Jeremiah question. The Trent Lott debacle is symptomatic of a greater underlying pathology. In America today Southerners are second class citizens! Our political values of limited Federalism and States Rights have become the political equivalent of the kiss of death! In modern America, the economy is controlled in New York by the Fed for the benefit of the privileged few. Hollywood establishes immoral social values as the norm for America, and "rights" for we the people are dispensed according to the wishes of power brokers and liberal special interest groups in Washington, D.C. "How long oh God must your people suffer?"

Subscribe to Southern Mercury