I have frequently lauded the work of Daniel Larison in this blog. He has always been an excellent critic of America’s “warfare” state, what I like to call the military intellectual complex. His most recent post, $1 Trillion in Military Spending Is Obscene (which it damn well is), is well up to his usual standard. But yesterday I stumbled across some old posts, dating from about 2005, that presented Dan as an unreconstructed “rebel” in the sense that he, most stupidly, insisted that the American South was the injured and innocent party in that outrageous War of Northern Aggression waged by that monstrous figure, Abraham Lincoln. Writing in the American Conservative, Dan “defended” (really, destroyed) himself and his membership in an absurd organization known as the “League of the South” (please) in a most unfortunate manner, to wit:
Let me take this opportunity to say a few words about the League of the South, a group to which I am proud to belong for these past ten years. This group of ladies and gentlemen, for whom such terms still have their traditional meaning, endeavours to preserve their Southern, Christian cultural, religious and political heritage from the ravages of the same freethinking, Yankee spirit and empire that has gone on to devastate so many other societies, including that of those northern states gulled into the cause of Unionism. Though my lineage is almost entirely from the North, ours were the sort of conservative and republican people who opposed usurpation at every turn, and as much as my kinsman, William Plumer of New Hampshire, was right in arguing for secession over the illegalities of the Louisiana Purchase the Southern states were even more justified in resisting the usurpation of their rights. In the League of the South, I see the natural home of anyone who would honour and venerate the legacy of his ancestors and the early fathers of this country.
It gets worse from there on, with Dan looking down his nose at an obstreperous foreigner, Max Boot, for criticizing a disgusting book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by crackpot anarcho-racist Tom Woods, on the grounds that Boot, being not really an American or a Christian (please), was clearly incapable of understanding southern culture, or anything else—though I suspect that Max had at the time a far better understanding of Woods’ execrable tome than did the then-fatuous Mr. Larison.
I have never, in the dozen or so years I have been reading Dan, seen anything in his writings that remotely suggests that he was capable of writing such fatuous drivel, which has massive overtones of both racism and antisemitism. But I can see why anyone who read this stuff back in 2005 would be less than enthusiastic about Dan. Let’s hope he has experienced a conversion. He certainly needed one.
