THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

In March 1958, just short of my seventeenth birthday, I became a member of the Euphradian Society of the University of South Carolina. It was a debate society, called a "literary society," which had been in existence since 1806. A new member had to make an inaugural speech, and mine had a title that will surprise no one here. It was "The Dangers of Modern Liberalism."

You can find the record of this speech, like all the other Euphradian notes going all the way back to about 1819, at the Caroliniana Library on the horseshoe at USC.

Back then, I had a lot of loyalties. I connected leftism with socialism, so I was loyal to the interests of big business. In 1962, when President Kennedy forced Big Steel to keep the price of steel from rising, United States Steel had no allies like us young people in the Young Americans for Freedom.

Well, to our cost, we learned better. Every leftist cause had a long list of Big Business sponsors. We Southerners bought Fords loyally, and the Ford Motor Company paid the Ford Foundation to back the left and underwrote the NAACP. Automotive workers' unions poured money into the far left of the Democratic Party, and every dime came from the dumb-and-loyal Ford buyers concentrated in the South.

The churches we supported sold us out every time it looked like it might pay off. The Democratic Party kicked us in the teeth. Then the Republican Party kicked conservatives in the teeth, regular as Big Ben, every four years at the convention. Boy, were we loyal. Boy, were we STUPID!!!

The Methodist Church sold us out. Now Bob Jones sells us out on the flag issue. The South Carolina Democratic Party sold us out to the liberals then, now statewide Republican officials line up on the NAACP side at press conferences to disown us.

Is anybody beginning to notice a pattern?

For the umpteenth time, let me make the major lesson of all this in this column. Politics is a rough business. Politics is a harsh business. Let me tell you how people on Capitol Hill look at loyalty.

There are exactly one thousand four hundred and sixty-one (1461) days between presidential elections. Conservatives can cry and moan and shout "Betrayal!" for 1460 of those days. They can talk about bolting for Buchanan.

Nobody cares, and for a very good reason.

On election day, conservatives always come crawling back.

And that, dear reader, is absolutely all that matters.

When we are all out there marching for the flag on January 8, no one is going to care, and for a very good reason.

The statewide Republican leaders, the Bob Jones alumnae fund, the Clemson Board of Directors, the Citadel Board of Directors, all of them are going to assume that it ends there, and the doglike loyalty will resume.

Leftists never forgive treason to their principles until someone DOES SOMETHING to make up for it. Conservatives demand nothing. Like a puppy dog, rightists just forget about it the next day.

1) Liberals have no doglike loyalty. The left is loyal only to its principles.

2) Liberals do not forget any betrayal.

3) Liberals tend to get their way.

Does anybody notice a pattern here?

Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer, said many things I did not agree with. But he hit upon one great, eternal truth. When every principle we cherish is dead, his words should be etched on the gravestone

"THE PENALTY FOR STUPIDITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN DEATH."

So, out here in the real world, there are two forces.

There are leftists, who dedicate their support and their MEMORY only to the goals they believe society should pursue. The other force is conservatism, which worships uniforms, Republicans, church leaders, trendy opinion, and whatever is in today's newspapers.

Guess whose principles win?

Guess why.

If anything we treasure is to survive, we are going to have to dedicate ourselves to a third way.

Please notice I said DEDICATE ourselves. This does not mean a short-term verbal commitment while we preserve our secular worships of uniforms and church officials and Republicans.

It means total secession.

When we march on January 8, it can be another meaningless expression of right-wing frustration. Or it can be one of the most meaningful events in American political history.

On the flag, all the "leaders" we have followed have come out against us. We are taking them all on, left and right. A leftist boycott has frustrated every state's attempt to hold out against fashionable opinion. They crushed Colorado's s attempt to deny gays special privileges. Their boycott overcame the Arizona governor's attempt to avoid giving state employees millions of dollars each year in the form of a Martin Luther King holiday. Every state has caved in to interstate economic pressure from the

left, aided by "leaders" on the right.

At this point, if we are able to resist the combined pressure of leftists and the rightist "leaders" who always become their allies, we will have done something absolutely unique. They can't afford to lose this one.

But we have some new allies. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), always tried to stay out of politics. But the SCV's new leadership realizes that the left will not allow anything Confederate to survive. They are joining us in this fight.

I understand that even the UDC will have a speaker at the pro-flag rally.

This is major breakthrough. For the first time, a local fight against the forces of Political Correctness has attracted groups that were out of politics before this fight began. This new configuration of forces is the only one that should have our loyalty as we fight ALL the powers that be.

When we all go home after the march, the real question is going to arise: where do we stand? Are we part of a new third way, a new way which is loyal only to our principles? Or will we go crawling back to the second group, the old loser/loyal brand of conservatism?

This choice will determine whether the pro-flag march in Columbia on January 8 will be utterly meaningless or a fundamental event in American political history.

"Wordism" has a giant job to do.

When you come up with a concept, it will be warped or it will be ignored.

Warped is better.

Brian pointed out that Wordism is being confused with objectivity. Since he noticed the subtle changes in the use of the word, I decided to discuss it a bit.

Unlike anyone else who gets a concept used by others, I don't want to dictate what Wordism is. I would have to write a book on the subject to do that, and I will write no more books. So, as I say, I am commenting on it.

My invention of the term Wordism was to provide a direct counterpart to "tribalism," "racism," and a hundred other terms used against any kind of loyalty to one's own kind.

They talk about Hitler and racism and war to say that loyalties to one's own POPULATION have a lot of bad things in their histories.

No one can think of any bad things that anti-racism or anti-nationalism ever produced because they assume what they call "universalism" had no history. It does, and that history makes Hitler look like a Boy Scout.

Mao Tse-tung would have laughed out loud at Hitler's paltry death rate. Pol Pot would be insulted if his personal destruction a third of his country's entire population would not put in class by itself. By European standards, though, Stain did very well and he did plenty of killings in peacetime.

To find such regular, day-to-day torture, Cultural Revolution and Oriental Despotism in Europe you have to go back the Religious Wars.

The key thing about universalism is that it is a plural. There are thousands of them. Mao and Stalin's Communism and both sides in the religious wars were universalisms. There would be peace when the True Bible became accepted by everybody. There would be peace when he books of Karl Marx, and the CORRECT commentaries on Marx, were accepted by all.

No price is every too high for a universalism to win World Peace forever. And each group of Believers BELIEVES that. Everybody must believe the Universal Truth, my set of words, for their own good.

And for your own good, there can be no mercy.

The problem is, they have made their labels like racism and nationalism, common currency, while as usual we have not given it enough thought to develop our own.

Now I see that Wordism is used to fit into whatever the person doing the writing is down on.

Wordism can be effective if it is only used in the sense I give it here. Every time one says that overspending is Wordism, it hurts the cause that a BUGSter would make that mistake.

They give all the evils of slavery and Nazism the name "racist." They are losing the word because blacks use it to denounce any spending cut. But it remains useful to them because they didn't dribble it to mean just anything they didn't like in the past.

Use Wordist for what it is, and for nothing else, especially your pet peeves.

Wordism is a horror. It is reality of what Wordists accuse racism.

And more.

You can't find many books on the real slaughters for religion. You can't hear the screams of people dying by fire or by weeks of torture in order to clean their minds out before they are executed, a process Orwell described in 1984. But which was once routine.

Over a billion people were penned in by Communism and the media have no interest in the tens of millions they killed. A hundred million is a reasonable guesstimate. But almost the entire billion people wasted generations under that system, coming out desperately poor after the rest of the world had developed.

I think that is quite enough reality for one word to encompass.

Don't cheapen it. Use it for the desperately needed truth it is.

I am tired to death of dealing with "conservatives" who say their first loyalty is to Christ, by which they mean their version of Christianity. I am sick to death of soldiers who will kill Americans to enforce anything the court decides is the Constitution this week.

That is what media conservatives and preachers say the American flag stands for.

You know as well as I do that not one of the Founding Fathers would disagree with me. They had just gotten rid of blind loyalty of that same kind to their King and Country in Britain. The one thing they agreed to was that a blind loyalty to a flag was treason.

It still is.

Are you loyal to everything Jerry Falwell or Professor Nitwit or Judge Goldberg says your flag stands for or are you loyal to your own race, your own interests?

Loyalty to the United States is NOT loyalty to abstract principles like a melting pot or diversity. As I pointed out many years ago:

"By definition, a melting pot is nothing specific. Anybody who is deeply loyal to nothing specific is in desperate need of psychiatric help."

"Loyalty to "We the people of the United States of America and OUR posterity" is the exact opposite of loyalty to these manufactured "abstract principles."

Faithfulness to "We the People" is loyalty to your OWN interests, your OWN preferences, your OWN beliefs.

And your OWN, your WHITE prejudices.

I am proud that our Founding Fathers dedicated a country to its people, and nothing else.

No Divine Right. No King in robes. No all-powerful judges in robes who can tell every state and every other branch of the Federal government what to do.

America was founded to be a nation which is made up of its people. No claims to perfection. No "rule by law, not by mere men."

No excuses.

That's America.

Anything else is treason.

The fact that McCain lost the nomination is not the end of his usefulness to the media and other liberals.

McCain defied almost the entire Republican Party in his desperation to enforce the multiethnic policy on Kosovo with American blood.

The media did not even mention that issue in their coverage of the campaign. Bush naturally did not mention it either.

Bush could have gained considerably in the campaign by pressing this issue to a Republican primary electorate which is not enamored of fighting liberal wars. But the liberal media made it clear that this would not be respectable. So Bush and his crew went along. It is distinctly possible that the Kosovo situation is going to blow up between now and November. If Bush issued warnings on this, such a blowup will put Gore in a bad position. No respectable conservative is going to press an issue that could be that embarrassing for a liberal.

So clearly Bush has to somehow adopt the liberal foreign policy position.

But there is a limit to how openly even a moderate Republican like Bush can sell out. He would do anything to court liberal favor, but openly advocating their foreign policy right now would be too much. But it can be done under a Bush Administration. When it comes to moderate Republicans, liberals find nothing impossible if they really want it.

And they really want a Clinton-McCain foreign policy.

So it turns out that the media are just worried to death about the split between Bush and McCain. They look forward to a "deal" between them. All for the good of the Republican Party, of course. I must have heard liberals mention McCain for Secretary of State at least five times recently. If not Secretary of State, one liberal opined, then McCain might accept Secretary of Defense.

Now I wonder why they happened to pick those two positions? Secretary of State and Defense are the positions which determine where American force will be used. After such a deal, does anybody think McCain would quietly accept the present Republican policy on ethnic mixing and the like?

As the British would say, "Not bloody likely." With all the media and his own Defense or State Secretary demanding American blood for liberal policies, how long would a weak-kneed middle of the road Republican hold out?

Liberals know that all they need to do is get some Americans killed for liberal foreign policy. As soon as that happens, liberal foreign goals will become a holy cause to American conservatives. This is what happened in Vietnam. Conservatives started by demanding that America either fight to win or get out, but liberals did not want to fight Communists the way they would a right-wing enemy, and they did not want to be the ones to lose America's first war. So they chose the gradual escalation of the war in Vietnam.

As soon as Americans began dying over there, conservatives declared American blood expendable. Here was a chance for a vast increase in military expenditures, the one thing for which conservatives salivate. You may expect the same reaction when Bush adopts a McCain war policy.