A Posthumous Revenge

By Dominique Venner
http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/a-posthumous-revenge/

Translator’s Note:
The following excerpt is taken from the concluding chapter of Venner’s Gettysburg, one
of two books he’s written on the War of Southern Secession. Like Maurice Bardèche’s
Sparte et les sudistes [Sparta and the Confederates], it reflects the other side of that
European anti-liberalism which crusades against everything contemporary America has
come to represent. Indeed, Venner’s defiant image of the Confederate legacy testifies not
just to what we whites have lost, it validates the tradition we hope to regenerate. —
Michael O’Meara
Ruined by war and Reconstruction, the [insurgent] South would survive the somber era [of its
defeat] through her lost sons, the great western outlaws, Jesse James, Cole Younger, John
Wesley Hardin, and Bill Doolin. Denounced in the North as vicious bandits, the former
Confederate guerrillas, forced to continue the war on their own terms, would be extolled in song
and story from Texas to Kentucky as modern-day Robin Hoods.
The Old South would also live on in myth, in the image of an idealized past projected onto the
future. Implicit in this image was a condemnation of a society dominated by economic
imperatives and the pursuit of individual gain, a condemnation that seems strangely germane to
our own age.
Through art’s royal way, the Confederacy achieved a surprising, posthumous revenge.
The first expression of this was perhaps D. W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation (1914), one of the
monuments of the silent cinema.
Aspects of the South’s chivalrous ideal were also perpetuated in the western, with its celebration
of the free life and the great, open spaces, its sense of honor, its contempt for Puritan hypocrisy,
and its respect for feminine virtues.
An entire generation of novelists would add further gild to Dixie’s already gilded legend.
Thomas Nelson Page, like Joel Chandler Harris. The South would indeed become one of the
privileged places of American literature. Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry James,
Robert Penn Warren would all find their inspiration there.
But more than any other, it was the admirable novel of Margaret Mitchell (in no way disserved
by the film of Victor Fleming) that would resurrect the white plantations with their trees of
honeysuckle and magnolia, their young girls in crinoline dresses, the gallant planters and
gentlemen seized by the torment of their inexorable fate.
Gone With the Wind wiped away the insufferable memory of the Yankee victory at Gettysburg,
along with that of its own defeat.
For Southern children — and for certain others, no doubt — Pickett’s charge on July 3, 1863,
[the failed infantry assault on Cemetery Ridge, which sealed the Confederacy's defeat] is always
something to be tried again. As Faulkner says, perhaps one day it will succeed.
Source: Dominique Venner, Gettysburg (Paris: Eds. du Rocher, 1995).