-----Original Message----- From: FAIR-L <FAIR-L at FAIR.ORG> To: FAIR-L at LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU <FAIR-L at LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU> Date: Friday, January 12, 2001 10:57 AM Subject: [FAIR-L] MEDIA ADVISORY: Southern Partisan:"Setting the Record Straight"
> FAIR-L
> Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
> Media analysis, critiques and news reports
>
>
>
>
>
>MEDIA ADVISORY:
>Southern Partisan: "Setting the Record Straight"
>Attorney general nominee praised white supremacist magazine
>
>January 12, 2001
>
>"Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of
>doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Gen.] Robert E. Lee,
[Gen.]
>Stonewall Jackson and [Confederate President] Jefferson Davis.
>Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand
up
>and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were
>giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to
>some perverted agenda."
>
>--John Ashcroft, Southern Partisan magazine interview (Second Quarter/1998)
>
>
>When Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft praised the neo-Confederate
>magazine Southern Partisan, he was endorsing a publication that defends
>slavery, white separatism, apartheid and David Duke; a publication that
>celebrates the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, while delivering a "mixed
>review" of Lincoln's assassin (Southern Partisan, Second Quarter/1990).
>
>Though Southern Partisan is the leading magazine of the neo-Confederate
>movement, it really is much more than a "gumbo of racist apologias," as the
>New Republic put it last year (1/31/00). Southern Partisan's bigotry
>targets virtually anyone who isn't a straight white male neo-Confederate.
>Southern Partisan practices equal-opportunity bigotry. Here's a sample of
>opinion from the magazine John Ashcroft says "set[s] the record straight":
>
>
>On Slavery
>
>"Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery,
>despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that
>slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian
>before modern times ever thought it was."
>--Samuel Francis, Southern Partisan, Third Quarter/1995
>
>"Slave owners . . . did not have a practice of breaking up slave families.
>If anything, they encouraged strong slave families to further the slaves'
>peace and happiness."
>--First Quarter/1996
>
>
>On Lincoln
>
>Abraham Lincoln is a "consummate conniver, manipulator and a liar."
>--Southern Partisan cited in Legal Times, 2/26/1996
>
>The Spring 1984 issue refers to "the sinister Emancipation Proclamation of
>President Lincoln--an invitation to the slaves to rise against their
>masters."
>
>On John Wilkes Booth: "His behavior was not only sane, but sensible. His
>background, loyalties, beliefs, and experiences had led him to that end."
>--Mark Brewer, Second Quarter/1990
>
>For years Southern Partisan has celebrated the murder of Abraham Lincoln by
>selling T-shirts with Lincoln's image over the words "sic semper tyrannis"
>("thus always to tyrants")-- John Wilkes Booth's cry just after shooting
>Lincoln. Timothy McVeigh was wearing this T-shirt when he was arrested for
>the Oklahoma City bombing.
>--New York Times, 6/3/1997
>
>
>On the Klan
>
>The Ku Klux Klan's first Grand Wizard, Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford
>Forrest, cited as evidence that "the Confederacy was full of super heroes."
>--Fourth Quarter/1996
>
>Praised former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke as "a candidate concerned about
>'affirmative' discrimination, welfare profligacy, the taxation holocaust
...
>a Populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal."
>--Fourth Quarter/1990
>
>
>On South African History
>
>"God led [Afrikaners] into the Transvaal, it was with God that they made
>their prayerful covenant when they were besieged by bloodthirsty savages on
>all sides."
>--Fall/1986-Winter/1987
>
>
>On Feminism
>
>Feminism is a "revolt against god."
>--First Quarter/2000
>
>"Feminists, ethnic minorities, sodomites and other 'victims' of majority
>culture are demanding special recognition and privileged status."
>--Second Quarter/1992
>
>
>On Homosexuality
>
>The University of Georgia "promotes perversion" by sponsoring programs for
>Gay men and Lesbians. Same-sex marriage is a "vile act of blasphemy."
>--First Quarter/1997
>
>"The acts of sodomy are probably the most repulsive desecrations in the
>sexual order.... The terrible swift sword of the dread AIDS disease is
>surely what in other ages would be acknowledged a sign of God's wrath. It
is
>only the least subtle notice of divine displeasure with the swinishness of
>our age."
>--Reid Buckley, Winter/1986
>
>
>On Everyone but "Us"
>
>"Newly arrived in New York City, I puzzled, 'Where are the Americans?' for
I
>met only Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans."
>--Patrick Brophy, Second Quarter/1991
>
> "What Southerner feels at home in Miami these days, a city 56 percent
>Spanish-speaking that includes not only Cubans but numbers of
>cocaine-pushing trigger-happy Colombians?"
>--Allan Charles, Summer/1982
>
>"Melting Pot: An instrument by which distinct forms of distinct material
are
>melted into a common sludge."
>--"The Partisan Dictionary," Spring/Summer 1981
>
>"The tides of immigration turned negative: were characterized by the losers
>of political history...the Italians and the Irish... the dull-spirited and
>pagan, such as the Scandinavians... and by peoples to whom the tenets of
our
>republic were altogether alien, such as the hieratic Jews....
>
>"Negroes, Asians and Orientals (is Japan the exception?); Hispanics, Latins
>and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and
>probably never will...
>
>"As the genetic racial pool in the United States from which the democratic
>government originally derived is dissipated in successive tides of
>immigration, our country is being overwhelmed."
>--Reid Buckley, Summer/1984
>
>A Summer 1983 article denounced the "deliberate lies" of the U.S.
>Declaration of Independence, including "We hold these truths to be
>self-evident, that all men are created equal."
>
>Until the late 1990s, Boyd Cathey was listed alongside Pat Buchanan as a
>senior advisor to Southern Partisan. As late as 1992, Cathey was an
>editorial advisor to The Journal of Historical Review, the leading journal
>of Holocaust denial.
>--Legal Times, 2/26/1996
>
>
>On Secession
>
>"The best hope, perhaps the only hope, for the South lies in an independent
>Southern nation, where we can at last be free to pursue the life we
desire."
>
>--Third Quarter/1997
>
>---
>
>The public rely on media to expose cabinet nominees to tough scrutiny, but
>so far the mainstream media hasn't seriously taken up the question of
>whether Americans will be well-served by an attorney general who sees
>Southern Partisan's bigotry and revisionist history as patriotic "straight"
>talk.
>
> ----------
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