DECLARATION OF SOUTHERN CULTURAL INDEPENDENCE (2000)
We, as citizens of the sovereign States of the South, proclaim before Almighty God and all the nations of the earth, that we are a separate and distinct people. We have an honourable heritage and culture worthy of being protected and preserved. Standing in the place where our President Jefferson Davis stood to take his oath of office in 1861, we declare ourselves entitled, like all peoples, to self-determination. Though political independence may not come for some time, we pledge ourselves to work for the preservation of our culture and identity in every manner possible.
To this end, we urge all Southerners to abjure the realm of the American Empire that now threatens the liberty of our families and communities, and the corrupt and sterile non-culture that pervades this land. We pledge to cooperate economically to build and sustain our own educational and cultural institutions and to form wherever possible our own communities, so that we may preserve living and uncontaminated the language, speech, manners, music, literature, traditions, customs, and faith of our people.
The present culture of the United States is violent and vulgar, coarse and rude, cynical and deviant, and alien to the Southern people and to every people with an authentic Western Christian sensibility and tradition. We, as Southerners, will, as far as possible, decline to participate in that culture. Rather, we shall seek to uphold the noble heritage of uprightness and unselfish service to our people that marked our great heroes—Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Calhoun, Davis, Lee, and Jackson.
Our cultural inheritance is not based upon the abstract slogans, armed doctrines, and sanctified greed that characterizes the present American regime. It is based on the permanent things that order and sustain life: faith, family, tradition, community, and private property; loyalty, courage, and honour. Cut off from these permanent things, the South will become only a point on the compass, and our descendants will be right to curse us for the loss of a noble heritage and way of life.
Were it not for historic, authentic regional cultures, America would have no culture at all. Even before the birth of this voluntary union of sovereign States in 1789 there was a Southern people with a proud and distinctive culture. The Southern people and their culture will remain, God willing, long after the hollow shell of the American Empire has collapsed upon itself.
God has seen fit in his Providence to give us our sublime cultural heritage, and we consider this a blessing. To our Southern forebears He gave the inspiration and wisdom to create a confederated, constitutional republic based on the principle of local self-government and sustained by a vibrant and vital cultural heritage.
Today our freedom and heritage are threatened as never before by an overweening government that has no limit except its own will and by a godless non-culture that emphasizes death over life.
We reaffirm today the cultural inheritance of our honourable forefathers and declare to the world our intention to defend and preserve it. We humbly invoke the blessing of Christ on a just cause. The preservation of historic cultures—especially those that establish liberty—has never been cheap or easy. Our message to the world is this: the struggle to protect and advance our Southern cultural heritage begins in earnest today in Montgomery, Alabama, the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” Henceforth, we shall stand steadfast in defense of our inheritance as free men and women of the South, and we welcome all who share our principles to stand with us.
As witness to our intent, we affix our signatures to this Declaration of Southern Cultural Independence on this 4th day of March 2000, in full confidence that the triune God will continue to favour our Cause.