FAIR Media Advisory: Southern Partisan
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.
Feel free to respond
to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can't
reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate
documented example of media bias or censorship. And please send copies
of your email correspondence with media outlets, including any responses,
to us at: fair@fair.org.
FAIR ON THE AIR: FAIR's
founder Jeff Cohen is a regular panelist on the Fox News Channel's "Fox
News Watch," which airs which airs Saturdays at 7 pm and Sundays at 11
am (Eastern Standard Time). Check your local listings.
FAIR produces CounterSpin,
a weekly radio show heard on over 120 stations in the U.S. and Canada.
To find the CounterSpin station nearest you, visit
http://www.fair.org/counterspin/stations.html.
Please support FAIR by
subscribing to our bimonthly magazine, Extra! For more information, go
to:
http://www.fair.org/extra/subscribe.html.
Or call 1-800-847-3993.
FAIR's INTERNSHIP PROGRAM:
FAIR accepts internship applications for its New York office on a rolling
basis. For more information, please e-mail Peter Hart (phart@fair.org)
You can subscribe to FAIR-L
at our web site: http://www.fair.org
, or by sending a "subscribe FAIR-L enter your full name" command to LISTSERV@AMERICAN.EDU.
Our subscriber list is kept confidential.
You may leave the list
at any time-- just send a message with "SIGNOFF FAIR-L" in the body to:
LISTSERV@AMERICAN.EDU.
FAIR
(212) 633-6700
http://www.fair.org
E-mail: fair@fair.org