The Thomas Carlyle Club for Young Reactionaries (Students Against a Democratic Society) #fundie radishmag.wordpress.com

[From the article The Truth about Lynching - Links in original]

The Carlyle Club hangs ’em high. Mighty white of us!

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In this issue of Radish, we’ll learn the truth about lynching through Winfield Hazlitt Collins’ startling, rigorous, aptly named book The Truth about Lynching and the Negro in the South (1918), and a bit from Thomas Nelson Page’s similarly excellent book The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (1904) as well.

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We’ve seen one good example of abolitionist propaganda already. And then there is a certain booklet, ‘The New Reign of Terror,’ which was “published early in 1860, and in all probability compiled by [William Lloyd] Garrison himself” (pp. 14–15):

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Now wait just one minute, you — rotten apologist for lynching! interjects the latter-day abolitionist. What sort of “intense excitement” could possibly make “law-abiding” men just murder — “with great reluctance” — all those hundreds of sweet, kindly — “dictatorial, inflammatory and menacing” — abolitionists — okay, maybe it was only one abolitionist, but whatever — “their propaganda did not comprehend even ordinary honesty” — whose only crime was a burning desire to share their lovely dream — “to impose their own half-blind perception” — of tolerance and equality — “of the way of the Lord, or their own ideas of what constitutes righteousness” — and an immediate end — with “regard for neither law nor common sense” — to awful evil racist slavery by you awful evil racist Southerners?

Who, for some reason, responded with a “bitter feeling.”

What sort of excitement indeed. To answer that question — which is only rhetorical if you see all Southerners as, essentially, comic book villains, twirling their mustaches as they concoct new and imaginatively sadistic methods of tormenting “the Negro” — we turn to Nat Turner’s slave insurrection, and the precarious position of white people in the South (pp. 15–17):

Could one reasonably expect that any man so situated would be inclined to be too ceremonious with any person, black or white, however innocent or saintlike his looks, who might be caught tampering with the Negroes and thereby jeopardize the safety of his family and those of his neighbors as well? When one considers the exasperating circumstances, the wonder is not that there were so many lynchings but rather that there were so few, comparatively.

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It seems like once “the carpet-bag rule was in full operation,” although the so-called victims of lynching still pretty much had it coming, there were a whole lot more of them who had it coming, and the ones who had it coming were way more likely than before to actually get lynched. Now why might that have been?

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Now the gloves are really off, as we near the end of Chapter 3 and Winfield Collins marshals human evolutionary history and human biological diversity to help us understand a uniquely Southern theory of law enforcement, particularly extrajudicial capital punishment (p. 59):

[T]he Negro, child of Africa, but lately removed from the jungle, because of the necessity of the habitat of his origin, has had developed in him by nature, possibly, stronger sexual passion than is to be found in any other race.

“To make up for the high death rate,” Collins notes.

But he is infinitely lacking in the high mental, moral, and emotional qualities that are especially characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon, and it is a grievous mistake to attribute such high qualities to him. When proper restraint is removed from the Negro he gets beyond bounds. The Anglo-Saxon, indeed, or members of that race, has a way of meeting extraordinary conditions with extraordinary means — hence lynching in order to hold in check the Negro in the South.

Indeed, a country occupied by two races so widely apart in origin, characteristics, and development as the whites and the Negroes of the Southern States — one race of the highest mental endowments and culture, the other of the lowest — one having a civilization that reaches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the other in the early dawn of civilization — might reasonably have two codes of law suited, as nearly as possible, to each race, respectively.

A mode of punishment that would be out of place as to the white man may be well suited to the Negro. Small-pox is not to be treated as chicken-pox. Barbarous criminals require barbarous laws.

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See: the “unnamable brutality” of the ‘Knoxville Horror’ (here, here, here, and here), the “unnamable horrors” of the ‘Wichita Massacre’ (here, here, here, here, here, and here), the “unspeakable” Pearcy massacre (here), and so many more excellent reasons to reinstate the time-honored practice of extrajudicial capital punishment.

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