A Paleo Guide for the Holidays: January.

Please remember the Center for Libertarian Studies' LewRockwell.com and the Ludwig von Mises Institute in your acts of "reckless exuberance" and generosity this year.

Anticipating your needs, LewRockwell.com gives you this guide as a service to paleos who have to move about in this "best of all possible worlds" or as we like to think of it, "the current barbarism" to keep up your morale. We do this "pour encourage les autres."

Holidays is a corruption of Holy Days. This presumes that some days are set aside from others as to be honored or sanctified. Thus when you here "holiday" you may remind others [or remember to yourself] that the term refers to days that are Holy. Remember those who only have holidays are living in a deracinated state and need your prayers.

January 1 is of course New Years Day. Here the fun literally begins. We just shifted over from last year [2001] to this year [2002]. So what happened two-thousand and two years ago that we started counting from? The birth of Jesus. A day important, sacred….Holy to Christians.

But EVERYBODY uses 2002. We live in a secularly-counting Christendom. We used to note in documents by adding "A.D." That is an abbreviation of the Latin for Anno Domini [in English "Year of Our Lord"]. Time was that legal documents would have both the "A.D." and the charming addition of, "….and the [whatever number it was] year of our independence from Great Britain."

The enemy tries to separate our lives, particularly our public life, from linkages to Christianity. But here they are tied to Christ.

The enemy has no prospect of getting this to change. I tell you three times, I tell you three times, I tell you three times: The enemy has no prospect of getting this to change. Be gleeful in this.

What would they have us do, count from the day of the founding of the United Nations? Or from the French Revolution? Oh that's right, that was tried, along with the Church of Reason [not currently affiliated with any publication or foundation of the same name].

To quote Aquinas, "God has fastened the world with Time, not in Time."

Efforts to enumerate this planets revolving around the sun from human events have failed.

The enemy cannot get us to go to some other number, so they console themselves with removing the "A.D."

One of my New Year's resolutions: I will add "A.D." to my datings.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. What sort of silk purse can a Paleo make from this? Celebrating the Reverend "Dr." by closing government offices is poor consolation.

Most of the civil government should be closed most days. All of the government should be closed down some of the time. And clearly many parts of government should never be reopened on this side of Hell.

But what is a Paleo to make of celebrating this intellectual descendent of W.E.B. du Bois?

Remember there are two intellectual traditions among black Americans on what to do in the aftermath of slavery's end for improving the conditions of their brethren.

DuBois, living and writing in Harlem, drank heavily of Karl Marx. He linked Marx's labor theory of value as it applied to a proletariat and added race to the mix. This would be amusing [Lew, I feel another article coming on….] to note Karl Marx's racial opinions and see what black Marxists have to say about the subject.

DuBois advocated the use of government power to achieve [in his eyes] racial justice. He wanted more than ending state segregation but pushed the entire panoply of racial quotas and compensation for prior losses incurred by slavery. Is it any wonder that American Communists in creating popular front groups critical of anti-black racism in America called their groups, "W.E.B. du Bois Clubs?"

The other tradition follows Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute. He hated the fact that his fellow blacks were giving the dirty end of the stick in America. But unlike du Bois, actually worked at risk to himself to improve the conditions of his brethren.

Look in Peter Brimelow's Wall Street Gurus for a contemporaneous look of Booker T. Washington's useful advice he followed at Tuskegee. Remember that while du Bois safely wrote in New York, Booker T. was negotiating directly with the Ku Klux Klan safety for his brethren.

Booker T. was making higher education available to his brethren at Tuskegee at a time when segregation was getting particularly nasty.

In my opinion the "high water mark" [low water mark?] of anti-black racism came with Woodrow Wilson showing D.W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation nightly at the White House for Congressional delegations to get the Congress to mandate FEDERAL segregation.

Albeit in a non-Christian sense, Malcolm Shabazz, followed in the intellectual footsteps of Booker T. Washington, despite spouting some duBoisian ideology. Yet Malcolm Shabazz was looked upon as being the more radical.

In a profound sense he was. For real independence, self-reliance, solid families, to wit, a black bourgeoisie, cannot be good for white racists.

So where does that leave a Paleo and M.L.King?

Remember, despair is a sin, for it rejects the possibility of God's grace.

A modest suggestion: celebrate Robert E. Lee's Birthday, which by one of those wonderful coincidences [God's Grace and Humor?], is on the same day. Or at least close enough for government work.

Bobby Lee's birthday is a state holiday in some southeastern states of these United States. A charming coincidence with membership in the late, lost and much lamented Confederate States of America.

Robert E. Lee is a better man to honor than Martin Luther King.

There is more than character here.

Lee was a reluctant secessionist. He believed with President Buchanan [I believe General Lee was in error in this matter, but that is a cavil] that states could not leave the Union of their own accord and that such action was treason. However, President Buchanan, believed the federal government also lacked the Constitutional authority to use force to coerce seceding states back into the Union.

Lee was opposed to slavery and advocated the Confederacy end it post-haste. In this he anticipated General Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee who sent in early 1864 a proposal for arming slaves and ending the peculiar institution.

Lee joined the southern cause because he felt a loyalty to his native home, Virginia and could not, to quote him, "…raise my sword against Virginia…" Unlike, someone convinced of a cause, then un-convinced of a cause, but was not rooted in a place, i.e. Benedict Arnold.

Thus Lee followed secession with the majority of southerners who stood for a voluntary Union. Even at his most aggressiveness in war he referred to the Union enemy as simply "those people."

In most alternative histories of a successful Confederacy: Robert E. Lee is looked upon as Jefferson Davis's likely successor.

Does anyone believe that a victorious Confederacy, guided by the tone of a Robert E. Lee as their first peacetime President, would have been as harsh as the defeated southern states were after both the War and Reconstruction? If they do, I believe they don't understand humanity.

In real history, when Lee left his manse at Arlington, his wife left the management of the properties with her black servant. At the end of the war, the servant gave a faithful accounting of what was there [and what the Union government had taken].

Robert E. Lee's character, particularly in a victorious Confederacy, would have, if not precluded, ameliorated the attitudes of southron society from the harshness Booker T. Washington saw.