Derelict Space

Category: Our Southern Highlanders

September 10, 2014

And if Altruism is a Tool of the State …?

by ds1977

“The Southerner has retained and fostered – in a certain way reinstated – the medieval estimate as to the value of life. In the opinion of those ages it was but lightly esteemed; it was not a supreme good for which almost all else was to be sacrificed, but something to be taken in hand and put in risk in the pursuit of manly ideals. Modernism has worked to intensify the passion for existence until those who are under its dominion cannot well conceive how a man – except for some supreme duty to which he is pledged by altruistic motives – can give up his own life or take that of his neighbor.” Nathaniel Shaler, North American Review, 1890.

September 8, 2014

The State Captures to Survive

by ds1977

“If there be one human quality that the mountaineer admires above all others, it is “nerve.” And what greater display of nerve has been made in this generation than for a few clansmen to shoot down a judge at the bench, the public prosecutor, the sheriff, the clerk of the court, and two jurymen, then take to the mountain laurel like Corsicans to the maquis, and defy the armed power of the country? The cause does not matter to a mountaineer.” Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 392.