Seven Questions for Donald Douglas on the Question of R.S. McCain’s Racism

Having been busy finishing up my book until finally completing it yesterday, I had been unable to respond to American Power commentator Donald Douglas’s recent piece regarding the charges that have been leveled by Charles Johnson and I against Robert Stacy McCain over the past several months. Incidentally, the final chapter concerns McCain himself, and should be sufficient to convince any honest reader that McCain is exactly what some of us have determined him to be – a white supremacist. The chapter also details the manner in which the former Washington Times editor and correspondent has perpetrated at least one extraordinary breach of journalist ethics by writing a news article concerning a dispute between a certain Professor Jonathan Farley and Sons of Confederate Veterans – an organization of which McCain is an active member – while slanting the article in such a way as to make Farley out to be some great villain. A few months after writing the article, McCain gave a speech to the SCV in which he asserts the following:

This we know: Our ancestors’ cause was just and their conduct was honorable. Anyone who says otherwise is insulting the memory of heroes… If the Confederate cause was a matter of honor for our ancestors, then it is a matter of honor for us, their descendants. It is our duty to defend the honor of our ancestors, and to preserve their memory for our own descendants.

… even at the expense of basic ethical considerations, it would seem; McCain did a swell job of taking on Farley, who had written a column in which he bashed the Confederacy and was thus clearly guilty of “insulting the memory of heroes.”

But I digress. Douglas seems unperturbed by McCain’s past activities insomuch as that the two seem to be very close. He also dismisses the large number of message board comments on the subject of slavery that McCain wrote before he was in the public eye and which were compiled by Holocaust researcher Sergei Romanov a few months back:

The entry’s basically a long crib sheet of allegedly “vile” articles and comments from Robert’s days as an associate editor at the Washington Monthly [sic]. This includes a long bibliography of comments Robert’s said to have posted around the web, at places such as Free Republic. All of this is supposed to be damning. But looking at them, I see nothing there that’s any more inflammatory than, say, what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in his penetrating but politically-incorrect book, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.

Allow me to disagree. Regardless of whether or not Samuel Huntington has written controversial things himself, McCain has clearly written the following:

The very pervasiveness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other such abolitionist propaganda goes a long way toward explaining not only the war, but the sometimes ludicrous perceptions of slavery which flourish to this day. I have in mind one well-known author who begins his study of slavery with a ritual denunciation of the institution as immoral, a crime unparalleled in human annals, but who, once he actually begins to cite facts relating to slave life, exhibits little evidence of the “crime” except his own analyses of “paternalism” and “white supremacy.”

Anyone who uses scare quotes around the term “crime” in reference to slavery is clearly questioning whether such an institution is a crime. Anyone who uses scare quotes around the term “white supremacy” in such a context clearly is working under a different definition of “white supremacy” than are the rest of us. Perhaps McCain is not lying when he claims not to be a white supremacist; we just haven’t defined our terms, is all.

Here’s another one:

Whipping and branding, Axel? How common were whippings? How common was branding? Did the slave who had proven his dilligence, honesty and trustworthiness — and I think it would be racist to say that slaves were not generally so — really have to face such treatments? I doubt it.

Good point, Stacy.

But I could go on for some 12,000 words on this subject – and did, last week, while writing the chapter on the fellow.

Perhaps Mr. Douglas will be good enough to answer the following questions; I will certainly be happy to answer any questions he has for me in return, and certainly he will have some very difficult ones for me if it is true that I am viciously attacking an innocent man. As of this point, if one Googles “Robert Stacy McCain,” several of the first displayed pages are articles in which I or Charles Johnson accuse the fellow of being what we deem him to be, and thus, if we are wrong, we have already done irreversible damage to the fellow’s reputation. Either we are correct, or we are the greatest of scoundrels – and if we are the latter, then certainly the facts must be analyzed so that the two of us may be revealed as fools or worse. Here, then, are the questions I would have Douglas answer:

1. Why do you think McCain chose the name “Dabney” for his alter ego?

2.What is it about Robert Lewis Dabney that McCain admires, in your opinion?

3. Are you aware that Dabney is known today almost exclusively for his theological defense of slavery?

4. Are you familiar with the publication American Renaissance?

5. Do you consider the publication to be white supremacist in nature?

6. What do you think it says about McCain that he wrote an article for that publication in which he warns about white “race suicide” and did so under a pen name inspired by a fellow who is known almost exclusively for his theological defense of slavery?

7. You attack me for being an atheist. Is it better to ascribe to the Old Testament, which explains that one may beat one’s slave so long as the slave does not die within a few days afterwards?

I hope that Mr. Douglas will choose to answer these questions, and I repeat my offer to answer any questions he has for me, and once again point out that, if I am truly in the wrong and if Douglas is a clever fellow, he should be able to use such an opportunity to discredit me.