THE GREAT UNIFICATION GRIFT

Filed under: Consolidation Is Not a Virtue

By Peter R. Mossback, Athwart Historian

“They came promising unity. They left behind Walmarts and debt.”

— Official Council Motto for the Occasion

The First Globalists Were Republicans And Freebooters

They say history repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as tourism. But we in the Council say: sometimes it just repeats as policy.

Consider the mirror tragedies of two regions a world apart: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Confederate States of America. One was absorbed into the new Kingdom of Italy by Garibaldi’s garishly idealistic Redshirts; the other was militarily subdued and “reconstructed” into the United States by Lincoln’s Union Army. In both cases, a regional culture was deemed incompatible with progress, and forcibly dissolved.

It was called nationalism at the time.

Today, we call its grown-up version globalism.

Same desire, larger ambition: to flatten cultural topographies into manageable administrative zones.

WHAT THEY CALLED UNITY, WE CALL ERASURE

Garibaldi’s invasion of Southern Italy in 1860—romanticized in schoolbooks and espresso brands—was less a liberation than a demolition. The South, with its baroque religious life, agrarian economy, and deep-rooted folkways, was regarded by Northern liberals and Freemasons as an embarrassment. It had to be “redeemed.” What followed was not renewal, but ruination: mass poverty, forced emigration, and internal colonialism dressed up as progress.[¹]

Likewise, the postbellum South was reconstructed with a Northern blueprint that ignored its cultural and spiritual character. The goal wasn’t just the abolition of slavery—it was the abolition of the Southern idea: a people bound more by kin and soil than by abstract ideals and interchangeable capital. The plantation was replaced by the sharecropper, the Southern gentleman by the absentee financier, and the local parish by the federal judge.[²]

In both cases, the victors claimed moral high ground—but built railroads over the ruins.

THE CENTURY THAT DIDN’T COUNT

Neither region truly recovered for over 100 years.

What was lost wasn’t simply infrastructure, but civilizational confidence.

For the Mezzogiorno, this meant a century of economic irrelevance and cultural derision—until mass tourism and EU subsidies arrived with their own set of conditions. For the American South, it also meant cultural derision plus demonization. Any semblance of recovery involved, a slow, halting crawl through poverty, resentment, and federal oversight—until the interstate highways brought air conditioning, fast food, and banks willing to lend to carpetbaggers.

Only in the latter half of the 20th century did both regions begin to appear “integrated” on the ledgers of modernity. But integration should not be confused with dignity. To this day, the Northern Italian views Naples as backwards; and Washington still regards Dixie and rural White folk in general—as suspicious.

They were forcibly absorbed—

…and then blamed for not assimilating fast enough.

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ALTDEF: “RECONSTRUCTION”

A polite euphemism for bulldozing a defeated culture and then offering it a loan to rebuild in someone else’s image.

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FOOTNOTES

[¹] For a corrective to the hagiography of Garibaldi, see Pino Aprile’s Terroni and John Dickie’s Darkest Italy. The Southern Italian diaspora was not a triumph of mobility—it was exile.

[²] See Eugene D. Genovese’s The Southern Tradition, which dares to read the defeated not only as slaveholders, but as people trying—rightly or wrongly—to conserve a worldview incompatible with modern managerial capitalism.