“Here you will find the true Proletariat. Here you will find inarticulate men moving irresistibly toward revolution and no less. Remember, these people are politically impotent. They can not vote out the poll tax, since they can't pay a poll tax to vote.... The communists, if they ever learn to use southern leaders, would sweep these bottom lands like wildfire. “
-Martha Johnson
The Confederate army's cowardly behavior before the pact with Ford remained a source of bitterness for Simmons. That the army 's hostility should continue even after his alliance with Ford infuriated Simmons, and he decided to act. In mid December Graves' staff drafted a remarkable document designed to bring Simmons's view to the attention of all officers.
The prerequisite for a state's political and military victory is obedience, loyalty, and trust in the leadership. As every officer knows, any body of soldiers without these qualities is useless. Indifference or half hearted obedience is not good enough. They will not fire enthusiasm or inspire sacrifice and the dedication needed to master each successive task. It has been our lot to fight against unequal odds. Where we have been successful, then abstract forces were at work, acting far more powerfully than any numerical or material superiority over the enemy.
It would be a remarkable thing if an officer's only duty were to weigh his own numerical strength against that of the enemy, while ignoring or underrating all those other factors that have always decided between defeat and victory in the past.
The “other factors” seemed obvious to Simmons. In Simmons view the Confederates were hardiest men that the white race had ever produced. Their inspired ancestors had held out for years against an economic juggernaut ruled by a tyrant. Before the war of the 1860s their people had tamed the lands of the wild Indian. All that stood before the confederacy now was a motley collection of Negroes and reds. They would be defeated easily enough with the army that Simmons had, even if Cherry's dire warnings about New Afrikan industrial output was correct. These savages and their Christ denying ideology was an affront to Christ himself, giving Simmons another ally who could very well be the kind of “abstract force” that he hoped would bring his army its victory.
Why was Simmons so eager to go to war against New Afrika now when he backed down a few months earlier? His military situation vis a vis New Afrika was worse than previously if it had changed at all. Probably the most pressing difference was radio free Dixie, a propaganda campaign spearheaded by New Afrika's lone white politburo member, Harry Leland Mitchell. Mitchell, already respected by Haywood for his work organizing the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union, was tapped by the party to lead a reconciliation campaign to convince New Afrika's white population of the need to cooperate with the new regime.
Reports from Cherry's agents suggested that communist “reconciliation” was far from voluntary and that many whites suffered ghastly indignities under the black regime. What was worse was that Mitchell constantly called for a similar regime to be set up in the rest of the South and where “socialism, desegregation, and human dignity would rule the day in the place of the plutocrats and terrorists who rule now.” That a white could support Negro butchers was beyond Simmons, he instructed Cherry to look into whether or not Mitchell was a Jew.
Harry Leland Mitchell, the founder of radio free dixie
Mitchell's propaganda was having some effect. Conner had uncovered a network of communists and college students who published underground newspapers that published vile insinuations against the government and articles by Haywood and Mitchell. Many of the conspirators had been trained by the communist faculty of the notorious Commonwealth College. Simmons had no problem ordering the execution of its ringleaders. In the post war era the young organizer Orval Faubus would be seen martyr by liberals for his intellectual resistance to the regime when most of the population supported Simmons. Simmons had no fear of turning these pamphleteers into martyrs at the time. “I feel no remorse for killing these young men, far better men have died for this country and they may well already be dead if they had served in our military rather than stabbed us in the back.”
By rare fortune, the three secret speeches of January and February 1939, by which Simmons prepared his officer corps for war have survived. No brief extract can reproduce their flavor. Their frankness was brutal. Simmons set out the blood-racial basis for his policies, the economic reasons obliging the Confederacy to reclaim its historical territory, and the inevitability of war. In this war he would expect his officers to serve him unswervingly, to die honorably and to show true leadership to their men. They were told to make themselves “worthy of Jackson, Lee, and Forrest.” He demanded that they cultivate optimism, because pessimism was their worst foe- it bred defeatism and surrender. “What belief do I demand of you?” he challenged them. “I demand that you, my young officers, develop an unconditional belief that one day our Dixie will be whole again and that no other power will be in a position to stop us, let alone break us.”
Don't be surprised if over the coming years I seize every opportunity to attain these objectives, and please give me your blindest support. Above all, take it from me that I shall always have scrutinized these matters from every possible angle first and that once I announce my decision to take a course of action, that decision is irrevocable and I shall force it through whatever the odds against us.
The decision was made on the 14th of February
-Simmon's War David Irving
