“When the Southern Confederacy fell, its leaders generally stood by the wreck and did their best for those whom they had led; but Judah Benjamin went off to pastures new.”
Goldwin Smith, North American Review (August, 1891)*
Richard Cocks’ latest post on our perfidious elite reminded me of a related anxiety by which I am these days nagged and hagridden. What loyalty can we expect from this cosmopolitan overclass, native and imported, if things go bust? The imports came to the United States for the Benjamins, and will no doubt scamper away in pursuit of some other species of filthy lucre if the value of a Benjamin falls next to nil. Their ancestors do not fill our graveyards. Our blood does not run in their veins. They are rootless cosmopolitans.
And if things go sour in the home of the brave, one suspects our homegrown cosmopolites will join the foreign fly-by-nights on planes to pastures new.
Born in the Virgin Islands in 1811, Judah Benjamin became a Louisiana lawyer, planter and politician. Under the Confederacy, Benjamin served as Secretary of War and Secretary of State. After the fall of Richmond, Benjamin escaped south with Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet, closely harried by Union cavalry, until they arrived at the Savannah River, in Georgia. On the south bank of that river, Benjamin showed where his loyalty lay (i.e. with the Benjamins).
Benjamin’s slippery getaway is described by another member of the Confederate Cabinet, the Texan John H. Reagan.
“After crossing the river we stopped at a farmhouse and got breakfast and had our horses fed. The Secretary Benjamin, who could not comfortably ride horseback [owing to corpulence], parted from us. With a travelling companion he set out in a wheeled carriage. He told me that only the President and his Cabinet knew his purpose, and that he did not want it made public. I inquired of him where he was going. ‘To the farthest place from the United States,’ he announced with emphasis, ‘if it takes me to the middle of China.’ He had his trunk in the carriage with his initials, J. P. B.. plainly marked on it. I inquired whether that might not betray him. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘there is a Frenchman travelling in the Southern States who has the same initials, and I can speak broken English like a Frenchman.’ He made his way to London, England.”**
President Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet did not, in fact, know the purpose of their soon-to-be-fugitive Secretary of State. They knew that Benjamin was too fat to ride a horse and so travelled, whenever possible, by carriage. When Benjamin climbed into a convenient carriage on the south bank of the Savanah River, President Davis and the other members of his Cabinet believed that Benjamin was, like themselves, headed west over the Mississippi. Their desperate plan was to rally the Confederate armies in Texas, and then fight until better terms of surrender could be obtained for the Southern people they had led into this disaster.
As President Davis explained,
“In that country abounding in supplies and deficient in rivers and railroads, [we] could have continued the war until our enemy, foiled in the purpose of subjugation, should have agreed, on the basis of a return to the Union, to acknowledge the constitutional rights of the States, and . . . to guarantee security of person and property.”***
As the historian who wrote my epigraph put it, this loyal native elite proposed to stand by the wreck of the Confederacy and do what it could to protect the interests of those whom they had led. Judah Benjamin on the other hand proposed (to himself) to follow the example of a rat on a sinking ship.
A dissembling and dishonest rat at that. As Jefferson Davis wrote:
“The Secretary of State, Mr. Benjamin, being unaccustomed to travelling on horseback, parted from me at the house where we stopped to breakfast, to take another mode of conveyance and a different route from that which I was pursuing, with intent to join me in the trans-Mississippi Department.”†
In the event of national disaster, would the rootless cosmopolitans of today’s elite attempt to rally in “Texas,” and there do whatever they could to protect the interests of those whom they had led? Or would they, like Judah Benjamin, imitate nautical rats and declare, with emphasis (not to mention crafty double-meaning),
“To the farthest place from the United States, if it takes me to the middle of China.”
*) Goldwin Smith, “New Light on the Jewish Question,” North American Review 153, 417 (August, 1891), pp. 129-143, quote p. 141.
** ) John H. Reagan, Memoirs, With Special Reference to Secession and the Civil War, ed. Walter Flavious McCaleb (New York: The Neale Pub. Co., 1906), p. 211.
***) Varina Howell Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife, two vols. (New York: Belford Co., 1890), p. 63.
†) Davis, Jefferson Davis, p. 635.
The Orthosphere 
The likes of Judah Benjamin are God’s buzzards, and there’s always another carcass to pick over when they’re done with America.
The phrase “loyalty to a lost cause” strikes them as ludicrous, perhaps ungrammatical.
Benjamin and John Reagan were the only competent members of the Confederate government.
But only Reagan stayed around to clean up the mess.
Rootless cosmopolitans have bought bolt holes here in New Zealand where I am right at this moment. As far as I’m concerned NZ represents one wrong direction the US could take, extreme successful authoritarianism, although experiencing a temporary reprieve to a degree or corrupt low trust places like Serbia. The weaponization of the courts and Dept of Justice against Republicans represents the Banana Republic option and lack of rule of law. Globalism means there is nowhere much for the rats to escape to. Imagine “escaping” to England these days!
A certain segment of the population have been told that whites are responsible for every ill they face. Even corpulence and over consuming alcohol. How come blacks and Māori get this excuse and I don’t? A sister was ready to disown me if I tried to question poor Māori longevity (smoking too is popular) being the fault of Pakeha too forcefully. I pointed out that systemic racism has just now been invented as a catch all excuse. She claimed to have been taught it in high school (she wasn’t – I went to high school in NZ also). Before the white man came many tribes ate a staple fern root so tough it wore their teeth out and they died of malnutrition around the age of 30. She had never heard this and asked me where I read it. An official leftist NZ govt website confirmed it when I checked. For years I have pointed out the genocidal implications of this line of thought. Scott Adams seems to have noticed it relatively recently. Theodore Dalrymple, a prison psychiatrist, points out the way m/c excuses for violence and crime are adopted by the violent and criminal – not among themselves but when confronted with someone like him.
Corrupt courts and angry minorities and their sympathizers are two reasons rootless cosmopolitans might think of escaping. But, where to? Japan, for instance, is sensibly against mass immigration.
My guess is the bold-holes will be fortified city states like Singapore or Dubai. The premise of the Hunger Games books and movies seems silly, but our overclass looks more and more like the freaks in the Hunger Games’ Capitol. Explaining dysfunction as a consequence of racism is terrible for all concerned. It ensures that the dysfunctional remain dysfunctional, and that the functional (especially functional whites) carry a millstone of guilt around their necks. Your poor sister caught the disease and now thinks she has hand it her whole life.
Japan’s attitude towards immigration was an always irritant which was going to be removed. They are starting to cave now.
Good riddance, I say, as I said of my state’s protesting public school teachers a few years ago when they, with united voice, threatened to leave the state for ‘greener pastures’ should our governor and state legislature fail to meet their demands for higher teacher compensation. As I said then, in a just world we would be sure to make good laws preventing their ever returning to their milk again. Let them wallow like the swine they are in the misery of their own making. Effing ingrates!
Some rats are nothing but rats, and to them good riddance. Other rats take valuable skills with them and cause the sinking ship to sink faster.
OT but vaguely related:
Was just reading an article by a Boomer Blogger where he mentions in passing his late father’s presence as a British officer on a Cairo-Haifa night train which was bombed by terrorists in 1948. What he doesn’t tell his readers is significant.
Of course the average American Barcalounging Boomer Blog (I say, these blog things are a bit yesteryear, what?) Reader is just going to *know* that said terrorists were Arabs being mean to the saintly Usual Suspects during end of Mandate fun and games. And of course they were wrong: it was Lehi, AKA the Stern Gang up to their usual bloodthirsty tricks who bombed that train.
Not sure whether or not the fairly well-read ‘Conservative’ Blogger and published author of SF and other novels who posted about his father knew the truth. I rather suspect he did and left the inconvenient bit out.
On Topic:
Japan. There’s a hilarious story about a super evil Japanese Military Intelligence organisation in Manchukuo in the 1930s debating whether or not to encourage Jews to migrate into their vast zone of control in order to promote Capital C Commerce — Jews being known for this. But they also knew damn well what a rotten subversive scorpion on frog’s back crossing river type of People they are. These Japanese officers titled their analysis paper ‘The Fugu Plan’. Fugu being that puffer fish which makes for the most wondrous sashimi, but if incorrectly prepared will quickly kill you with the neurotoxins this fish is notorious for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_the_Japanese_Empire
In Japan and China few people hold illusions about the Tribe. There is no automatic reflexive recoil from Noticing.
Don’t get me started on the ANC-backing Jewish elites of Johannesburg and Cape Town who, when things immediately and predictably went to shit when Apartheid was ended (For Thee, Goy… not for Me!) decamped en masse to Herzliya, Netanya, Hampstead, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Orlando, etc… etc… Of course leaving behind the White Cattle to the tender mercies of the Bantu.
It’s an old, old story.
To be just a teensy bit fair, the Afrikaner Broderbund Deep State types were in on the fix, too. It was a one-time offer for *them* to get their kids into the Ivies and become Anywhere People.
If you’re the kind of person who is good at climbing greasy poles, you’re also likely to be expert at jumping ships ahead of the crowd.
Almost everyone has a limit where they grab their bug-out bag, but everyone’s limit is not the same. Some of the early boaters haven’t put down roots, others don’t have roots to put down.