George Paul Kalas DixieNet: The League of the South Web Site 
George Kalas
Most members of the DixieLand Ring are already familiar with DixieNet, the celebrated web site belonging to the League of the South, (formerly the Southern League). As one of the first truly large Confederate sites on the web, DixieNet was a trailblazing site and an inspiration to many other pro-Southern webmasters. The DixieLand Ring has received many requests for a member profile on the site's "rebmaster," George Kalas over the past few months and so we bring it to you here this month.
No newcomer to Confederate causes, George is a long-time Confederate heritage activist, having joined the Sons of Confederate veterans on October 12, 1977 at the age of 15 on the record of four Gr-Gr-Grandfathers who served as Confederate soldiers and sailors during the War for Southern independence. In the 20 years since then George has been active on a number of fronts for Southern causes but in recent years he has dedicated most of his time and energy to advancing the cause of Southern independence through his activities for the League of the South.
A 7th-generation Texan whose ancestors settled in East Texas with Lorenzo DeZavala's colony in the 1820's, George was born in Houston, Texas on 27 April 1962. The son of a Greek immigrant father, George's Southern roots came down to him from his mother's side of the family where they extend back through the deep South to colonial times. George's mother is a devoted genealogist and a long-time member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the War of 1812, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. With a patriotic lineage like this, it was a foregone conclusion that George learned to revere the heritage and accomplishments of the Anglo-Celtic peoples who traveled to the New World, tamed a savage land and built a civilisation that is the admiration of the world.
Spending the bulk of his childhood in Houston throughout the 1960's and 1970's, George experienced a far different cultural environment than the one people see today. Back then, most Houstonians still celebrated their rich blend of Southern, Texan and Southwestern heritage without apology and the biggest cultural event of the year was the annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. (Unfortunately, like most other big public events, this once-great celebration of Anglo-Celtic Texan culture that has since been destroyed by the infusion of politically correct, multiculturalism.) Just as Houston began it's phenomenal growth during the "oil boom" years George left Houston and from 1974 to 1976 he attended school at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas. Under the strict tutelage of retired United State Marines, George was taught the values of duty, honour, patriotism, loyalty, reverence for our constitution and self-discipline. It was also during those years in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas that George began studying American history and taking a more active interest in the period of the War for Southern Independence; an interest that was strongly encouraged and supported by his mother.
In 1976 George returned to Houston where he attended Patrick Henry Jr. High and Sam Houston Senior High. Not long after his return, George was introduced to a member of the Dick Dowling Camp #1305, Sons of Confederate Veterans and began attending meetings as a prospective member. By Summer's end George, with the help of his mother and grandmother, had traced his Confederate ancestors and applied for admission to the SCV. He became the camp's youngest member in the Autumn of that year (at 15 years of age) and immediately became one of the camps' most active members -- never missing a meeting and serving as the camp's historian in 1979 and 1980. In 1979 George also became a member of the Sons of the Republic of Texas, (no relationship to the present day Texas independence movement), on the record of his ancestors who were citizens of the Texas Republic and patriots of the Texas Revolution.
Upon graduation from Sam Houston High School in 1980, George went on to attend the University of Texas at Austin where he earned a B.A. from the College of Liberal Arts with a major in Government in 1985. During his college years George remained active in the SCV and was also involved in a number of conservative political causes including the Young Conservatives of Texas, College Republicans and the Texas Review Society. George also served as a campaign volunteer for the Reagan presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984 and later served as an assistant campaign manager for Republican Texas State Representative Randy Pennington in 1985.
After graduation from U.T. in 1985 George entered South Texas College of Law in Houston. Within a year, though, George decided to leave law school in 1986 to accept an intriguing job offer to go to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. George entered CIA service via the elite Career Trainee program and served 6 years for the agency, working under both the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Administration. During this time, George enjoyed numerous opportunities to travel, including many, many road trips across the deep South while working as a security clearance investigator in Miami, Florida and New Orleans, Louisiana. It was while living in Louisiana that George met the famous Southern Kennedy brothers -- renowned for their books, "The South Was Right!" and "Why Not Freedom!" and it was they who introduced him to a growing network of SCV activists who were pondering the idea of starting a new Southern independence movement. Also during this period George became interested in "civil war" re-enacting and joined the 12th Louisiana Infantry Regt., (re-activated) -- an enjoyable hobby which has become a wonderful tool for educating Southerners about their proud and noble Confederate heritage.
In 1992 George decided to leave government service to be closer to family and friends and to pursue other opportunities in the private sector. At this time, he purchased his first computer, (a 486 PC clone) and soon began going online with local BBS services and with America Online which sparked an interest in pursuing a career in the field of computers. After spending some time in private investigations, George decided to make a career change in 1994 and entered the information technology industry. Little did he know it at the time, but this change would not only lead to a more fulfilling and financially rewarding career, but it would also equip him with the skills he needed to create DixieNet.
In the Spring of 1995 George joined the Southern League -- the South's first serious independence movement in over 130 years. Not wanting to merely pay dues and sit back, George soon accepted the position of State Chairman of the Texas Southern League where he immediately set to work. At about this time a co-worker introduced George to the Internet and the emerging new technology of the World Wide Web. Immediately recognising the incredible potential of this medium George purchased a copy of author Laura LeMay's "Teach Yourself HTML in 7 Days." By May of 1995 he was hooked on authoring HTML and in June of 1995 George traveled to the second annual Southern League conference where he placed before the League's Board of Directors a proposal to establish a World Wide Web site for the organisation.
Taking a gamble that the investment might pay dividends, the League agreed to finance the project and by the first week of July 1995 "DixieNet" was launched. Like most web pages in existence at that time, DixieNet was initially a very modest and not particularly glitzy site. The graphics were few and far between and the content was pretty sparse, but the response from Southerners was fantastic. Within a year the Southern League grew from 875 members to over 2,000 -- largely due to memberships that began flowing in via DixieNet.
During this period George's skills as a webmaster continued to advance and he was soon offered a position as general manager and chief webmaster for Access Internet Unlimited, a Houston-area Internet service provider. Within another years' time George had already outgrown this position and in August of 1996 he was offered the job of chief webmaster for a oilfield equipment manufacturing division of a well-known Fortune 500 company.
With his new webmastering career in high gear, George continued to expand and improve the DixieNet web site, applying an ever-expanding set of web authoring skills to the project. The effort paid off handsomely for the League of the South. DixieNet's server logs indicate that there have been close to a quarter of a million visits to various parts of the DixieNet site in the past two and a half years and over 100,000 visits to the home page alone! Popular not only with Southerners, Dixienet also draws large crowds of Southern partisans from all regions of the United States and dozens of foreign countries. Today, Dixienet consists of nearly 300 pages of content and it requires the assistance of over half a dozen other web authors, graphic design artists, digital music composers, writers and mailroom volunteers to handle current traffic along with routine maintenance and expansion of the site.
Visitors to DixieNet will find the largest archive of League of the South literature and information to be found anywhere along with links to cultural and political sites of interest to Southern partisans everywhere. DixieNet also features compendiums of news articles about the League from the world's press and it publishes a generous sampling of email received from both supporters, (and flame-mailers), from around the world. Future expansion plans for DixieNet include areas for League press releases; a Confederate computer resources page; pages devoted to Southern professional guilds; an online membership application form to enable visitors to join the League using their credit cards; and a sampling of League of the South speeches via a streaming audio technology like "Real Audio."
George calls DixieNet a "true labour of love" and says that he plans to
continue as the site's "rebmaster-in-chief" for as long as the League of the
South will indulge him. He also says that he's "looking for a few good
rebmasters" to join his growing staff of Southern nationalist DixieNet staffers and
he invites any who are interested to contact him via email at George Kalas.
