On Rebel Flags and Progressive Targets

In the wake of the Charleston mass murder, apparently carried out by a piece of delusional and racist scum from a highly dysfunctional family, we saw some of the usual gun control blather, but without any real energy behind it. Most progressives, pace the idiotic foreign millionaire Piers Morgan, have learned that their usual factually incorrect nonsense about needing "more gun control" tends to fall on deaf ears, and, politically, is going nowhere. In fact, the trend seems running in the opposite direction, with many states--and Puerto Rico, I might add--scrapping anti-gun legislation and regulation. So, in keeping with their tactics outlined in my June 5 post, the progressives have launched an attack on a different target, the Confederate battle flag which flies over the South Carolina State Capitol building in Columbia since 1961 (here is one version of the history of that). Let us not forget, of course, that the Confederate flag is not the real target either.

Full disclosure: My view on the Rebel flag and other Confederate symbols is clear. I do not, never have, and never will fly or paste any Confederate symbol, flag, battle or otherwise, over my house, or on my vehicles, clothing, or coffee mugs, etc. I spent my professional life representing one flag, that of the USA, and have no loyalty to any other. I admire the courage and fighting spirit, as well as the tactical and strategic talents of Confederate Generals and soldiers, love reading about the Civil War and visiting battle sites such as Gettysburg and Vicksburg. I, however, am pro-Union, pro-Stars-and-Stripes, anti-slavery, pro-Lincoln, pro-Grant, pro-Sherman, pro-Frederick Douglass just about all the way. I do not share in the sympathy for and romanticism of some for the Southern cause in the, ahem, "War of Northern Aggression." Slavery was an inherited curse on our nation which we should have dispelled long before it came to war--and, yes, I do see slavery as the overriding reason for the great 1861-65 war, and, of course, as the proximate cause for the creation of the Republican Party shortly before that war. Men such as Washington and Jefferson, both slave owners, knew slavery was evil, but compromised with that "peculiar institution" to our long-standing misfortune. Great men, great flaws. I fully understand why black Americans could and would find Confederate flags and other symbols offensive. We, of course, can debate all this in saecula saeculorum and never reach consensus. End of Full Disclosure

OK, back to the issue at hand. All that said, I also think that the issue of the Confederate battle flag and whether to fly it over State properties is a decision for the people of South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas or anywhere else it flies. It has nothing to do with gun violence, and, let us remind the progressives, it was the Republican party that defeated that flag and for what it stood in the first place. In addition, the greatest practitioners of gun violence, of course, are found in liberal Democratic constituencies, e.g., Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, east Los Angeles, etc.

Understatement Warning: The practitioners of gun violence tend not to be whites. Whites, racist or otherwise, killing blacks is a rare phenomenon in the USA. The shooting in Charleston proved a horrid exception to that; so, of course, the progressives and their echo-chamber media seize on the exception, ignoring the many black on black killings that took place the same day, and look for ways to use it to advance The Agenda. They also pervert history by trying to tie the Confederacy to the Republicans--a grotesque distortion made possible by the low-information consumers of media and Hollywood nonsense. End of Understatement Warning.

While we should not forget it was Democratic governors who hoisted the Rebel flag, and that the KKK was the armed wing of the Democratic Party, and that Jim Crow segregation was instituted and maintained by the Democrats, and that it was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, and a Republican Chief Justice, Earl Warren, who began dismantling the Democratic party's segregation policies, let's put all that history aside, for now. Let's, instead, look at the shooting in Charleston. The alleged killer, whose name I will not reproduce here, had a website (I won't link to it) on which he published a "manifesto." One of the things that comes through most clearly is that he could find no other male Southern whites to go along with his plan to murder black citizens. He complained that all he heard at school, yes, school in "racist" South Carolina, was talk about getting along with all races. Yes, "racist" South Carolina which has elected the daughter of Indian immigrants as Governor. His hatred for black people came from somewhere else in his twisted mind. He adopted the symbols of the Confederacy, Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa, and posed himself burning the US flag--much as do many of the progressives who demand the elimination of the Rebel flag. He was no Tea Party "radical"; no member of the GOP; no fanatical supporter of Mitt Romney; no ardent follower of FOX News. Nope, none of that. The Confederate battle flag did not drive him to murder anymore than I, assume, the Black Panther flag drove the black mass murderer at the Washington DC Navy Yard nearly two years ago.

None of this, however, stops the progressives when they get a bone in their toothy jaws. They drove the media into a frenzy about the Rebel flag. As I said before, whether States remove the flag or not from their public properties is an issue for those States; but the crowd was whipped up and South Carolina's Republican Governor and legislature gave in. Democrats are very good at lynch mobs. That's not the way I would have liked to see the issue decided. The more important point, of course, is that progressives aren't stopping there. They already have Mau-Maued big retailers, e.g., Walmart, EBay, Amazon, into pulling merchandise with Confederate symbols. A major flag maker has announced that it will no longer make and sell Confederate flags.

No gun deaths will be averted by all this. Racism will not decrease because of this. Neither of those is the real target. The real target is attacking white male culture, especially the hated "Redneck" culture, which progressives cannot stand. The real target is trying to stigmatize white males and cowing them into politically correct submission. For you see, in the Hollywood movie that runs in an endless loop inside the heads of progressives, white males, especially in the South, are all Rebel flag-waving, pick-up driving, gun maniac racists just dying to kill black men and rape black women.

BOLD PREDICTION: THE NEXT STEP WILL BE TO DEMAND THAT CONFEDERATE SYMBOLS BE DECLARED HATE SPEECH. We will see kids sent home from school for having Confederate flags on their shirts; cars with Confederate decals will be banned from certain areas; and we might see the expunging of CSA symbols from movies and books and prohibiting Confederate flags at re-enactment events, etc. History must conform to the Progressive dictate of the day. END OF BOLD PREDICTION.

If that is to be--and it will--I, in turn, demand progressives stop wearing Che t-shirts. I insist they stop waving the "Palestinian" flag. I propose that we all demand that Maryland alter its flag which consists of the heraldic banner of Lord Baltimore. I find offensive the yearning for royalty and feudalism. The Union Flag must be struck from the flag of Hawaii. I find offensive this paean to colonialism. The Alabama flag has troubling similarly to the Scottish flag and might prove offensive to those of Welsh descent. Will Walmart stop selling items made in China, an offensive state if ever there was one? Will there be a ban on Mexican flags considering the horrid history of human rights in that country? What about the Japanese flag? Why should Japan be able to keep the flag under which millions of Chinese, Malays, Filipinos, Koreans, Pacific Islanders, Indians, and whites were tortured and murdered? I am sure we can turn this into a drinking game.

Meanwhile, the people of Charleston showed real class as they honored the victims and sought to promote unity rather than division.