Put Out More Flags

http://blog.fleming.foundation/2015/06/from-under-the-rubble-put-out-more-flags-by-thomas-fleming/

From Under the Rubble Put Out More Flags by Thomas Fleming The only good thing to come out of the controversy over the flag is that I cannot turn on radio or television, much less look at Google News.  It’s not so much that the chant of “Take it Down, Take it Down!” is particularly offensive.  Viewed from the right perspective, it is almost amusing.  Imagine a happily married man dragged to a strip show.  He is not interested in the homely painted hussies, but, if he is cruel enough, the spectacle of his buddies shouting “Take it off, Take it off!” might strike him as funny. Of course the undereducated goons at NPR and CNN want to tear down the flag, but what’s new in that?  We have had to listen to their whining for decades.  They never had an argument, and they never will.  All they have to live for his their  hatred of everything good, beautiful, and true.  Their “love” for the opposite–perversity, rap “music,” and environmentalism–is tepid in comparison. “The flag is a symbol of slavery and racism, etc. etc.  Whatever virtues might have resided in the Southern way of life are gone, and those who defend their heritage are really defending their right to be bigots.”   To an over-educated cynic of my advanced years, the tirades are as diverting as feminist attacks on patriarchy or the late Christopher Hitchens hilariously ignorant diatribes against Christianity.  Ignorance really is bliss, in these United States. People in politics and the media do not care about objective reality.  They are soldiers in a revolution. They can afford to wait for years until some psychopath beats up a homosexual or a Southerner burns a church.  Then it is always, “See, I told you so.  It’s time to tear down the flag, ban guns, legalize same-sex marriage.”  It is rather like the old John Cleese routine, in which an attractive young lady comes into the doctor’s office.  No matter what she says, the doctor replies, “Just take off your clothes, please.”  When she finally tells him she only needs a form signed, Cleese replies, “Yes, I know, but I just want you to take off your clothes.” What is depressing in this controversy are the weak arguments put up by many of the flag’s defenders.  I read some Southern lawyer whining on National Review.  I did not bother to finish the piece, which was as predictable as the attacks on the flag, but the argument went something like: “Of course, we all know slavery was terrible, but the flag has nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with the gallantry of our ancestors.” This poor fellow, like so many Southerners, thinks the attackers are rational human beings whose arguments can be defeated by rational arguments.  Beaten up repeatedly by leftist accusations of racism, he defends himself—“Please don’t hit me again, I’m really a nice person”—by attacking slavery. If ever there were a strategy designed to lose, it is this servile kowtowing to an open and declared enemy.  When are Southerners going to learn that they have been under attack for over 150 years by the very same people who are attacking Christianity and civilization?  Their enemies do not hate the flag because it was flown by a country that maintained slavery any more than Muslims hate the cross because Crusaders fought under Christian banners.  These people hate the South because it was— and to some small extent is—a remnant of the Christian civilization they have been taught from infancy to destroy. The war against the South is part of the war against Christian civilization and against every normal and wholesome human attachment.  These people want to obliterate all distinctions, not just between North and South or Liberal and Conservative, but between citizen and alien, male and female, straight and twisted. Southern people, you are at war, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, and in such a war you cannot afford to flinch in the face of the enemy.  What do you care what your enemies think of you?  So long as you have the slightest whiff of Christianity emanating from your churches, so long as anyone has a kind word to say about General Lee, they will continue their campaign of cultural genocide. And by “they,” I am including 90% of so-called “Southern” politicians.  I hate to say this, but South Carolina Republicans are getting what they deserve for electing Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham.  (“Lindsey,” they should have been saying to themselves, “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”)  One by one the wooden-headed dominoes are falling.  Tear down the flag, demolish statues of General Forrest, and now, Mitch McConnell–the living (if you can call it living) embodiment of everything rotten in the GOP–is calling for Kentucky to remove the statue of President Davis from the Kentucky capitol.  In one sense he is right:  A state whose “conservatives” elect Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul is no fit place for a man of Jefferson Davis’s intelligence, courage, and manliness. With elected officials of this stamp—and there are vast printing presses in Columbia, S.C., and Washington, D.C., that mass-produce such politicos every year—there is absolutely no point in trying to keep the flag on government grounds.  Your state officials, especially Conservative Republicans, are owned by the enemy.  Oh, here and there in Southern states, there are still a few decent Southerners in office, but they are a minority.  The rest will talk Southern, from time to time, to get the sucker vote, but when the crunch comes, they will always reveal their true loyalty, which is to money.  They are like the pirate ships that would fly the Union Jack until they got in firing range of a merchant ship, at which point they hoisted up the Skull and Crossbones. So long as you continue to worry about what your enemies think, you will continue to lose every battle.  Every generation of Southern children over the past hundred years is less likely to go to Church or speak their local dialect, more likely to tolerate (or practice) perversity and denounce the South.  That is because each generation of parents is content to go along to get ahead, conforming to whatever edicts come out of Washington, letting their children’s minds be molded by the dimwits who graduate from schools of education, watching Fox or CNN, listening to NPR or Sean Hannity. Twisted people like Dylan Roof are not the product of traditional Southern families.  They are the offspring of divorced parents who named their son after the pseudonym (Dylan) adopted by a repulsive Minnesota pop singer?  Why not blame the shootings on Bobby “Dylan” Zimmerman, his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, and a pop music industry that celebrates fornication and adultery, violence, and stupidity?  Ridiculous?  Not so ridiculous as blaming the Battle Flag. Southerners need to quit apologizing for slavery.  Every developed society in the history of the world has slavery in one form or another.  In 1860 Northern industrialists, like their British counterparts, subjected their workers to far harsher conditions than most slaves in the South had to endure.  Today, our blue-collar classes are enslaved by transnational corporations that have broken down the border and torn down tariff barriers protecting American workers. One South Carolina Senator (James Hammond), when taunted that the Northern states had eliminated slavery,  stated the truth succinctly: Yes, the name but not the thing.  The exploitation of human labor is a brutal reality, and whether it is wage slavery, factory slavery, or plantation slavery, it is still slavery.  Changing names is simply a superstitious gesture.  The Greeks had originally called the Black Sea “axenos”–hostile to strangers.  Changing it to “euxeinos”–kind to strangers, made them feel better but it did not save them from shipwrecks, and turning slaves into proletarians and welfare-dependents has probably made their condition worse. It is time for Southerners to get off the defensive and positively assert the virtues of the South while condemning the vices of their enemies.  The South was not perfect, because even to imagine there can be a perfect society is a leftist fantasy, but, compared with most societies of that time, the Kennedy brothers were certainly correct when they titled their book, The South Was Right. As Jesse James is said to have told Cole Younger, before the Northfield raid:  It is time to take the war to enemy country.  Tearing down the flag is exactly the wrong thing to do.  Flags are symbols of historic identities.  In my former position, I collected a few significant flags representing peoples I respected:  The Scottish flag, the Serbian royal flag, the Quebec fleur de lys, the Confederacy’s First National Flag, and the thirteen-star flag of the original American confederacy of republics.  As the Left continues its war against nations and peoples and cultures, we need to put out more flags to tell the world who we are.