Support the Confederate Flag: DON'T BACK DOWN

Note to those who support the Confederate flag: DON'T BACK DOWN.

Don't be tepid or tentative in your support of the flag. Our opposition to Northern cultural bigotry and historical (and hysterical) ignorance must be firm and unflinching. We are right, and they are wrong. View the issue with the moral clarity it deserves.

Anti-Southern bigotry is possibly one of my biggest triggers.  I wrote about that some time ago, in a previous post from 2010.  In that post I noted that the Civil War was then, and this is now.  I said that I wanted to work with Northerner conservatives in our modern political struggles, and not refight a war of 150 years ago.  However, I noted that the Civil War (better described as The War for Southern Independence) tapped deep emotions in me, and had the power to make me hate.  I stated that I don't like to hate and seek to avoid that emotion whenever possible, because happiness and hate cannot coexist.  This week, however, I feel the negative emotion returning.  

Why?  Because Yankees, liberals and Southerners ignorant of their own history keep re-invading the South.  They buy into the Northern Myth.  Intellectually lazy, they go along with the popular mythology that casts the Confederates into the role of villain.  They dishonor our Confederate ancestors and grossly misrepresent their cause.  Now they want to finish the wishes of General Sherman to exterminate all Southerners completely, by insisting that the Confederate flag be relegated to museums, viewed only as a dishonorable artifact.

"We must show manners to those who find the flag objectionable," they write.  Why is it that we must show manners but they do not?  Why do their feelings count but not ours?  

Arm yourselves with knowledge of Southern history.  I suggest you can do that by reading a previously posted article by Professor Donald Livingston of Emory University, "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery."

Sick Freak Murders Nine in Black Charleston Church; Irrational Outpouring of Outrage Ensues

Another freakazoid has murdered people with a gun.  This time the perpetrator is one Dylann Roof, who resembles another mass murderer, Adam Lanza, who shot and killed 26 people in 2012, including 20 children in their classroom.  Both of these freaks remind me of the in-bred banjo player of "Deliverance" fame, but only in appearance.  They are nuts, crazy psychopaths -- and they can't even play the banjo.

Roof shot and killed nine parishioners in a Charleston church on June 17, 2015.  His apparent motive was that he hated black people.  The killing has invoked passionate debate, about gun control, the Confederate flag, and the collective guilt of white people for racism.

Now for some points that will prove unwelcome in the frenzied search for culprits in the aftermath of the crime.

1.  White people are less "racist" (I hate that overused word) than black people.  Some black people have been calling for a race war for some time, on Twitter and elsewhere.  Blacks have been shooting cops since Michael Brown was killed in the act of assaulting a white police officer, and expressing hatred of whites and advocating murder of policemen everywhere.

2.  Blacks commit murders and other crimes against whites in far greater proportion than the opposite.  Bad attitudes, racial prejudice and an inability to be held accountable for these things are endemic within the black community.  These facts are bound to increase prejudice against blacks by others, not only by whites, but also by Hispanics, Asians and Jews, who are frequently the victims of black violence and crime.

Colin Flaherty writes in the American Thinker, in an article titled The War on Black People in South Carolina: the First Casualty is Truth:

In Charleston, locals know racial violence is far more widespread than that. Only it is far more likely to be black on white.

And:

A black person is 50 times more likely to assault a white person than the other way around. The black on white rape numbers are even more out of proportion when compared to white on black sexual assault.

3.  The Confederate flag had nothing to do with the crime.  However, the Daily Kos and other leftist sites are calling for the flag to be removed from public display in South Carolina.  Lindsay Graham has defended the flag and stated that it will not come down.  Graham is right.  Confederate descendants, and there are millions of us, love the flag for other than "racist" reasons.  It's not coming down, and those who don't like it can self-copulate.

4.  Dylann Roof's crime is not a factor of his political leanings.  Whether he is a Democrat or a Republican is irrelevant.  The little punk is nuts, crazy and insane.  Insanity is not a political persuasion.  Rabid political partisans on either side should stop trying to make political hay out of the tragedy.

5.  There are many good black people who have thrown their lot in with the forces of tolerance and civilization.  Many blacks in the South identify with the Confederate flag and are aware that the Northern Myth (of fighting the Civil War to free the slaves) is a lie of Biblical proportions. The criticisms in this post are not directed towards them.  Every man and woman is an individual, to be judged on his or her own merits alone.

6.  We will not give up our guns, and become helpless against a central government that seeks greater and greater control over our lives and liberties, as well as defenseless to violent criminals.  It is a shame that insane people periodically murder innocents with guns, and solutions must be sought to alleviate this.  However, such tragedies will have to be endured until solutions are found that do not remove guns from law-abiding citizens.

That's the way I see it anyhow.

Why We Fight For Right to Display the Confederate Flag

The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles has opposed issuing license plates that display the Confederate flag.  The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued the DMV for the ban, and won their case on appeal in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.  Now the Texas state Attorney General seeks to bring the argument to the Supreme Court. The fanatical cultural oppression by the Texas AG is outrageous.  But why do anti-flag fanatics seek to ban the Confederate flag?

The anti-flag forces seek to ban the flag to uphold their erroneous views as described below:

1.  That the Confederacy was evil and wrong "in fighting for slavery."

This view is wrong because the North did not go to war to end slavery, as is popularly but falsely believed, but to compel the Southern states to remain in a union that they no longer wanted. If the North was not fighting to end slavery, the South could not have been fighting to preserve it.  The myth that the North fought to end slavery was invented after the war to give a false aura of respectability to Northern aggression and to justify the enormous number of fatalities and widespread destruction.

2  That the Confederate flag's display is "a painful reminder of racism and slavery."

This view is self-serving, in that the American flag is, historically, far more associated with African slavery than the Confederate flag.  Its goal is to scapegoat the South for an institution that was well-entrenched decades before there was a Southern Confederacy, and to deny the massive culpability of the North in the support and expansion of the institution.  

3.  That the Confederate South is solely responsible for the institution of African slavery.

Again, this is to scapegoat the Confederacy -- see rebuttal of No 2 above.  Northern states were heavily involved in the slave trade before the Civil War, and other countries both sold and used slave labor, e.g. Portugal, England, France, Cuba, Brazil and the West Indies.

4.  That the Confederate flag is "racially insensitive."

This view is is in support of race-huckstering groups like the NAACP, who are totally ineffective at solving the problems of their constituents, e.g. school drop-outs, poverty, illegitimacy, absent fathers and crime.  So they attack the Confederate flag instead, so they can point to some kind of success, however meaningless.  They must validate their otherwise feckless existence by scapegoating the flag.

6.  That the only possible interpretation of the flag's display is to express race hatred.

Although it is true that the flag has sometimes been misused by hate groups, those same groups have likewise used the American flag and the Celtic Cross.  However, all of these symbols mean many things to many people, and no one has the right to limit individual interpretations to the lowest common denominator.  For example, some might see the American flag as the flag of the genocide of the Plains Indians or the unconstitutional interment of Japanese Americans, or the imperialism of annexing Hawaii and deposing its queen.  However, like the American flag, the Confederate flag should be seen in a much wider context.

We fight for the flag for these reasons:

1.  We insist that the Confederacy be accorded a respectable place in American history.  The scapegoating of the South, and the slanderous falsehoods against it must not be the official position of any federal or state agency.

2.  We refuse to allow the Confederate flag to be used as a bogeyman to disrespect our ancestors, their descendants, their country, Southern history, or the Southern section of the nation.

3.  We refuse to allow our viewpoint on history to be repressed by "viewpoint discrimination," such as that practiced by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.  We refuse to be acquiescent in the legal proliferation of negative stereotypes of Southerners who are proud of their ancestors and who cherish Southern symbols like the Confederate flag.  The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles seeks to enforce its bigotry through legalization, and we will not quietly go along.

4.  We refuse to acquiesce to official slander of Southern history or culture, by allowing federal or state governments to ban the Confederate flag, or to define it as "the flag of slavery, racism and oppression."

We will never stop fighting for an honorable place for Confederates in American history.  We will never give up.

My Letter to Governor Jerry Brown Re: California Bill to Ban the Confederate Flag

Today I finally had enough, and wrote to Governor Brown.  That correspondence is below.

September 1, 2014

Governor Jerry Brown

c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173

Sacramento, CA 95814

Re:  Proposed Ban on Confederate Flag in California

Dear Governor Brown:

I understand that a bill to ban the Confederate flag in California has been passed by the state legislature.  It now sits on your desk awaiting signature.  I am asking you not to sign it.  It is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, and if passed, we will litigate the matter in federal court.  You will lose.

The Confederate flag is a sacred heritage symbol to millions of Americans, both white and black, particularly those who are descendants of Confederate soldiers, sailors and marines.  We do not display it to offend anyone, or to express hatred of anyone, but as a symbol of who we are and where we came from.  It is a tribe symbol, representing our families, our ancestors, our people, their culture and their history.  If some are offended by the sight of the Confederate flag, you can be sure that we are equally offended by their uninformed and unfounded hostility.  They pretend to know what’s in our hearts, and they haven’t the slightest idea.  Their efforts to ban the flag both insult us and slander us.

Those who seek to ban the flag do so out of ignorance, and seek to make their ignorance the law of the land.  They seek to politicize American history, making any alternative views of that history illegal, shameful and suppressed.  Such efforts are totalitarian and oppressive, no matter how “honorable” they pretend to be.  

For the sake of freedom of expression, inquiry and association, please do not sign that bill.

Sincerely yours,

  

Stogie [full name redacted]

Life Member, Sons of Confederate Veterans

Cc:  Isadore Hall III, D-Compton

2200 W. Artesia Blvd. Suite 210

Compton, CA 90220

California Seeks to Ban the Confederate Flag

California, where I live, is one far-left cesspool of tyranny.  All but one of the state legislators have voted to ban the Confederate flag from public display and the sale of Confederate flags.  Human Events reports:

Assemblyman Isadore Hall III, D-Compton, introduced the legislation after his mother discovered the Capitol gift shop sold a replica of Confederate money that contained a picture of the flag, according to the L.A. Times.

Isadore Hall is an ignoramus of Southern history, and seeks to legislate his ignorance into law.  We are to be forced by the state government into accepting his ignorance as fact.  This is politicizing history, and is a slander against our Confederate ancestors and against us who love the flag.

Governor Brown has yet to sign the bill into law.  If he does, I suspect we will sue the state in federal court for a blatant violation of our First Amendment rights.

Read the Human Events article here.  Of particular interest are the comments to the article.  They, once again in similar articles, overwhelmingly support the flag and oppose the California bill.

Support for the Confederate Flag Grows on FaceBook

The idiot legislature of our Looney-Tunes state of California has passed a law to ban the display or sale of Confederate flags on state property.  I will happily and willingly break this law at the very first opportunity.  What we need is a group of us to visit the State Capitol grounds in Sacramento, and take turns selling each other small Confederate flags, say, for 10 cents each.  Someone can film it, and we can then put the film on YouTube.

This law is so unconstitutional as to defy the imagination.  It deserves not only our contempt, but our open defiance.

This new law has been discussed on at least three FaceBook forums recently, and the commenters were overwhelmingly in support of the flag.  Many discussed contempt for California.  I find this trend most encouraging.  Almost none of the commenters were in any way offended by the Confederate flag, and recognized it as a heritage symbol and an American flag.

Outraged by the Confederate Flag?

You never hear anything about the Confederate flag in the media unless it is negative.  Someone is always "outraged" by the display of the Confederate flag.  The flag has become a Pavlov-like trigger to those prone to perpetual paroxysms of posturing paranoia, outrage, self-righteousness and ignorance.

Today it is a Confederate flag that some high school students displayed in Blue Springs, Missouri.  Earlier this year the California State Legislature considered passing a bill making it illegal to sell Confederate flags on state-owned property.  Some attorneys in California sought to remove the flag of Mississippi from a display of all state flags, because it contains the Confederate flag within it.  The flag is such a convenient tool for airheads to pose and posture over.  By their phony "outrage" they are really saying "Look at me!  I am so enlightened and sensitive!  What a moral hero I am!  Admire me!"

The asininity is endless.

Just let me say this:  we of Confederate heritage love the Confederate flag.  We do not wish to offend anyone, but could care less if they are offended, being that their "offense" is based on ignorance and a century and a half of slander against the Confederacy.  In fact, we are more offended than they are for being offended by the flag in the first place.  It's as if they object to a photo of our mother because they think our mother is ugly.  Those are fighting words.

Just for the record, I cannot say I am "offended" by the display of the modern American flag, but cannot help but think, when I see it flying over a Southern capitol, that it flies there not by choice, but by violent force.  So the Confederate flag is "controversial," but the American flag, which flew over the slave ships, over the genocide of the American Indian, over the burning of Atlanta to the ground, over the seizure of Hawaii, over the Japanese internment camps -- is not?  Ah, there is no hypocrisy like Yankee hypocrisy.

We are going to keep the Confederate flag, and if you don't like it, you can go straight to hell.  The flag stays.  We won't give it up, and we will not acquiesce to the "outrage" of the human equivalent of Pavlov's dogs.  Go salivate over something else.