Heritage of Evil

Here's another illustration of how the American Bipolarchy allows the two leading parties to shapeshift and contradict themselves in pursuit of power: after the Civil War, when Republicans nearly monopolized the White House for 60 years, one of their favorite tactics was called "waving the bloody shirt." This consisted of pandering to your base of Union Army veterans by evoking the sacrifices of wartime and reminding them that the Democrats were the party of secession and Copperheadism. The thought that, in the 21st century, any Republican might be found singing the praises of the Confederate flag would have driven a 19th century Republican mad. But here we are, and here's Mike Huckabee in South Carolina, and for the sake of balance, here is John McCain.

Let's note that Huckabee did not repeat the defensive notion that the Confederate flag represents "heritage," but he's clearly catering to those who feel that way. "Heritage," in this context, never has anything to do with slavery, as if Southern culture as we know it could have existed, or the Civil War would have been fought, without slavery. In a way, the defense of the Confederate flag is like the activism against American Indian sports mascots. In each case, a faction within a cultural group tries to tell the world that they alone will decide what their symbols represent. In the case of the Confederacy, the Southern states lost that right in 1865.

History has ruled that slavery is the pre-eminent heritage embodied in the Confederate flag. History is unimpressed by distinctions people try to draw between the state flag and battle flags, because Lee and all his generals and all his boys in gray were fighting for slavery. They broke with the Union because a plurality of its people and a majority of Electors chose a candidate who would not let slavery infest new territories. That was unacceptable to the plantation masters, so they declared the Union dissolved. Ever since then, there's been talk and research about why the common white man fought for the Confederacy, but I don't care to know about their personal motives. They had a self-evident duty to resist a conspiracy to break up the Union simply because one particular party won an election. Most of them failed in this duty and enlisted in defense of slavery, which was the real meaning of the defense of secession on this particular occasion. To defend the secession movement of 1860-61 means either that you endorse a completely value-free idea of secession that allows you to break up the country on any and every pretext, or you're defending the plantation masters' alleged right to spread the plague of slavery on new lands. Enjoy your choices.

If public education should have any purpose of indoctrination, one thing that should be indoctrinated should be hatred for the Confederacy and the Civil War it called down upon itself. Children should be taught to despise every version of the Confederate flag, and to condemn every Confederate general and civilian leader as a villain. To admire any of them is, at best, to admire militarism for its own sake. Mike Huckabee says it isn't the country's business to pass judgment on those flags. I know that he can fall behind on some subjects, like the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, but he should have caught on by now that the country passed judgment on this matter nearly 150 years ago. Maybe he's been waiting for God's verdict on the question. I refer him to the words of an American prophet:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."