Cultural barbarians …

The Confederate flag will likely be coming down soon on the Capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina. Governor Nikki Haley has introduced legislation she hopes will make removing the flag there a reality. The South Carolina legislature is expected by many to pass the measure. 

Whether you agree or disagree with Haley’s decision is irrelevant. She is moving properly through their legislative system to remove the flag from state grounds, following the rule of law. She has no authority to outlaw displays of the Confederate flag by individuals on their own property, and made a point of that when she announced her decision about the flag on state grounds. 

Meanwhile, others in her state and around the country have decided they have no use for laws, common decency, or respect for history to get their way.

So there have been numerous reports of vandals spray painting memorials to the Confederate dead, statues of Confederate generals, as well as elected Southern officials from that time. There have also been calls to removed paintings and statures in the US Capitol of anyone now deemed – more than 150 years later – a racist or supporter of slavery. 

In one very recent incident, somebody spray painted “Black Lives Mater” (yes, mater) on a monument memorializing the Confederate defenders of Charleston harbor. In another, “Calhoun, racist” was spray painted on a Charleston monument to John C. Calhoun, who, while a defender of slave holders’ rights in the 1850s, was also former Vice President under Andrew Jackson, as well as a former US Secretary of State, US Secretary of War and US Senator.

In North Carolina, someone spray painted “Black Lives Matter” on a monument to Zebulon Vance, who was a Confederate officer in the war, but after the war served as governor of North Carolina and US Senator. It’s also happened to a monument in Baltimore.   

I believe in dissent. I believe in making your voice heard through protests. Those are essential American rights which should never be abridged, especially when others may find what you say offensive. Those rights are enshrined in our Constitution because the founders recognized that if we ever start limiting opposition voices we are doomed as a free society.

But those rights apply to every American. So it’s a double-edged sword: you have the right to say what you want, but so do others.  When someone abridges the rights of others, or physically attacks their beliefs and symbols of their beliefs, that’s simply unacceptable.  

And when someone goes even further and tries to erase history because it offends them, or doesn’t comport with what they think history should have been, that’s the sign of a barbarian. They’re no better than the Taliban demolishing the statues of Buddha, or ISIS destroying temples and historic artifacts from other civilizations.

Imagine if someone defaced the Lincoln Memorial by writing “nigger lover” in foot-high letters on it?   Or the Martin Luther King Memorial by painting over the “I have a dream” quote, and replacing it with “white lives matter” instead?   What if someone spray-painted “faggot” on gay-rights’ landmarks like Stonewall Inn?  Or painted “murderers” and “child killers” on the iconic Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington Cemetery? 

There would be an outcry heard throughout the country. There would be calls to track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice for barbarous hate crimes.

For some reason, when modern day barbarians defaced monuments to the Confederate war dead, or long-dead politicians now on the wrong side of history, there’s barely a peep. 

Except online.  There I was stunned by the vitriol spewed by people who openly cheered these acts of vandalism as “about-time” events. 

Some went so far as to claim people should paint “traitors!” and “losers” on the same monuments.  Others unleashed their hatred for all things Southern – the people, their faith, their region, their politics, whatever. They equated the South with bigotry, racism, white supremacists, and intolerance of anyone who isn’t male, white and heterosexual.  A few said the South engaged in armed aggression against the United States and for that alone should never be forgiven.      

Defacing monuments was the least of what most of them seemed to want.  I think they’d be happy for the US to go to war with the South again and this time totally destroy it. (Which is essentially what a lot in the Union tried with Reconstruction.) 

The South I grew up in moved on long ago. Slavery is part of its past, regrettably, but it’s in the past, and has been for more than 150 years. When Southerners honor those who fought and died for the Confederacy, they aren’t honoring slavery; they are paying tribute to their ancestors who fought bravely in a losing cause against overwhelming odds.

When America loses a war, it still honors its soldiers; the South has done the same. How that somehow translates into a continuing support for slavery and racism escapes me.     

Now, let me be completely clear about this: I am not an apologist for slavery or those who supported it.  Slavery is as abhorrent to me as it is to the overwhelming majority of Americans today. I don’t buy the use of Biblical passages to justify slavery back then, just as I don’t accept ISIS’ use of passages in the Koran to justify slavery today. Slavery in any form is reprehensible and rightfully condemned by modern nations and people everywhere.

Nor am I in denial that slavery was a backbone of the South’s cotton-dependent economy in the 1800s after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. Plantations in the South were almost entirely dependent on ample, cheap labor provided by African slaves. Slaves were valuable property to plantation owners, and as such were bought, sold and traded as property.

I also won’t white-wash the South’s plantation owners’ desire to preserve slavery as the main reason for acts of secession that in turn triggered the Civil War. Certainly there were other issues, and lingering distrust and antipathy between the North and South, but these paled in comparison. 

Almost none of us today can understand how otherwise decent, God-fearing people could accept that owning other people and treating them like livestock to be bought, bred and sold would be just business as usual. But it was. And that’s sadly an undeniable part of the South’s history.       

The North had slaves as well. However, use of African slaves simply didn’t make as much sense in the more industrialized North. Getting higher skilled labor from indentured European workers – still slaves by any other name, and largely English or Irish, made more economic sense.    

Slavery, whether of Africans or Europeans or Chinese or whatever, is an unfortunate and shameful part of American history. But it happened; attempting now to erase anyone or anything associated with it just because it still offends someone can’t turn back the clock and right wrongs that took place more than 150 years ago.  

But such is our culture today. Cultural barbarians shout down anyone with whom they disagree. They bully and try to intimidate anyone with a different viewpoint. They seek to rewrite history by erasing it, either with spray paint, or political correctness ordinances and laws. They think they can get away with anything with a mob of like-minded barbarians at their back.

They’ve now managed to get Sears, Walmart, Amazon and other large retailers to stop selling anything with a Confederate flag on it – something they consider a victory. The barbarians should be careful in celebrating too much. 

Will that stop people from wanting to display that flag?  Some, perhaps.  Yet others will want that flag now more than ever.  Not because it symbolizes racism and bigotry – for God’s sake no – but what it has symbolized for millions of Southerners long after the Civil War.

Pride in who you are, where you're from, and what you believe.  

And standing your ground, even against overwhelming odds.