From the latest Radio Derb, here’s a corking rant by John Derbyshire on the latest national frenzy: the destruction and damnation of all symbols of the Confederacy. It’s so good that I reprint it here in full, with some emphasis added.
Back there in our April 11th podcast I noted the 150th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse that ended the American Civil War. Quote from myself:
Both commanders behaved with grace and professionalism at the surrender. I find it very moving to read about.
End quote. I followed that with a brief reading from Shelby Foote’s narrative of the surrender.
A few weeks later ”” earlier this month, in fact ”” I stood in Wilmer McLean’s parlor, where the surrender ceremony actually took place, complete with replicas of the tables where Lee and Grant sat.
The day before that, travelling around Virginia, my wife and I had visited Monument Avenue in Richmond, a beautiful broad boulevard decorated at intervals with fine statues. The statues are, in order from south to north, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate Naval Commander Fontaine Maury, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, and Richmond-born tennis champion Arthur Ashe.
Those magnificent statues impressed on me again, as the story of the surrender had, the terrible gravity of war, and the supreme importance of the lead participants in a war behaving towards one another with proper gentlemanly forbearance, as a counter to the horror and cruelty that are inseparable from the business of waging war.
A key factor here is how the victor deals with the vanquished. The barbarian standard is the one set by Brennus the Gaul: “Woe to the vanquished!” The barbarian victor grinds the beaten enemy beneath his heel, laughing as he does so. Civilized nations have not always been above this kind of behavior, either, as the victorious allies showed after World War One, with vengeful and vindictive policies that are generally, and in my opinion credibly, blamed for bringing on World War Two.
Civilized nations are mostly better than that, though. We don’t generally massacre, enslave, or reduce to beggary the nations we defeat. After the allies defeated Japan in WW2 we let them keep their Emperor even though Hirohito had been, at least theoretically, a key decision-maker in Japanese war policy. We let them keep their other national symbols, too: The national flag of Japan today is the same as the one flown a hundred years ago. Then we helped them rebuild their economy.
When the war is a civil war, a civilized tolerance towards the defeated enemy, his sensibilities, his symbols, his grief for his dead, and his wish to honor their sacrifice, is doubly necessary. Victor and vanquished have to live together as fellow citizens ”” tolerant of social differences, but firm in the belief that they must function together as citizens of a single nation.
Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant understood that. The architects of the post-WW2 global peace understood it ”” men like George C. Marshall, George Kennan, and Douglas MacArthur.
The Trotskyite fanatics who control today’s public discourse do not understand it. Or rather: They understand the principle, but despise it. They represent, essentially, a regression to barbarism, to the ethics of Brennus the Gaul. For them, it is not sufficient that the defeated enemy has been defeated. He must also be humiliated, his symbols defaced and burned, his face pushed down into the mud. Woe to the vanquished!
These fanatics will not rest until all those fine statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue have been defaced and destroyed; until every street or square named for a Southern hero has been renamed for some black communist, philanderer, or crook; until every trace of what our ancestors believed, felt, and fought for has been discredited and mocked.
Just today I read in the New York Post some yammering fool telling me that Gone With the Wind, one of the best American movies ever made, from a very fine novel, should be hidden away in museums for fear it might offend someone.
Well, here’s what I say to that. The hell with these vandals and their barbarian values! The Civil War was fought by Americans of courage and honor on both sides. Inevitably one side won and the other lost, so that instead of two separate nations we ended up with two distinct sections within one nation. Each can honor the valor and sacrifice of the other, without loss of face or honor.
That’s how mature people behave. That’s how mature nations behave. That’s how Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant behaved. That’s how George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur behaved. That’s how Americans at large behaved until recently; until Cultural Marxism fixed its clammy grip on the national soul, insisting that all right is here, all evil is there, and all dissent from official dogma is sick and cruel.
We are relapsing into barbarism, ladies and gentlemen. The current campaign against the South and its symbols ”” what I call the Cold Civil War ”” is the manifestation of that relapse. The South accepted its fate, as defeated peoples must. Out of that acceptance came a great modern nation, the U.S.A. of the 20th century. That nation is now being destroyed by people who hate it. American patriots, and everyone who believes in civilized values, should resist that.
22 Comments
Let’s see, attack the American South for political opportunism but open an embassy in Communist Cuba for a “new beginning”. Those jails where the Castros keep their enemies are still there. Here in the American South we have no slaves anymore. Only too many Democrats who manage to self enslave themselves to their party and then come out in public every 4 years and do it all over again. Doing the same thing over and over expecting….well hell. Why bother.
“That nation is now being destroyed by people who hate it. American patriots, and everyone who believes in civilized values, should resist that”. we will
You could spend years reading John Derbyshire’s writings, and still not find an insight of value. This article is no exception.
There is the usual hysteria. Public discourse is not “controlled by Trotskyite fanatics” who represent “a regression to barbarism.” Richmond statues have not been destroyed. Streets, parks, and schools have not been renamed to honor “black communists, philanderers, or crooks.” Cultural Marxism has not “fixed its clammy grip on the national soul.” And, in the last sentence, he wraps himself in patriotism and civilized values; one wonders why honoring a seditious and treasonous armed rebellion against the United States is in any way patriotic, or why opposing its cause slavery reeks of barbarism.
Derbyshire ignores the fact that the traitors in the Confederate army started a war to maintain slavery and human bondage. Their cause was ignoble and immoral, despite Derbyshire’s attempt to posit a moral parity between North and South.
The Confederate flag is not about “honoring valor,” as Derbyshire suggests. It is a symbol of slavery, cruelty, and oppression. It started flying over state capitols in the early 1960’s, when Southern states resisted integration and civil rights for blacks. Dylann Roof did not drape himself in the Confederate flag because he was honoring the army of Northern Virginia; he expressed his hatred of blacks with the symbol of white supremacy and black subjugation.
Derbyshire has no concern with how black Americans might feel when a symbol of their oppression and slavery flies above their state capitol. As someone who was fired from National Review for publishing what its editor described as an “appalling” and racist article, I suppose it is too much to ask him to understand how the grandchildren of slaves might find that upsetting and offensive.
He bases his defense of the Confederacy, and its flag, on the suffering and bravery of its soldiers. Plenty of Nazi soldiers acted bravely in battle, and they suffered enormously. Like the Confederate flag, the swastika is a symbol of genocide, human bondage, and the subjugation of a hated minority. It is as much a part of German heritage as the Stars and Bars are of Southern heritage. Does Derbyshire advocate flying the Nazi flag in Berlin?
For God’s sake, Peter, just stop already. Doesn’t it ever surprise you that you always think perfectly in lockstep with whatever the vanguard of the liberal cultural-demolition machine happens to be saying this week? I’ve known you for over forty years; I don’t recall your ever once being bothered by the Confederate flag until suddenly all the social-justice warriors of the Left started, in Borg-like unison, to call for the damnation of the South. Even a majority of Southern blacks have no objection to this symbol, but suddenly, this week, the sight of it is just too painful for you to endure? What a lot of pious horseshit. Your sycophancy to this movement, and to the man who leads it, should embarrass you.
The MSM is spinning madly, don’t fall for this orchestrated symbol driven agitprop that has been breech birthed by the murders in Charleston, SC. These people have a presidential candidate that should be in prison orange, not the hope–even the best the Democrat party can do anymore. They know it. Thus we will get 24/7 by the media and Democrats that which they must do to accommodate a candidate that is nothing more than a soulless sociopath. America’s oldest political party has at long last come to this. It is hoped that this race baiting campaign will move blacks to come out for Hillary in 2016. Nothing more.
More of your hogwash I cannot pass over in silence: the Confederacy was not “seditious and treasonous”; they had no wish to overthrow the government of the United States. They simply wished, just as the Founders had a century earlier, to “dissolve the political bonds that had connected them with another”. Nor were they Nazis, bent on mass murder and global conquest. The institution they sought to preserve violated no American law, and had they not seceded, the flag of the United States would have continued to fly over slave and free States alike. Nor were the Union leaders, including Lincoln himself, any more believers in equality of the races than the soldiers and politicians of the South. The hypocritical moral preening and revisionist history of this Jacobin mob, in which you are very obviously a happy participant, is sickening.
Your example shows that it is just as Derb said: insisting “that all right is here, all evil is there, and all dissent from official dogma is sick and cruel”.
Malcolm, I agree with just about everything you say, but the photo to which you link shows Roof burning the US flag, not the Confederate flag, as you seem to be saying it does.
You are right, djf. Link (and paragraph) deleted. Contrary to what I had said, and of no other interest whatsoever, Dylann Roof does seem to have had an affinity for the Confederate cause.
I would add, Malcolm, that I think you’re too generous to Confederacy in your 10:51 post. But, understandably so, in view of the provocation. And I agree, this sudden jihad against the Confederate battle flag should be resisted, as it is not really about the Confederacy or the country’s past sins against black people. These creepy zealots are not going to be satisfied with banning The Dukes of Hazard. All of America’s historical memory must be eliminated and replaced with a Manichean leftist narrative.
As Louis Farakhan remarked just after the murders and the flag flap…”why the Confederate flag, I don’t get it. What about the American flag?” Sounds pretty far fetched doesn’t it. But if you keep up with any college and university history “teaching”, it really isn’t. Even public school history books bring America into doubt and rebuke. The American flag will come along as its symbol. There is more at work here, slowly, than just an old Confederate flag.
http://www.infowars.com/video-americans-have-no-idea-why-they-are-celebrating-the-4th-of-july/
http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/07/pentagon-rename-confederate-bases-army-values/
Asked what Americans were celebrating on the 4th of July, another woman said that Independence Day was to recognize “the day that we overtook the south….it’s our independence….from the south”
I don’t even know what to say. Bug god damn Americans are a special kind of stupid.
That nation is also being destroyed by the people who love those people who don’t love that nation.
Malcolm,
I used to think that your tolerance for the troll’s chronic vituperation was excessive. But I see his idiotic usefulness. It reminds us how obsessively the Left hates this great nation which enables the cretins who want to destroy it.
Eh, TBH.
Reason you dropped out of all this was because … an alliance you would not go.
Turrubull spot to be in i’t?
Henry, speaking of liberals as constant useful idiots–http://www.sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/06/no-truce-with-left.html
The Confederate flag is the flag of Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Orville Faubus, and Jim Crow. We can now add Dylann Roof to this list. If I never expressed my revulsion to it before, it is only because it should not even be a matter of controversy. This has nothing to do with what you condescendingly refer to as “social-justice warriors of the Left” or being au courant. I probably never said that racial segregation, stoning adulterers, and the designated hitter rule are all crimes against nature. Some things are so blindingly obvious that there is no reason to discuss them.
If refusing to follow federal law, firing on Fort Sumter, and starting a civil war are not acts of sedition and treason, then I don’t know what is.
Lincoln was most definitely a greater believer “in equality of the races than the soldiers and politicians of the South.” He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and voted against it. He explicitly opposed slavery in 1854 – stating that “I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world” – and he continued to oppose it as a moral abomination. His opposition to slavery was prominent and explicit in his debates with Douglas, which is why he was elected with no support from the South. Once elected, he gave the Gettysburg Address, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and made the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment his key legislative priority in his second term. The contrast with “the soldiers and politicians of the South” could not possibly be clearer. This is not “revisionist history.” It is what actually happened.
In any event, I hope you have a great Fourth of July. My daughter — who plans to vote for Bernie Sanders — and her cousin Jordan (Dave’s oldest) are coming over for barbecue. As you enjoy the national holiday, you can be proud that you live in an America which has never been stronger, more prosperous, or closer to its founding ideal of all men being created equal and its Fourteenth Amendment ideal of equal treatment under the law. It’s a great country. America has never been in as good a place as it is today, and our best days are still ahead of us.
No, Peter. We saw Confederate flags all our lives; they were just a familiar symbol of the American South. If they bothered you every time you saw one, you would have said so.
Lincoln was willing to put forward a Constitutional amendment that would make slavery legal in perpetuity in slave states, if it would have kept the Union together. He also often expressed his belief in the inequality of the races.
For example:
And:
And:
Again: the Confederacy was not seditious, or treasonous; they sought not to overthrow the U.S. government, but to secede from it. The Confederacy had received assurances from no less than the Secretary of State that Fort Sumter would be evacuated. As ‘Mencius Moldbug’ explains, regarding the massing of a Union fleet in Charleston Harbor:
Once elected, he gave the Gettysburg Address, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and made the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment his key legislative priority in his second term.
Don’t forget about suspending the right of habeus copus.
It’s a great country. America has never been in as good a place as it is today, and our best days are still ahead of us.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Joseph Goebbels
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2014/09/lincoln_s_back_to_africa_solution.1.html
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Perhaps. Lester, George, and Orville at least *enjoyed living memories* … notable One-Eye (to my way of thinking; maybe you don’t have any appreciation of, those guys were all *mature men and politicians* … Dylan Roof … pretty much “a nobody” influenced by
Not only the “Acceptable UnAcceptably Confederate (as supposed) Flag” but equally influenced by the Internet.
If Roof was so unacceptably influenced by the former why is it y’all aren’t so incensed at the latter? And what about that Gold’s Gym t-shirt? That Roof was driving a Hyundai ought make us all outraged at South Korea too? Was he wearing Hanes underwear?
Expediency? *Business Interests*?
Selective Outrage Convenience?
Gettysburg Address: November 1863 – at which point the war was nearly concluded.
Emancipation Proclamation: January 1863
(Lincoln’s birth-state of Kentucky. Just those states “still in Rebellion”
Baltimore and Ferguson being in states not.)