Three Confederate Prisoners at Gettysburg

The Confederate Flag is a popular graphic icon in America, North and South, East and West. It is historically associated with the Civil War, of course, being the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and all that, but actually its contemporary display usually has only the dimmest possible connection to the War for Southern Independence.

The Confederate flag has genuine Confederate associations when used to decorate graves in Civil War cemeteries or when displayed at war memorials, but such cases represent only a tiny minority of instances of its appearance.

One sees the Confederate flag much more commonly on cars, pick-up trucks, tractors, ATVs, and motorcycles, on key-rings, sports team mascots, lunchboxes, and on souvenir coffee cups, and every variety of tourist kitsch.

Left-wing hysterics are presently screaming that Confederate flag must be taken to symbolize the “malignant spirit” of slavery and white supremacy, but this is all a bunch of entirely subjective nonsense really represent their own personal demons, hatreds, and obsessions.

The Confederate flag is almost always seen today simply as an attractive graphic device taken by popular culture as a symbolic expression of a generalized Southern or Appalachian, or even merely rural, regional identity, or as a symbol of some kind of elusive and indefinable spirit of masculine rebelliousness. The Confederate flag is about as popular in rural Oregon and Pennsylvania as it is in Alabama. West Virginia came into being as separate state because the residents of Virginia’s Western mountains were Unionist and against Secession, but West Virginians happily display Confederate flags as regional (and class) identity symbols.

The Confederate flag, as near as I can tell, has today far more intense and intimate associations with a passion for the internal combustion engine than it does with States’ Rights. All the talk about black people recoiling from Confederate flags, like vampires from crucifixes, is simply a very recent activist invention.

If you want to read a bunch of complete malarkey and poppycock served up as agitprop by a hate-filled American Studies professor from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, try this bunch of dreck out of Salon. Its author, Nick Bromell, wants to repeal the First Amendment and make any display whatever punishable as a hate crime.

These people like playing a seriously nasty game. The way it works is your race-baiting agitator, democrat pol, or radical leftist prof gets to define what you mean when you display a symbol. His interpretation is lurid, colorful, and spectacularly uncomplimentary. When you put that Confederate flag on the side of your Harley, you meant to say that you are some kind of a rebel. But Professor Bromell and Congressman John Lewis and Al Sharpton will jump in, and put words in your mouth for you. According to them, you are saying: “I hate black people. I want to restore Slavery.”

These left-wing troublemakers are not just having fun at your expense either. Their game is serious. They are angling for power. If they can define what you mean by your symbols, then they hope they can ban them, and along with them any and all of your beliefs and ideas that they don’t like.

Pat Buchanan warns that as the establishment community of fashion moves farther and farther away from, and becomes ever more hostile and contemptuous toward, the values, symbols, and religious beliefs of normal, ordinary Americans, the divisions they are creating are growing deeper and deeper and are ever more likely to manifest themselves in unpleasant ways.

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

Something like that is happening in the country.

A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural and political views and values, is taking place.

America is disuniting, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 25 years ago.

And for those who, when young, rejected the views, values and laws of Eisenhower’s America, what makes them think that dissenting Americans in this post-Christian and anti-Christian era will accept their laws, beliefs, values?

Why should they?

The Daily Currant:

Seven people were killed this morning when a Confederate flag walked into an Alabama shopping mall and started shooting.

According to local reports, the flag entered Cherrywood Mall outside Huntsville armed with two AK-47 assault rifles, a P 228 handgun and several grenades. It immediately proceeded to unload its ordinance on unsuspecting shoppers.

In addition to those killed, 23 people were injured and are currently being treated in area emergency rooms. Several are in critical condition and not expected to survive.

The flag’s motivations are uncertain at the moment. However, according to witnesses the flag did specifically target White people with Northern accents.

“The flag chased us down the hallway screaming ‘Die, Yankees Die!’, says Justin Anderson, a aeronautical engineer originally from New Hampshire. “Luckily flags don’t move very fast, so my girlfriend and I managed to outrun it.”

Complete story.

Kevin D. Williamson attributes the outbreak of national Confederate Flag hysteria to the Left’s increasing sense of panic as the Age of Obama slinks and scuttles toward its end, but notes that, despite unfavorable electoral prospects, the Left can still lead much of the country around by the nose.

You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective.

Read the whole thing.

“Sergeant A.M. Chandler of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, Co. F., and Silas Chandler, family slave, with Bowie knives, revolvers, pepper-box, shotgun, and canteen.” Handwritten label on back of frame: “Andrew Martin Chandler, born 1844, died 1920. Servant Silas Chandler. 44th Mississippi Regiment, Col. A.K. Blyth. Wounded in battle of Chickamauga.”

In 1861, A.M. Chandler enlisted in the Palo Alto Confederates, which became part of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. His mother, Louisa Gardner Chandler, sent Silas, one of her 36 slaves, with him. On Sept. 20, 1863, the 44th Mississippi was engaged in the Battle of Chickamauga, where Chandler was wounded in his leg. A battlefield surgeon decided to amputate but, according to the Chandler family, Silas accompanied him home to Mississippi where the limb was saved. His master’s combat service ended as a result of the wound but Silas returned to the war in January 1864 when A.M.’s younger brother, Benjamin, enlisted in the 9th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment.

Via vanderleun.

A study by Pew Research found liberals are so much more intolerant on the Internet than the rest of us that it isn’t even funny.

Not exactly shocking news for those exposed to them for years, but the respected Pew Research Center has determined that political liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than regular Americans.

In a new study, the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life Project confirmed what most intelligent Americans had long sensed. That is, whenever they are challenged or confronted on the hollow falsity of their orthodoxy — such as, say, uniting diverse Americans — liberals tend to respond defensively with anger, even trying to shut off or silence critics. (i.e. photo above of President Obama reacting to Boston hecklers.)

The new research found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That’s double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.

The proportion jumps even higher when someone on a social site disagrees with a liberal’s post.

Only 1% of moderates would block or shut out someone who dared to disagree with them, compared to 11% of liberals, whose rate was nearly three times that of conservatives.

Of course, it is not as if liberal intolerance is restricted to opposing expression on the Internet…

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn comments on some of the recent national manifestations of liberal tolerance.

Liberals take the same view as the proprietors of the Dar al-Islam: Once they hold this land, they hold it forever. Notwithstanding that those who give to the foundation are specifically giving to support breast-cancer research, Komen could not be permitted to get away with disrespecting Big Abortion. We don’t want to return to the bad old days of the back alley, when a poor vulnerable person who made the mistake of stepping out of line had to be forced into the shadows and have the realities explained to them with a tire iron. Now Big Liberalism’s enforcers do it on the front pages with the panjandrums of tolerance and diversity cheering them all the way. In the wake of Komen’s decision, the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff that its invitation to Nancy Brinker to be its commencement speaker was now “under careful review.” Because God forbid anybody doing a master’s program at an Ivy League institution should be exposed to anyone not in full 100 percent compliance with liberal orthodoxy.