Confederate Battle flag

I'm a Union Civil War reenactor (42d Pennsylvania -Bucktails) and glad to be one; I think it was best that the Union was preserved and slavery is absolutely indefensible. That said: though it is understandable that some people are offended by the Confederate battle flag and it is proper to make a democratic political effort to remove it from public property, or to defend its presence there, I very much doubt that that will settle the matter.

A maxim concerning the left is that while most people are willing to divert their attention from symbols which anger them, or to offer arguments to counter what those symbols signify, the left always seeks to ban them. In its enforcement of "political correctness" in many settings (eg. "universities") the left has proven its disdain for free expression. True, many conservatives have called for the removal of the flag from public property but they can be counted on to be, well, conservative about carrying this effort any further.  Not so the American left, which orchestrates proposals to outlaw any display of the flag, to mandate destruction of Confederate monuments and to remove Confederate names from public and ,no doubt eventually, private property, by force of law if necessary.  Of course if they get their way we can expect consequent efforts to similarly denigrate the U.S. flag and our nation's founders.

What is their motivation? Hate.  The Confederate battle flag is for many decent people a symbol of a southern style, rural, blue collar, traditional, relaxed mode of living and a thumb in the eye to those who would interfere with the freedom to live such a life.. The left, which is dominated by overeducated east and west coast elitists, despises these people and has no misgivings about trying to order them about (try running that by Hank Williams Jr. though). Due to the Confederacy having resisted what it saw as an overreaching Federal government, the flag is also an obvious expression of serious and well founded present day concerns about incipient totalitarianism in the U.S.  The twentieth century proved the left to be thoroughly totalitarian and it is natural that American leftists would see such concerns as a mortal threat.

Southerners have been the backbone of our military, which did by the way save the world three times in the twentieth century, for one hundred years. The south and the mountain west are the most patriotic regions in the U.S.  even  though the south was forced back into the Union, but lingering southern resentment over Yankee cultural intrusion should be given the same regard shown to the resentments borne by other once conquered peoples ( eg. Native Americans).  Removal of Confederate names from bases such as Forts Lee, Jackson, Hood etc. would of course serve our very leftist President's intent to harm our military's morale and cohesion and to express his disdain for the very significant segment of the U.S. population which values the memory of the Confederacy ,but would be insensitive (lets see the left defend itself against that charge) to the memory of those Americans who fought resolutely for home and country in the south.

The President recently had our White House bathed in colors symbolizing a cultural and political development many Americans find deeply disturbing.  He ought to display some recognition that the Confederate battle flag, though a historically undeniable symbol of a slave state which had to die and which did die, also today means some good things to some good people;  he ought to call off the hounds, though I'm not holding my breath.   Demosthenes