That Belongs in a Museum!

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The Confederate Battle Flag shouldn’t be flying from any government building, full stop.

That flag was raised in armed rebellion against our central government to defend the pure evil of human slavery.

The South, as I argued on Trifecta this week, has much to be proud of. This country’s best food and best music — some of the best in the world — trace their origins to the South. Ironically, the states of the old Confederacy have come to represent the best, sometimes I think the last, of our founding principles. The South is economically vibrant in the way the North once was, thanks in no small part to the crushing of that armed rebellion and the end of slavery.

While the South does indeed have much to be proud of, that battle flag isn’t part of it — at least not in any official way.

Jeb Bush when he was governor of Florida got it exactly right when he ordered the flag removed from state buildings, as this Washington Post story shows:

In 2001, one writer said Bush “risks the next election by taking the action he took on removing the flag.”

Yet Bush won the next election in Florida — and not everyone was as outraged by his decision to move the flag to a history museum.

One fellow Republican, from Orange County in the Orlando area, told Bush he disagreed with those in the party who had criticized his move.

“I believe that the action to remove the confederate flag was an appropriate and appreciated act of respect to many Floridians — especially African-Americans — for whom it holds a very different, and far less positive meaning,” he wrote in March 2001, a month after the flag came down. ”I applaud you for respecting those wishes and sensibilities from communities whose wishes and sensibilities have not always been respected.”

Just after the flag came down in 2001, a woman wrote Bush, “You have no right to impose your northern prejudices and misconceptions on the people of Florida and to snub your nose at its history.”

The governor replied that the flags would be “respectfully displayed” at the history museum.

Respectfully displayed in a museum — this, yes.

It’s one thing to remove the flag from government buildings, which is justifiably, perhaps correctly even, viewed as an endorsement of racism and slavery. Remember that the battle flag was raised by a Democratic legislature over the South Carolina statehouse, after a century’s absence, in defiance of the flowering Civil Rights Movement in 1962.

But now, almost inevitably, the Left is pushing to drop the flag down the memory hole, to scrub American history because they can, to blot out the First Amendment, to take a region with many things to be proud of and attempt to fill it with shame.

Read:

Following Walmart, Sears and eBay, mega online seller Amazon and crafts site Etsy say they will ban sales of Confederate flag merchandise, after the products experienced a surge in popularity.

Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. is joining the ban on Confederate flag sales, a spokesman for the company confirmed to ABC News, with its more than 2 million third-party sellers.

In the last 24 hours, the top five biggest sales rank gainers on Amazon.com, or “movers and shakers,” of the “patio, lawn and garden” category have been Confederate flag products, according to the website.

Will these retailers ban Che Guevara shirts? He did after all murder gays for being gay, inaugurate Cuba’s forced labor camp system, and worked hard to take common soldiers and peasants and turn them into “effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine[s].”

Will Amazon take down its collection of Communist flags, the ideology responsible for the murder of perhaps as many as 100 million human beings during the 20th Century?

No, of course not. The American Left is quite happy to exalt murderous ideologies and ideologues when it suits their political purposes. And scrubbing the nation of Confederate symbols isn’t about fighting racism. It’s about forcing people they don’t like to shut up, protecting the tender widdle feelings of grown up children in need of trigger warnings, and as another Lilliputian rope secured across the First Amendment.

The flag does belong “respectfully displayed” in museums — or on the back of your pickup truck or even flying in front of your home. I wouldn’t fly it anywhere, but that’s my choice — and a choice each American is supposed be free to make for themselves.

Those on the Left however, with their enduring love for Che and their Communist kitsch, cannot brook any dissent. And American corporations, browbeaten for years at street level and by Washington, will go along.

Our history is being erased, one symbol and one tradition at a time, so that all comrades might enjoy that glorious future together, when everything not mandatory is forbidden, and all feelings are happy feelings.

Pass the soma.

UPDATE: The very first comment is from Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Reader™ Tim Maguire, and he has a point worth addressing. Read:

I was with you until you shifted gears. Most of the commenters on the blogs I read seem to ignore that fact that, while the Confederate flag may mean many things to many people, it most of all represents slavery, Jim Crow, KKK, lynchings, etc. It means that always.

So far nothing illegitimate has happened. Companies have decided to stop carrying a product they’ve decided they no longer want to carry. So what? Yes, some people are being selective in their outrage, but, again, so what? Nobody can be exactly consistent all the time. We can’t rail against that neighbor who didn’t pick up his dog’s poop in proper proportion to our railing against the Khmer Rouge. Liberals think it’s cool to wrap themselves in commie imagery. Well, liberals suck. They’re still right about the Confederate flag.

I have to respectfully disagree with Tim on this one — gears had to be shifted, because the Left won’t allow itself to be satisfied by an honorable victory. They can’t stop at getting the Confederate Battle Flag removed from official government property; they must go on to browbeat Amazon and Walmart into conforming to their vision of America. Dissent will not be tolerated.

Because whether it’s the individual mandate, campus speech codes, or offensive flags, the Left will not and cannot stop until we are all on their plantation.