The War on White Heritage
Source: amren.com
Written July 2000 By Sam Francis
After years of bitter controversy, the South Carolina legislature voted in May to take down the Confederate battle flag that has flown over the state capitol in Columbia since 1962 and to move it to “a place of honor” at the Confederate Soldiers Memorial located on the capitol grounds. The legislature’s vote on the flag is regarded as a defeat for the defenders of the flag, mainly a coalition of Southern traditionalist groups and Civil War buffs, and a victory for the opposing coalition that demanded the removal of the flag: the NAACP, Big Business, and an odd partnership of political liberals and conservatives.
Many white Americans, especially those outside the South, have shown little interest in the controversy and wonder why it even exists. They regard the issue as one of exclusively Southern, historical, or black interest and fail to see the larger implications of the controversy for themselves. The fact is, however, that the conflict over Confederate symbols is not only about those symbols or even about honoring the Confederacy, but also about issues of national and racial heritage with which all white Americans should be concerned regardless of what they think of the Civil War or where they live.
Southern traditionalists and Civil War buffs honor the Confederate flag and similar symbols for a variety of reasons, but those symbols are as much a part of general American history as the “Don’t Tread On Me” rattlesnake flag of the American Revolution or the Lone Star flag of the Republic of Texas. Until recently, few Americans saw any difference between honoring and displaying those historic banners of American legend and honoring and displaying the Confederate battle flag or the several other flags associated with the Confederacy.
Only with the advent of the “civil rights” era and of mandated racial equality have the Confederate flag and all other symbols associated with the Confederacy been singled out for attack, and of course the reason is that these flags and symbols are the emblems of a government and culture that was based on slavery and racial inequality. In an age in which the egalitarian imperative is absolute and “racism” is virtually a religious taboo, continuing to honor and display these symbols in public–especially by state and local governments–constitutes an outright act of resistance to the dominant egalitarian orthodoxies.
Moreover, the NAACP, which has been crusading against Confederate symbols for decades, is increasingly tipping its true hand, revealing that behind its overblown rhetoric about the flag (a 1991 NAACP resolution characterized the Confederate flag as “an odious blight upon the universe” and “the ugly symbol of idiotic white supremacy racism and denigration” [sic]) and the Confederacy lies another, far broader, and much more radical agenda. The NAACP and similar groups want the removal and erasure not only of Confederate symbolism but also of a wide range of symbols and icons from American history that have no association with the Confederacy or the ante-bellum South. The purpose of this attack is to emphasize that American civilization itself is “racist” and that virtually all the symbols, icons, heroes, songs, and institutions of the American past or at least its most important and defining ones have to be discarded or radically reconstructed to suit the new “anti-racist” dogmas the NAACP upholds.
In launching this broad attack on the historic symbolism of America, the NAACP is embarking on what is almost explicitly a revolutionary course, intended eventually to lead to the destruction of the traditional civilization of the United States and the establishment of a new, purportedly egalitarian, and essentially totalitarian order that replaces the real, historic traditions of the American past with the fabricated propaganda and “Afrocentric” racial mythology of which the NAACP approves.
In this new order, whites–whether Southern or not–would be denied any public affirmation of their cultural and historical identity, and the denial of their identity would more easily allow their cultural and political subjugation to the non-white majority that has been projected to emerge in the United States in the next half century. The end result of the attack on Confederate symbolism, in other words, is not merely the disappearance of the Confederate flag, “Dixie,” and other symbols and customs of interest mainly to Southerners and Civil War buffs but, in time, the eradication of all symbols from pre-1960s America that suggest a white-based or “Eurocentric” public identity. With their disappearance and the cultural and racial dispossession it represents would come the racial domination of white Americans by the non-white majority of the next century.
The crusade against Confederate symbolism is so far the most developed part of the anti-white attack on American civilization, and the NAACP and other black nationalist groups have emphasized such symbols because, given their historical association with slavery, they can more easily build a case against them and attract the support of white allies. Given the power of egalitarian propaganda, few mainstream leaders, either conservative or liberal, are willing to defend Confederate symbolism, and some of the most effective enemies of the flag have been Republicans, “conservatives,” or white Southerners themselves.
In the 1990s, the war on public Confederate symbolism escalated dramatically, with the NAACP demanding the removal of Confederate flags flown over state capitols in Alabama as well as South Carolina. In the former state, the governor removed the flag after a state judge ruled in 1993 that flying it violated state law. Also in 1993, the white liberal Democratic governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, sought to alter the design of his state’s official flag, which contains a Confederate battle flag, on the grounds that it would be an “embarrassment” to the state during the Olympic Games scheduled for 1996. The governor’s efforts were unsuccessful. In Mississippi, there are current demands to remove the Confederate battle flag in the corner of the state flag, and the governor has appointed a commission to consider doing so. There are also controversies about the state flags of Arkansas and Florida, which contain designs either symbolizing the Confederacy or resembling its flag.
In addition to attacks on the flag, songs such as Virginia’s state anthem “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” and Maryland’s “Maryland, My Maryland” have also been attacked as “racist.” At the University of Mississippi, the Confederate flag and similar symbols, including the football team mascot, “Colonel Reb,” a caricature of a Confederate officer, have been banned by the university administration.
Virginia, and especially the state (and Confederate) capital of Richmond, has been the scene of some of the most bitter and far-reaching attacks on Confederate symbolism. The construction of a statue of black tennis player Arthur Ashe in 1995-96 on Richmond’s Monument Avenue–famous for statues honoring Confederate leaders–was intended to disrupt the symbolism of the monuments. In 1999, another controversy erupted in Richmond over a mural that displayed a picture of Robert E. Lee. Black city councilman Sa’ad El-Amin demanded that it be removed and threatened violence if it were not. “Either it comes down or we jam,” he said. The Lee portrait was later firebombed and defaced with anti-white invectives and racial epithets (“white devil, black baby killer, kill the white demons”). Earlier this year Mr. El-Amin and other blacks on the city council voted to remove the names of Confederate generals from two bridges in the city and rename them after local “civil rights” leaders. El-Amin also announced that “Monument Avenue is on my list of targets.”
The NAACP also embarked on a campaign to force the Virginia governor to cancel annual proclamations of April as “Confederate History Month” and threatened a boycott of the state if the custom were continued. “Anything less” than promising not to issue the proclamation again “is unacceptable,” Salim Khalfani, state director of the NAACP, proclaimed. On May 10, Republican Governor James Gilmore reached a “compromise” that consisted of a promise to “reconsider” Confederate History Month and to meet regularly with NAACP leaders if they did not proceed with plans for a boycott. It is probable that proclamations of “Confederate History Month” will be discontinued.
It has been in South Carolina, however, that the most protracted controversies over the Confederate flag have taken place. The state legislature in 1961 enacted a public law mandating that the Confederate battle flag be flown over the state capitol dome beneath the American flag and the state flag. Contrary to what the flag’s enemies have asserted, this was not so much defiance of the “civil rights” movement as the desire, encouraged by the U.S. Congress and President Eisen-hower, to mark the centennial of the Civil War. The flag at that time was largely uncontroversial, and it remained so until the early 1990s.
In 1994, the NAACP announced it would boycott the state unless the flag were removed, but a populist campaign under the leadership of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) was able to prevent the flag’s removal, and in the gubernatorial campaign of that year, the Republican candidate David Beasley promised he would not seek to take down the flag. Soon after being elected, however, Gov. Beasley embarked on a campaign to do just that. Flag supporters and the CofCC went on to lead a movement to unseat the governor for his betrayal. Gov. Beasley was defeated in his re-election campaign in 1998; he has since acknowledged that his reversal of position on the flag was the main reason for his defeat.
In 1999 the NAACP returned to the fight, announcing yet another boycott. This time the boycott attracted the support of liberal organs like the New York Times and Washington Post. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Urban League, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the National Progressive Baptist Convention all canceled conventions in South Carolina. The state Chamber of Commerce told Republican lawmakers that “businesses were considering cutting off campaign contributions to lawmakers who support the flag,” and major foreign corporations that have built plants in the state–BMW and Michelin Tire–also demanded that the issue be “resolved quickly” (meaning that the legislators accede to black demands).
Flag defenders were by no means idle during the controversy, and in October, 1999, and January 2000, they staged mass demonstrations in Columbia. Nevertheless, the charges of “racism” lobbed at anyone who defended the flag, threats to the $14.5 billion-a-year tourism industry, and the general desire for acceptance by the cultural mainstream all led to a “compromise” measure that relocated the flag to the Confederate Soldiers Memorial. As Julian Bond, national president of the NAACP, remarked, “Money talks.”
But the removal of the flag in South Carolina can be expected only to unleash an even more frenetic crusade against Confederate symbols. As Dr. Neill Payne, executive director of the Southern Legal Resource Center, remarked just afterwards, the vote simply means that it is now “open season on all things Confederate.” Flag enemy Georgia state Rep. Tyrone Brooks explained, “It’s like the civil rights movement. Once we win in South Carolina, we move to Georgia. Once we win in Georgia, it’s on to Mississippi.” The vote in South Carolina only encourages the NAACP and its allies and creates further problems for the mainstream conservatives and businessmen whose principal concern is to avoid controversy.
Indeed, while the main reason for the retreat in South Carolina was fear of the boycott, the NAACP not only refused to call off the boycott after the vote but threatened to intensify it unless the flag were removed from the capitol grounds entirely. NAACP national executive director Kweisi Mfume complained that “to take it from the top of the dome where you had to strain to see it, and move it to a place where anyone coming down the main street will see it is an insult.” Even as the House voted to adopt the compromise measure, black demonstrators burned Confederate and Nazi flags at the Confederate Soldiers Memorial and then sprayed anti-white invectives on the monument itself.
The premise of the compromise was an acknowledgment that while the Confederacy is an important and legitimate part of the South Carolina heritage, it is not (as flying the Confederate flag over the capitol might be taken to imply) the whole or the dominant part of it. Yet the NAACP’s demand that any honoring of the flag be abolished refuses to concede that the Confederacy has any legitimate place in South Carolina or American history at all. The rejection of the Southern and American past was implicit in signs carried by black anti-flag demonstrators last winter that read, “Your Heritage Is Our Slavery.” In rejecting the heritage of the South as merely one of their own enslavement and exploitation, blacks are in effect affirming that they are not part of the culture and nation that are the present-day product of that heritage. What they presumably want celebrated and honored is not the real heritage of the South, in which blacks played a major if subordinate role and from which blacks have derived much of their own cultural identity, but the total extirpation of those parts of the Southern past they find “offensive” (i.e., anything that does not glorify blacks) and the rewriting of the past to magnify and glorify the achievements of their own race.
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