Bad Reactions to W&L ?

Drosselmeier
Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:09:57 +0000

While I don’t doubt that any private university has the right to ban Confederate flags, I’m too libertarian to really like that idea.

It seems to me the recognition of private property rights would support a private institution’s decision to ban certain speech under Libertarian philosophy, much as an individual might ban profanity in his or her home. If Washington & Lee is private (I know nothing of the school, since it honors a Confederate), then shouldn’t Libertarianism support its right to ban the Confederate Flag? Free speech is not a right in private venues, yes?

I think W & L has the right to ban or publicly display the Confederate Flag on its own property, much as the KKK has the right to ban or display the flag on its property. And as long as the flag stays on its property and is supported by private funds, I literally have no concern about where or how it flies. But I do not think our local and state governments have the right to fly the Confederate Flag on public property because the flag is a scurrilous symbol representing the Southern struggle for the right to explicitly codify the oppression of blacks. To force blacks to literally pay for the display of the symbol of their own oppression is reprehensible.

Surely the KKK has flown the American Flag, just as many a scoundrel has thumped the Bible as they have performed dirty deeds. This makes neither the American Flag nor the Bible inherently filthy symbols in themselves. That is because these symbols did not come into being as a direct symbols oppression. The American Flag was not created to represent an effort explicitly hostile to freedom for blacks. Though blacks were enslaved, even as the Flag took shape, the Revolt that the Flag symbolized was clearly established on a principle hostile to slavery. The proof of this is seen in the response of blacks almost immediately after Jefferson published the philosophy under girding the revolt. Tens of thousands of blacks began to appeal to Jefferson’s principle in view of their own emancipation. Lincoln himself appealed to it as he argued for the end of slavery. He appealed to it as he freed the slaves of rebellious states. MLK came along to appeal to the exact same principle, over a century later, as he argued for increased civil rights for blacks. No such principle existed in the Southern Confederacy. When its battle flag was established, it was already fighting to enshrine in Constitutional Law an unequivocal decree legalizing slavery specifically against blacks. The Confederate Flag’s very purpose was to help the South in its struggle for the right to keep and maintain blacks as slave property.

And this is very clear in the texts left behind by the Southern leaders who had power to promote the Southern war effort. The Vice President of the Confederacy, for example, was very clear in how the United States differed philosophically from the Confederate States. He clearly described how the Founding Fathers established the United States on the foundational belief that all men were created equal. He stated this with astonishing clarity. He also stated that those [“ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”]( http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76) He also claimed that the rupture between North and South (i.e. Secession), and the Civil War itself, was caused by the fact that a new country, the Confederacy, had come into being. And he was very clear that the foundation of this new nation was “exactly the opposite“ of the equality philosophy that under-girded the United States. To put a highlight on his meaning, he explicitly stated that the Confederacy had as its foundation, indeed as its very ‘Cornerstone,’ the philosophy that all men were NOT created equal, but that the natural status of blacks was oppression at the hands of whites. The Southern Confederacy stood as a nation that was philosophically hostile to the very heart and blood of America.

We ought not miss this. Jefferson was clear that because all men are innately equal, they have a right to fight against oppression against themselves. Because all men are equal, he argued, American colonists had a right to create the United States. And, for all his weaknesses, the great man was quite clear that he included blacks in his beliefs. The Confederacy, however, came along to argue that Jefferson was wrong, that all men are not equal, and that as a result, the foundation supporting the existence of the United States was faulty. The Confederacy aimed to cut America down at its philosophical root, and the Confederate Battle Flag was created to better help the South carry out this effort.

I understand how many people still have fantasies of a bucolic South, of sipping mint juleps under a shade tree as the slaves sing and dance in the fields. And I understand how the Confederate Flag might represent this history for them. But we ought to be very clear to understand that the Southern Confederacy was not American. It was established on clearly anti-American principles – principles that explicitly despised the idea that makes America what it is. Its symbols have no legitimate place of honor in any publicly supported American space. Let Washington and Lee support it on its own dime. No one has a moral right to force me or any other American, black or white, to support it in any way.