That Priority is Not Mine

As a Catholic Conservative (or indeed Reactionary) I am grateful for Brazil. You know the Empress of Brazil in 1888 ...

The ‘Southern Avenger’* Repents: I Was Wrong About the Confederate Flag

States’ rights? Heritage? I was wrong: The Confederate flag has always been about race.

Is that so? A Hillbilly who joined the Confederate Army and fought under the Confederate Flag, was he racist?

A Black man who fought under Confederate flag, was he racist?

And Unionists who fought under the Union flag, were they all antiracist?

There was a Unionist song where there was a line about first liberating the black slaves - and then sending them to Liberia.

A black man who worked on cotton fields as a slave, was he totally worse off than his brother who, after fleeing north, had become a wage slave in the factories of Chicago?

I was wrong. That flag is always about race. Whatever political or historical points the flag’s defenders make, there will never be a time—and never has been a time—in which millions of Americans have looked at that symbol and not seen hatred.

Whether at the outbreak of the war there were or weren't millions of Unionists who in the flag saw hatred, there were millions of confederates who saw the flag as not being about hatred.

The Duke of Alba, as Belloc said, was a villain in Dutch historiography, but a hero in the Belgian one.

We live in a world where loyalties are divided - and will presumably remain so until there is a final division of two major loyalties, for Christ or for Antichrist. And there too each side will have millions who feel a certain way about the symbols of the other side.

But I am here to say there is something at stake far more important than this symbol.

Heritage might not be hate. But battling hate is far more important than anyone’s heritage, politics, or just about anything else. We should have different priorities.

I now have different priorities.

Hate is not battled. Hate is sometimes abandoned by someone hating others, and usually only if he has enough calm to abandon it. Battling "hate" too often means oppressing "haters" in too hateful ways, which make it finally easy to document that they harbour the emotion of hatred.

Dylann Roof is a reminder of what’s at stake.

Indeed. But not exactly as former Southern Avenger thinks.

He may have been a white suprematist when doing his illdeeds. But before that there may have been a time when he simply felt his Southern nostalgia was being oppressed, unduly. If that is not his case, it is the case of several others, perhaps not so radical, but more pervasive in the rise of race hatred and brutality.

Understand this: Imagine your great-grandfather was a slave. Imagine your great-grandfather was lynched. Imagine your grandfather was forced to drink from a separate fountain. Imagine your father or mother was murdered by a deranged man with the Confederate flag all over his website.

Imagine these kinds of horrors were your American heritage. Imagine every time you saw a Confederate flag it reminded you of this.

Now imagine being told you don’t understand what the flag “really” means.

It’s an insult.

Imagine you are dealing with a Jew. His grandparents disappeared in Auschwitz and his best guess about them is they were gassed in such and such a year or month, not sure of the date.

He feels the swastika is just another cross, and the cross just another pagan swastika.

Shall you give up on the cross because he feels that way? You can possibly leave him alone because he is grieving (if he is still grieving for sth that happened 70 years ago). But do you need to give up Christianity because he is misinformed about its relation to Nazism?

Of course NOT!

And imagine that Jew is also insulting you because you are into certain Fascist causes - you specifically mention Austrofascism. He then tells you that even if Austrofascists never killed non-violent people just because of their origins, they nevertheless targetted Jews economically (as Jews had targetted Germany economically in 1933?) and thus "helped to bring the holocaust about indirectly" - are you supposed to tear out Austria from your heart, trample on the memory of Dollfuss (who was killed by a Nazi) and of von Schuschnigg (who spent 1940 to 1945 in Dachau), and of Karl Lueger (whom they and lots of other Viennese admired) - just because Hitler admired him too?

Of course NOT!

I have a right not to be insulted too, not just the guy who is or pretends to be traumatised and who feels insulted by my loyalties!

A 14-year-old black girl attending a pool party in McKinney, Texas, had been manhandled and thrown to the ground by a police officer. The girl had done nothing except talk. She was just standing there with other teenagers.

It was revolting to watch. I asked others to imagine it was their daughter.

The overwhelming response was that she was a “thug” who was “no saint” and needed to be taught “respect.” The comments were as revolting as the act—an adult mob praising the assault of a 100-pound, half-naked and scared black kid. I pleaded again for people to stop defending this. It got uglier.

I am as revolted as the writer.

But how many of the guys who feel they need to sympathise when someone is "taught respect" first had felt they were not getting any - while at school, perhaps while being taught above attitudes about Southern Nostalgia and not accepting them, asking for respect and not getting it from teachers? How many?

Some portion, I would think. Some of this very ugly mob became such very ugly mobsters precisely because they were too long around teachers who thought their one due priority was "battling hate".

Hate is not battled. Sometimes, hate is abandoned. And sometimes it is enflamed. But "battling hate" means battling someone else's hate against who you think deserves no hatred.

I thought a big part of being conservative meant picking a “side” and attacking the other. I thought not caring what others thought or felt was part of it. Some of my Confederate flag debates certainly reflected that mentality.

This is something ideologues do and is by no means exclusive to the right, as evidenced by the way some liberals cartoonishly portray conservatives, Christians, and, yes, Southerners.

True enough.

But some people who are still defending the Confederate Flag are not such.

There are sides which do need to be taken no matter how misinformed people feel about it - as my parallel about the upcoming Harmageddon scenario should suggest.

As a Catholic Conservative (or indeed Reactionary) I am grateful for Brazil.

Slavery was ended because a royal was generous - and hatred was avoided because hitherto slave owners were not considered as either criminals in general or "war criminals". And that is what earlier had been achieved by one Wilberforce in the English Commonwealth as well.

And I am grateful for Queen Saint Balthild:

When Clovis [II] died (between 655 and 658), his eldest son Clotaire succeeded to the throne, aged five. His mother Balthild acted as the queen regent. As queen, she was a capable stateswoman. She abolished the practice of trading Christian slaves and strove to free children who had been sold into slavery. This claim is corroborated by Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, who mentions that Balthild and Saint Eloi (who was also known as Eligius, according to Dado)[8] “worked together on their favorite charity, the buying and freeing of slaves”. [Reference to: Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, Ca. 500-1100 By Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg]

Finally, a point:

A 14-year-old girl at a pool party isn’t a “thug” who deserves abuse. She’s a child. Decent people should view her as such.

She was no thug, but neither is she a child. The marital age limits of the Catholic Church through centuries have been the 14/12 limit (girls develop quicker than boys, in medium two years quicker). Adolescents are not children, and lots of adolescence problems come of modern society treating them as what they aren't.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Sts John and Paul of Rome
martyrs under Julian Apostate
26-VI-2015

* Jack Hunter - he often appeared in a wrestling mask. I never did. And if I say sth hurtful, to some codebater, I try to make it either of necessity and as little hurtful as possible or in measure for measure the hurtful things he says.