April, as you probably do not know, is Confederate History Month. In less politically correct days, Southern governors had no more problem proclaiming it than they did in proclaiming National Pickle Week. Nowadays most governors are too yellow.
its unfortunate that a few demagogues and hate-mongers insist on associating the Confederate battle flag with racism, but, hey, you don't exactly expect knowledge or reasoned debate from racist bigots.
The battle flag -- the red one with the cross of St. Andrews -- was carried by one of the noblest armies ever to take the field. Its members were the last of the chivalrous knights. Sir Winston Churchill said that the Confederate Army's fight against overwhelming odds is one of the most glorious moments in Anglo-Saxon history. H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, said that the only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
It fought for a good cause -- independence and the right of self-government and the rule of law. Those are such good things so worth fighting for it's no wonder Yankee propaganda keeps repeating the lie that it was fighting to preserve slavery.
In 1860, of 7 million non-slaves in the South, only 384,000 owned any slaves at all. That means that 6.6 million Southerners were non-slave owners, and if you think that they would leave their homes and farms to fight for the planters' right to own slaves, you don't know much about Southern culture.
Another false image of the South is that people were either rich slave owners or slaves. There were, in fact, several thousands of free blacks living in the South, and some of them owned slaves. The South was quite diverse and multicultural, with French, Spanish and German, not to mention Indian languages, often heard. The 10th Louisiana Regiment was known as Robert E. Lee's "foreign legion." Its volunteers hailed from more than 50 countries.
Over in South Carolina, where the flag still flies over the capitol, four college football coaches joined a march by about 30 people on that day protesting the flag. There is an easy explanation for that.
Despite the fact that football is a sacred subject in the South, the Southeastern Conference football teams are now virtually all black. Southern coaches certainly don't want anything as trivial as history to interfere with their recruiting efforts. They all screamed like scalded dogs when somebody said their athletes had to score at least 700 of a possible 1600 on the SAT to qualify for a scholarship. Most of them are willing to sacrifice a lot more than history, honor and tradition to field a winning team so they can get paid to hawk Fords and lumber on television.
Post-modern folks who would sacrifice any principle for the sake of making a buck or avoiding a controversy do not impress those of us who would preserve the good name of the Confederate soldier who sacrificed his life for the sake of liberty and independence.
The proper name for such pitiful folks, if they are Southerners, is scalawags.
All of us true Southerners have nothing against folks who aren't Southern. We have long since been willing to be reconciled, but there are some people who just won't leave us alone. They insist on insulting our ancestors, distorting our history and, in short, attempting to commit cultural genocide. They want to tear down our monuments and rename our streets and schools until they have blotted out every sign of our past. We have no choice but to resist.
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