“Conservative” Commentary Capocons to Racial Socialists, Regarding the Confederate Battle Flag: We’re More PC than You are!

 

Max Boot runs from fire with the battle flag on the right 

[Of related interest:

“Nepotism at Commentary Magazine: An Open Letter”;

“Norman Podhoretz: My Negro Problem—and Ours”; and

“My John Podhoretz Problem—and Ours.”]
 

By Nicholas Stix

Just what is Commentary conserving? Cheese-eating, surrender-monkey Max Boot perfectly illustrates the hypocrisy of contemporary “race-blindness.” The race-blind political propagandist alternates between surrendering to genocidal anti-white cadrists, collaborating with them, as in the piece below, and acting as if one were blind to what they are doing.

Commentary’s teaser to the essay below is, “There Is No Confederate Flag Controversy.”

Denying that there is a controversy is really dangerous, in the way of political sabotage that we have gotten from Republicans and neoconservatives for so many years.

If we are only hearing one side, it is because that side holds the megaphone, and that side responds to its nay-sayers by destroying their lives, and thus cowing everyone else into silence. That totalitarian side is what Max Boot and Commentary Editor John Podhoretz have thrown in with.

Boot reminds me of a Commentary essay I read in the late 1990s or early 2000s, in which Joshua Muravchick denied that there was any schism among conservatives. It was a lie designed to unperson all conservatives that had yet to be unmanned, e.g., paleo-conservatives, and thus dominate the Republican Party on policies and “principles,” without ever debating them.

Muravchick’s editorial was symptomatic of neocon intellectual decline. Were he a real intellectual, and by implication, a real man, he would have lustily joined the battle of ideas.

What I said about Muravchick goes in spades for Boot.

What he and his capocon cohorts are doing is counter-productive.

For a look at their future, consider the white leftist sycophants of The Atlantic’s black supremacist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has zero tolerance for even the slightest whiff of disagreement from commenters, whom he immediately had permablocked at all The Atlantic’s blogs (not just his own!). For years, they sucked up to him on his comments page. No matter. A couple of months ago, he blocked all comments.

It’s better to go out like the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, than the capos cremating the corpses, and piling up their valuables.

If you want to understand what this is really about, read Jeffrey Lord and my VDARE colleague, Thomas Meehan.

 

Contentions
Rightfully Reversing Decades of Secessionist Rehabilitation
Max Boot | @MaxBoot
6.24.2015 - 2:00 P.M.
Commentary

In the wake of the Charleston massacre, a bipartisan consensus has formed in South Carolina to take down the Confederate flag that has been flying over the grounds of the statehouse. [Garbage. There is no consensus. What has happened is that racial socialists have driven a political frenzy via their media fronts, and “conservatives,” rather than standing fast, have jumped on the bandwagon, yelling, “Forward, ho!” I hope Max Boot and his fellow “conservatives” are getting treated by their orthopedists. Jumping on and off bandwagons’ll give you broken ankles.] And the [surrender] movement has spread well beyond South Carolina, with retailers such as Wal-Mart removing Confederate flag merchandise and states from Mississippi to Virginia taking steps to remove the Stars and Bars from license plates, flags, etc. I have suggested going further and renaming streets and schools named in honor of Confederate heroes such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, as well as taking down public statues in honor of those men and others who fought for the Confederacy.

[Ah, so it’s not enough to tear down the Confederate battle flag, which Boot does not even properly name; no, we must obliterate the memory of all things Confederate from public life. This is radical Reconstructionism.]

This has caused a predictable backlash from some conservatives who compare what is going on now to the rewriting of history undertaken by French revolutionaries, Russian Bolsheviks, and other radicals after seizing power — the kind of historical rewriting satirized in Orwell’s “1984.” I believe that these criticisms are wide of the mark.

No one is suggesting the rewriting of history — something that cannot be ordered by the government in any case, at least not in this country. [Sure, it can. Government teachers are constantly re-writing history, and forcing it down the throats of captive children in their classrooms.] Nor is anyone suggesting — at least I am not — removing the books of Mark Twain or William Faulkner from libraries because they contain depictions of racism. [Maybe not, but you’re helping gas up the prohibitionists, and doing absolutely nothing to stand in their way.] Heck, I’m not even suggesting that Amazon should stop selling bigoted, pro-Confederate tracts such as Thomas E. Woods’ crackpot Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Confederate flags can continue to be displayed in museums and Southerners can continue to go to Civil War cemeteries to honor the sacrifices of their ancestors who fought bravely in a bad cause.

[I have yet to read Woods’ book, but I’ve heard lectures he’s given, and I’ll take him any day, over Boot.]

But there is a big distinction to be made between remembering the past — something that, as a historian, I’m all in favor of — and honoring those who did bad things in the past. Remembrance does not require public displays of the Confederate flag, nor streets with names such as Jefferson Davis Highway — a road that always rankles me to drive down in Northern Virginia. Such gestures are designed to honor leaders of the Confederacy, who were responsible for the costliest war in American history — men who were traitors to this country, inveterate racists, and champions of slavery.

In this regard, honoring Jefferson Davis is particularly egregious, or, for that matter, Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. But I believe even honoring the nobler Robert E. Lee is inappropriate. True, he was a brave and skilled soldier, but he fought in a bad cause. Modern Germany does not have statues to Erwin Rommel even though he — unlike Lee — turned at the end of the day against the monstrous regime in whose cause he fought so skillfully. Thus, I don’t believe it is appropriate to have statues of Lee, or schools named after him, although I admit in his case it’s a closer call than with Jefferson Davis.

This is not “rewriting” history; it’s getting history right. The rewriting was done by Lost Cause mythologists who created pro-Confederate propaganda (such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind) to convince their countrymen that the South was actually in the right even as it imposed slavery and then segregation. This required impugning those Northerners who went south after the Civil War to try to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. They were labeled “carpetbaggers,” and their memory was tarnished while the actions of the white supremacists they opposed were glorified.

As Sally Jenkins recently noted in the Washington Post, “[I]n 1957, John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, in which he distorted and maligned the character of Union Medal of Honor winner Adelbert Ames, chased from the Mississippi governor’s office during Reconstruction by White Line terrorists, while instead lauding L.Q.C. Lamar as the more heroic figure. Lamar drafted Mississippi’s ordinance of secession and raised the 19th Mississippi Infantry Regiment.”

JFK was not especially racist by the standards of his time and place; he was just the victim of the Lost Cause mythology that made flying the Confederate battle flag appear to be a legitimate act of reverence for one’s ancestors. Southerners can continue to honor their ancestors, but doing so does not necessitate embracing the vile cause for which they fought — just as Germans can honor their ancestors without embracing Nazism and Japanese without embracing militarism.