Monday, June 29, 2015
Ban the Stars and Stripes too?
Now that Walmart, eBay and Amazon, three of the world’s largest retailers, have said they will stop selling merchandise bearing the Confederate flag, can we finally accept that those ostentatious displays of ‘free speech’ solidarity after the Charlie Hebdo killings were an utter fraud?
The clamour to denounce the flag, following the church massacre in South Carolina, is grimly ironic. While we in the mature, secular West are easily prone to stereotype Muslims as volatile, sensitive souls who are likely to get murderously enraged at any representation of the Prophet Muhammad, we now seem to subscribe to the notion that the mere sight of a flag has the capacity to transform the average American into a fanatical, gun-toting killer.
‘Je Suis Charlie’ was but a mere passing fad. The proper motto of our age is ‘I believe in freedom of expression, but…’. We live in hyper-cautious times, in which all are deemed imperilled by images that might make us lose our rational faculties. To use that mealy-mouthed word, it could rightly be deemed ‘inappropriate’ to have the Confederate flag on a state building. But on toy cars? This all-too-familiar, hollow grandstanding demeans us all.
The Confederate flag may represent racism and slavery to some, but if we’re going to apply the same rule, then the Stars and Stripes has a lot more blood on its hands.
SOURCE
In addition to the blood on the hands of the Northern army during the North/South war, read this account of a series of racial atrocities committed under the banner of Old Glory.
As Jesus said: "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
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7 comments:
The Confederate flag stands for a way of life that was possible only due to the vicious evil of slavery. Without slavery, the South would have probably been a backwater.
So by JJ's general "freedom-to-fly-any-flag" argument, it's okay to fly the Nazi flag wherever you like, as that should not always be seen as a "hate flag" but maybe as an anti-communist flag or whatever.
I think the point is a good and valid one.
You may not choose to fly the flag, but if you truly believe in freedom of expression you should allow others the right to do so should they wish.
How about banning Che Guevara t-shirts and products given the blood on his hands? Same with Castro, Mandella, Mugabe and numerous other socialist heroes.
You were born with the right to free speech. Society will always try to limit that right. Using the fact that someone may act inappropriately due to your exercise of your right is a fallacious reason to limit it.
MDH
Anon 9:03. Use the Che T-Shirts and stuff to burn in a big protests against this PC nonsense
1:35 AM
By your logic you can burn any flag you like as all countries have been at war or born out of war at some stage or another. You obviously have a poor grasp of your history if that is all that flag means given the number of slavery offence under the Stars and Stripes around that era. Lincoln was a fool for not repatriating all slaves after the war. Given that, when Monroe created Liberia why weren't they repatriated then? The US created the problem and failed to integrate the slaves in way that would led to a better outcome. Today there are too many blacks trading on the fact that integration was not successful and many blacks have become dependant on welfare by trading on their impoverishment that they don't intend to improve while whitey pays. Now you have many illegal immigrants also moving in on the welfare market and squeezing blacks for jobs and putting pressure on the welfare system to the bursting point. The US will implode in the near future with its economic debt but Obama doesn't care. He is stupid enough to believe that the US is to big to fail and the world will bail them out. Sorry to say it, but no one entity is to big to fail, even countries.
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