E Unum Pluribus - The Triumph of Tribalism

Following the lead of the US Armed Services, NASCAR announces total ban on Confederate flags from all races, events and properties.  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/motorsports/nascar-announces-ban-on-confederate-flags-from-all-races-events-and-properties/ar-BB15j5s3 

[begin sarcasm]

As scribes in attendance feverishly recorded, Pharaoh Phelps I, the leader of NASCAR, was overheard to decree, "Let the Confederate Flag be stricken from every book and tablet.  Stricken from every pylon and obelisk of Egypt.  Let the name of Robert E. Lee be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of man, for all time.  So it shall be written, so it shall be done; let the woke times roll.”

[end]

I am an amateur vexillologist (or at least a vexillophile; I am also an amateur thespian but I’ll save that for another blogpost).  

Also, as an inept but recovering student of history, I note several things related to this sudden clamor to eradicate any vestige, etching, carving, monument, or symbol from the Civil War in the public (and now private) commons.  

Everyone is now seemingly gleefully fixated on the expurgation of the “Confederate Battle Flag” as a token gesture against white racism.  

The flag was adopted after the battle of First Manassas, as a visual aide to identify Confederate regiments at war on the field of battle.  The ‘peace’ or ‘parade’ flag of the Confederate States was the Stars and Bars, the first of three styles representing the Confederacy.  

Given that the Patron Saint of anti-American wokeness, Colin Kaepernick, has represented that the Betsy Ross Flag (and by logical extension each subsequent iteration of the US National Flag) is racist iconography of our defective founding (in 1619?), I therefore predict that in all of this Latter Day Wokeness, the marauding Jacobins will metastasize and expand the Gleichschaltung to include the following flags: 

The Mississippi State Flag 

The first US Navy Jack 

The Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” Flag (including the Georgia 1st Battalion Flag) 

The Join Or Die Snake "Benjamin Franklin” Flag 

The Battle of Gonzalez Flag 

The Thin Blue Line Flag 

The Three Percenters Flag 

The Ensign of the US Coast Guard 

The Seguin “Alamo” Flag 

The State Flag of Alabama, Florida, Flag of Scotland, Jersey and any flag in the Commonwealth containing the UK Union Jack, including Hawaii (for the similarity to the Confederate Battle Flag) 

And possibly The 1824 Alamo Flag (which, was likely never flown over the Alamo) because, cultural appropriation.

This will not end here.  The radicals will expand the range and depth of those icons that must be eradicated from our history, and collective memory.  

As Robert Heinlein has been quoted as saying, “A generation that doesn’t know history has no past; and no future.”  Orwell said in 1984 “Who controls the past controls the future.”  “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”  - Edmund Burke

The upbeat of tearing down monuments and icons of our past is control of the future.  

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