http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4501
By Christopher Sullivan
Okay, kids. This is a pop quiz on http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4105. I’ll give you the basic facts and you tell me where it’s happening.
A culture war is rapidly heating up. Ordinary citizens have become increasingly concerned about the cost of illegal immigration, the rise of the welfare state, and multiculturalism enforced by liberal elites.
Things have gotten so hot that the Economist magazine (one of the world’s best-known journals of leftist opinion) published a recent article explaining “the culture war” in this place as a crude reaction to a laudable effort by liberals to “redraw national identity” and to “make amends for past wrongs to indigenous peoples.”
Rejecting the policies of the left and reconnecting with their ancestors, ordinary citizens are now displaying their traditional flag whenever they can: at political gatherings, public places, private homes and wherever people gather. Meanwhile, leftist policy makers are, of course, deeply concerned about such displays of militant nostalgia and have proposed that the old flag be redesigned to something more acceptable in the modern world. Sound familiar? Where do you think this is happening? http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=47? South Carolina?Well, yes. There too. But the set of facts outlined above describe what’s happening today in Australia. The good people Down Under are fed up with militant modernism and the Labor Party’s drive to destroy all tradition. And the Australian flag has become a symbol of renewed pride for ordinary citizens and a link to their ancestors, whose lives and sacrifices they refuse to trivialize or to discredit in the false name of progress.
American Southerners understand. Consider for example recent events in Georgia. Herculean efforts were made by secular progressives to eradicate the 1956 Georgia flag which included the Confederate battle flag design. As you may recall, a committee of soulless boosters attempted to replace the flag with a horrendously bland banner—the Barnes flag— which was replaced with another design after Governor Roy Barnes was defeated.
Mississippi found a better way. The same leftist legions agitated for years to replace the state flag and to strip away its Confederate symbolism. But Mississippi politicians were clever enough to allow the issue to be decided by public referendum.
In South Carolina, the state flag has so far escaped attack because its traditional design is merely a lone palmetto tree with a crescent moon, and the heathens are not well enough informed to understand its Confederate roots. So, instead they attacked the easier target: the Confederate battle flag which flew atop the capitol dome.
In 1996, there was a public referendum on the GOP primary ballot in South Carolina asking voters whether the battle flag should continue flying atop the statehouse.
The flag won with a whopping 76%, attracting the largest primary voter turnout in state history. Still, four years later, the South Carolina legislature voted to move the flag from the dome to a Confederate soldiers’ monument on statehouse grounds, where it still flies and where the attack on its existence continues unabated.
In 2000, when the South Carolina Senate was debating removing the Confederate flag, Sen. Harvey Peeler warned his colleagues that if that one flag came down from the dome a thousand would go up across the state.
http://www.southernpartisan.net/2007/10/24/the-power-of-symbols/