March 11, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
CONFEDERATE FLAG DAY and Crazed Leftists Column Now Published by Abbeville and Reckonin.com
Friends,
The installment of MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey of this past March 6, “What
Happened at Confederate Flag Day 2019 – The Madness and Mayhem of the Unleashed
Far Left” [https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2019/03/march-6-2019-my-corner-by-boyd-cathey.html]
has received hundreds of hits and been read widely. At least two Web magazines have
picked it up and published it in slightly differing versions.
Both Reckonin.com [“What Happened At Confederate Flag Day, 2019,” at https://www.reckonin.com/boyd-cathey/what-happened-at-confederate-flag-day-2019] and The Abbeville Institute [“Crazed Leftists Strike Again”] have published it as
featured essays. So, this morning I pass that column on again, as published.
====================================================
Crazed Leftists Strike Again
Boyd Cathey on Mar 11, 2019
For thirty-one years the North Carolina Division
of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has sponsored annually Confederate Flag
Day, an event commemorating our state’s rich history and Southern heritage,
held in the House of Representatives chamber of the historic 1840 Tar Heel
State Capitol. First proclaimed by former Governor James G. Martin in 1988, the
day has served as an occasion to host a number of major guest speakers:
including former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Beverly Lake
Jr., distinguished historians Clyde Wilson and Lee Congdon, and
internationally-known authors such as Don Livingston and Paul Gottfried.
For all those years, the event has been
peaceful and gone off without problems. Indeed, the Sons of Confederate
Veterans has been a major contributor to the programs of the State Capitol,
providing funding for restoration and preservation projects, and supplying
volunteers for Capitol activities.
This year was different.
This year the commemoration, on March 2,
was beset and harassed by dozens of—perhaps around seventy or eighty—screaming
and frenzied demonstrators, a mob that surrounded the Capitol, shouting the
vilest profanities at women and children as they made their way to and from the
event, and threatening physical violence towards all attendees.
Online the organizing umbrella group
responsible for the demonstration was titled #SmashingRacism, a loose coalition
of members of several far Left and Marxist elements centered in central North
Carolina, including Antifa NC, Democratic Socialists of North Carolina, Hillsborough
Progressives Taking Action, and other such groups.
Given what has happened in recent months in
the Tar Heel State, such a reaction might have been expected, but not on the
scale witnessed on March 2. In recent months violent mobs have destroyed the
monument to Confederate veterans in Durham, followed by the toppling of the
“Silent Sam” monument on the campus of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, a monument erected a century ago to honor university students who
went off to war in the 1860s.
The threats to Flag Day were such that
nearly 200 members of law enforcement—State Capitol Police, Raleigh City
Police, and, finally, State Highway Patrol—were summoned to maintain order and
to prevent the hysterical protestors from attacking attendees. Indeed, at the
end of the event, police were compelled to form protective corridors to permit
attendees to safely reach their automobiles. On each side of the
corridors were unhinged screaming demonstrators, many holding placards
denouncing “racism” and “white oppression”—some declaring “F – the
Confederacy.” Prevented by the police from physically engaging the
exiting attendees, the mob shouted in unison: “Cops and Klan, go hand and
hand!”
It cannot have endeared them to the members
of law enforcement attempting to maintain order—who were viewed as protecting
the “white supremacists” as they tried to leave the event!
You would think that local news media would
have covered the event thoroughly, that 200 members of law enforcement present,
most of the streets in central Raleigh closed down to traffic, and the
necessity to physically protect event participants would have been a major
story on Raleigh station WRAL-TV’s 11 o’clock news—but it wasn’t: barely a
brief twenty seconds of coverage. That was it.
Could it have been that the constant, very
audible shouts of “Cops and Klan, go hand and hand,” and the obvious violence
directed at the peaceful attendees did not make for good, politically correct
television, that it did not serve the correct political slant?
There was one short interview with a black
man…he seemed not to have been actually a part of the demonstration. The
reporter for WRAL-TV had to chase him down for his comment.
And therein lies the rest of the story: the
mob was almost entirely white, mostly millennials and college-aged white
students, uniformly from upper middle class families. Indeed, tuition at nearby
Duke University now costs nearly $74,000 a year, and at UNC at Chapel Hill the
figure is equally jaw-dropping. How many average middle class parents can
afford that? No doubt many of the students receive handsome grants and
scholarships; and the non-students also have few worries about
finances—pass-through funding reaches them via a variety of progressivist
foundations, including from the myriad of George Soros-related organizations.
As I exited with other attendees I looked
into the faces of the mob: what I observed was a very real madness, an
unleashed fury, eyes filled with uncontrolled hatred—if they had not been
restrained, no doubt they would have physically attacked us.
To read their Web sites and their tweets
these revolutionaries are consumed by “the fight against white supremacy” and
against “historic racism.” Their entire existence is wrapped up in that
struggle, a struggle which has become increasingly violent and which has
discarded any concept of belief in “freedom of speech” or “free expression of
ideas”—if you dissent from their advancing narrative, if you seek to express a
different point of view, you are obviously a “racist” and a “white
supremacist,” and have no right to express your views.
Indeed, in reality you have no right to
exist, as a grad student at Chapel Hill, the son of a upper middle class white
family I know, told me a couple of years ago. After finding out that I had
voted for Donald Trump in 2016, he—let us call him Mark—informed me that his
generation would soon dominate this country, and that “your generation will die
out in a few years, and then we can completely change things!” His parents
don’t share his university-learned opinions but seem helpless or incapable of
responding.
What is so apparent about Mark and hundreds
of thousands like him is that his hatred for “white privilege” and “historic
racism” is directed at his own history and inheritance, and in a very palpable
and real way expresses his own personal self-loathing. His reaction—like the
reaction of the frothing mob on March 2—is an effort to virtue signal, to in a
way expiate for the sins of his ancestors of whom he is the latest miserable
representative. He bears the weight of millennia of “whiteness” and all the
accumulated wrongs and sins associated with it, and if his parents or other
white people will not grovel and apologize and make reparations for that, then
he must do it for all of them—and he must remind them in stentorian voice of
the centuries of evil and oppression, by expiating his own self-hatred as a very
comfortable white grad student, attending one of America’s most prestigious
universities…a recipient of that very same “white privilege.”
Mark’s penance, then, like that of the
seventy or so Leftists who assembled outside the 1840 North Carolina State
Capitol, is to accuse and assault—if possible—the rest of us who do not see
what he sees, who do not understand what he understands, who do not support the
burden he supports, and attempt to shut us down and extinguish any dissent from
his raging ideology, the burning fire that consumes him. And in so doing, he
tries to expiate his own imagined heavy burden, inflicted on him in large part
by such prestigious institutions as Duke and UNC which serve as incubation
facilities for frenetic post-Marxist Leftist revolutionaries. And by a culture
that now facilitates and encourages that posture, or, at best, coddles it like
the man who thinks he can tame an angry rattlesnake.
Those angry faces—those glaring and fierce
eyes—I saw on March 2 betrayed ruptured souls, corrupted and demonized,
existing in a kind of counter-reality with their own set of always-advancing
rules, but dedicated in a fearsome and unambiguous way to the
destruction—salvation through destruction—of Western Christian civilization, of
mankind as we have known it.
In the end, like all incendiaries they will
burn out, but their unhinged and violent praxis may well end in something far,
far worse for us all.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in
European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain,
where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from
the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to
conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years
he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and
History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical
subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of
Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical
organizations.
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