Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

  Click Here for U.K.   Click here for U.S.   Paperbacks from£4.99. Kindle from 0.99p  

It is good news that the governor of South Carolina has indicated that the Confederate Flag should not fly outside the State Capitol. The Confederate States of America is a country defeated in war which no longer exists. It is right that its symbolic battle flag should not be flown from official buildings, other than museums and commemorative sites where the US flag should fly beside it.

Symbolism is powerful and emotive but the same symbol can be different things to different groups of people. To some this flag recalls deeds of valour by ancestors upon fields of battle where heroes fought with their lives for the independence of their country. To others it recalls the fallen dream of a different kind of North America; a nostalgia for something which might have been. But to another group this flag became the symbol of white supremacy and the rallying totem for a culture of segregation, cruelty and repression and because of that every African American in the South looks upon it as an evil emblem flown to evoke a dark past and an an attempt stamp it on the present.

This blog has often pointed out in the modern context that armed conflict rarely solves ethnic or cultural divisions. Having become the world’s most enlightened democracy it was completely wrong in 1861 for democracy to be cast aside in favour of conflict, killing and conquest. Had slavery ended by democratic agreement as it did in the British Empire in the 1830s, its legacy would have been far less toxic and the emancipation of African Americans far more complete and inclusive. The war was not about slavery, it was about the right of people to choose a different path to independence; the ending of slavery became the cause to justify the slaughter, but the fight would have happened if no such thing had existed.

America had fought for and won its independence from an all powerful state, Great Britain. There were many who held that the Union had simply replaced Britain as an all powerful overlord which failed to recognise the sovereignty of individual states within the American family. That alternative vision was subjugated by force of arms, but it did not die. Because of the war all sorts of bitterness, prejudice, repression and fear became a consequence unforeseen at Appomattox. These scars are still not fully healed. America is one country but it remains two nations. If Charleston’s tragedy can pull good from the evil of that deed, it will be to ignite a drive that at last it is time to become one.