James Lileks:
Perhaps soon in Muslim countries some provocateur will hold an “Everyone Draw the Confederate Flag” contest. Social Justice Warriors might crash it with strongly worded pickets, and perhaps some damning chants (“Hey Hey Ho Ho / Racist men were Duke and Bo”). Such a thing would have been absurd a week ago, but the culture turns on a dime these days — a dime with the portrait of a president who interned people for their race, and isn’t that a tad problematic? — and now the Stars and Bars have been scrubbed from Amazon, Sears, Etsy, eBay, and all other merchants eager to scramble to the virtuous side of the modern moral ledger. Within a week there will be a law that grants the right to wear a Confederate-flag tattoo, but if you go out in public you have to wear a piece of waxed paper over it, preferably smeared with Vaseline.
Insert obligatory boilerplate about the South and the Flag here; imagine counterargument right . . . here. Are we good? Good. Those issues aren’t the point here. Consider a complaint going around the right side of the Internet lately, which notes that merchants eager to drop the Confederate flag like a flaming sack of feces are perfectly fine carrying — well, this:
Hurry! Only four left! Be the first on your block to proclaim your love of omnicidal tyrants.
Or, if you prefer more artisanal, small-batch killers, there’s everyone’s favorite hairy homophobe:
So why are these okay? many on the right ask. Typical, isn’t it? They have no idea.
1. Che was cool. You can tell he was cool because he was totally into universal health care and building a new society where everything was taken care of and you could concentrate on art instead of worrying about things like money. He and Fidel overthrew that Babtisto guy who the CIA put in there to torture people so they would harvest sugar for Coca-Cola. I mean, look at his expression! Noble. Unselfish. Looking up to the future with calm, confident resolve.
Or, it’s the look of a man who’s thinking, “Never fails. Two minutes after the firing squad’s done, and here come the buzzards.”
2. Communism is kinda awesome! First of all, the USSR stuff is amaaazing from a graphic-design point; they used revolutionary styles to spread their egalitarian message, just like people today are using responsive web design to garner awareness about the need to ban plastic bags. A lot of those artists wouldn’t have gotten jobs in the U.S. They would have ended up in some small town doing drawings for the local newspaper, which is practically like going to the Gulag. And if some of those artists did die in the labor camps, well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, and also purge several million chickens who were hoarding eggs by laying them too slowly. And then you have to purge the men who run the chicken coops for wrecking the five-year plan to produce twice as many eggs with half as many chickens. Have you seen old Soviet art for the Chicken Production Drive of 1924? It’s awesome.
I mean, sure, Stalin did some things, but they were way ahead of everyone else when it came to font selection. They probably had like a Ministry of Fonts.
3. Communism is really a noble idea, and it’s never been tried. I mean pure Communism, where everyone is taken care of and stuff gets made because everyone’s on board and pitching in. Not like today’s dog-eat-dog society, where you get out of college with a Masters in Fine Art focused on Iberian lute dirges and a ton of debt, and you can’t get a job that isn’t handing a cup of caffeinated sugar to some bro in a suit. In Communism, college is free and you get a job afterwards teaching people about Iberian lute dirges. If that’s what you want! I mean you can be a doctor too, but it’s not like you’ll make more money.
@George Wells:
George is it your opinion that citizens should only obey the laws that they like and that they should not be penalized for breaking any laws? I’m not a student of the Nuremburg trials, but I think war criminals should be punished for committing crimes. I think any citizen should pay the penalty for breaking laws. We have courts to decide what reasonable penalties are. If a judge thinks Rosa Parks had justification for what she did, I suspect there would be little or no penalty. The penalty should fit the crime. Which part of that do you disagree with?
@George Wells:
He is so faithful to the law. I guess you could call him pro-gay marriage. It’s the law.
@George Wells: Whining? Like you? All you have ever done on this site is whine about “gay rights” even when the thread has had nothing to do with gay rights. Here I was thinking that there was some common ground on an issue and here you are disproving that. Silly me. We are done. Don’t bother responding to my posts because I won’t even bother reading yours anymore.
@Redteam #51:
I don’t think that the issue us whether or not you like a law. The issue is whether or not you should ALWAYS obey the law.
In the military, the Uniform Code of Justice governs everyone’s behavior, and part of that code addresses the conditions of when direct orders should be obeyed and when they should not. A direct order carries the same immediate imperative that a law carries, but the serviceman is required to recognize the difference between a “lawful” order and one that is not. Try to remember the movie “A Few Good Men” – it made this distinction central to its plot. The Nuremburg Trials made the same distinction: The Court at the Hague found that the German servicemen who followed Hitler’s direct orders were morally obligated to disobey them if and when those orders were “unlawful,” the “unlawful” ones generally being associated with the extermination of Jews.
In this country we have what is perhaps a more lenient perspective on following bad laws. Generally, so long as the act is legal at the time you commit it, you’re safe. Similarly, if the act is illegal when you do it and you are still in jail when the law is changed to legalize the act, you may or may not get released – your “crime” is grandfathered to when it was committed. Sometimes the offender successfully petitions for release in such circumstances, sometimes not.
Now, this doesn’t take into account when people rebel against laws that they believe are unlawful. Our American Revolution is a perfect example of a great many people who RIGHTLY broke the laws that England imposed on them, and the “rightness” of their disobedience is celebrated to this day. So is Rosa Park’s civil disobedience, as was Gandhi’s, and there are many other such examples. Usually, such “heroes” are punished at the time and are afforded acclaim only after their causes succeed. Sort of “to the victors go the spoils” and “history is written by the victors, not the losers.
In the final analysis, we each have a duty to determine which laws are indeed lawful and worthy of being obeyed, which laws are unlawful and morally objectionable to obey, and what our comfort levels are with taking the risks associated with breaking ANY of them. That sort of responsibility cannot be abdicated.
@George Wells:
So you are basically an anarchist, everyone should obey the laws they want to at the time. So if you are at a party and everyone is drinking and you feel as if it should be okay this time for you to get drunk and drive home, you should get a pass?
As I said, if Rosa Parks broke the law, she should pay whatever her judge felt was just. There is a process for changing laws and disobedience is sometimes the method for putting it into motion, but I don’t think you would want to live in a country where everyone only had to obey the laws that they agree with. I’d hope you didn’t have a neighbor who felt like your playing music loud after dark was a reasonable reason to shoot you. The code of military justice has nothing to do with this conversation. Everyone knows if you have a maniac giving you unlawful orders you should not obey them. Same as if a policeman gives you an unlawful order. But you do that at your own peril. If you are holding a rifle and it is perfectly legal for you to be holding a rifle but a policeman tells you to lay it on the ground, I’d recommend that you lay it on the ground and get the technicalities sorted out later. While his order might not be ‘legal’, it would most likely be considered as ‘lawful’. Also consider you’re driving down a highway and have done nothing at all illegal but a policeman signals you to pull over. That’s a lawful order. You should only break a law willingly that you are willing to pay the penalty for.
@Redteam #55:
What is the difference between a religious person refusing to obey a law that says he has to serve gay people and Rosa Parks refusing to obey a law that says she cannot drink from a “whites-only” water fountain?
Don’t you think that your conscience has a role in this?
It isn’t a matter of only obeying laws that you LIKE.
It has everything to do with making yourself part of the process of overturning laws that you believe are unjust.
If you turn out to be right, your name will be part of the title of the court case that gets decided in your favor by the SCOTUS, and you’ll be a hero.
If you turn out to be wrong, then the punishment you get is what you deserve for being wrong.
The news is chock-a-block full of right-wing folks – including some that are candidates for the Republican nomination for president of the United States – who are publicly declaring that they WILL NOT OBEY the SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriage.
They are preaching civil disobedience on a wholesale scale.
Is that the anarchy you are talking about?
I commend them for standing up for the principles they believe in.
History will determine whether they were right or not.
@Larry Weisenthal:
Some (mostly of Cuba heritage) do. You clearly aren’t listening or perhaps more likely it is because the MSM doesn’t cover the outrage from people who are offended at what Democrats do.
Neither do I. My wife is Jewish and I’m Bavarian on my father’s side (My ancestors legally immigrated from the late 1800’s to 1912). I think if you ask you will not find anyone on FA who “likes” the NAZIs.
I don’t believe you are an authorized spokesman for African Americans. I’ve noticed that there are quite a few Blacks speaking out who do not agree with your ASSumption.
Really? I see t-shirts with Che on them quite often. Usually (but not always,) by White (“privileged”?) Millennials, some Hispanics (presumably not of Cuban descent,) and college students who have no idea of the atrocities Che and his bloody revolutionaries did. (ask them, they really don’t know). These are the some of the very same types of people the Democrats go after to get votes from. I’m not surprised you think so lowly of them, as good many of them voted for “Hope and Change” Obama.
So, if someone gets butt hurt over something it must be eradicated? The standard of Free speech in this nation is that even that which some find offensive is protected speech. Considering Democrats and other radical leftists like their KKK have had those rights protected, and have profited by them, I think it is rather hypocritical for leftists like you to try to censor “free speech” that you don’t agree with. It is worse that you want to eradicate Sons of the South (not Clinton and Gore) who fought on the side of the rebels, because of this same butt hurt from people who were not even alive then and who have never been slaves, simply because Democratic radicals under the prompting of the White House, Obama’s Organizing for Amerika operatives and MSM, are trying to whip up race wars.
Wrong, there’s outrage but it isn’t being covered by your leftist MSM.
You knowledge of the Civil War period (and the South and US prior) seems to be rather limited. Very few Southerners owned slaves. “Less than 5% of the whites in the South owned slaves. Fully 3/4’s of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system.” (- Harvard educated Professor Emeritus of History and Professor of Legal History at Duke University John Hope Franklin author of From Slavery to Freedom, McGraw-Hill, 1994., p. 123. Dr. Franklin also happened to be a Black man. This may come as an inconvenient truth to some here. Prior to the 1830s most antislavery activists focused on gradual emancipation. Most of these activists were Southern whites, who thought that the institution would gradually whither away. Many southern Whites were abolitionists, and most lower class whites saw slaves as an unfair, unpaid labor competition for jobs.
Hmm importing cheap labor to do jobs Americans would be willing to do at a fair wage. Where have we heard of this before… …but I digress.
Prior to the Civil War, do you know what the difference was in how the United States of America viewed slavery as compared to the Confederate States? There was no difference. Even after the war started, the “Union” (aka still part of the United States,) did not immediately change it’s view on slavery, until much later when it was used for propaganda reasons. The Emancipation Proclamation ONLY applied to the Southern States. Lincoln’s military mission at the start of the war was specifically to both punish the southern states for their rebellion and to force then to rejoin the United States
Yet leftist wonks would have us believe that the 95% of Southerners who did not have slaves and fought in the Civil War all supported the institution of slavery, which only 5% of Southerners owned and benefited from, (all in order to continue to spread their revisionist embellishment that slavery was the “primary” reason for the Civil War). It is not so.