Time To Drive Old Dixie Down

No surprise here.

Hillary Clinton will have attended many a wreath-laying and speech-giving on Confederate anniversaries by her husband when he was Governor of Arkansas.

When Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at an SS cemetery on a State Visit to West Germany, then the defeated dead had not been Americans, and had never set foot in the United States.

When the Queen laid a wreath at a memorial to those who died fighting for Irish independence, then, although the defeated dead had been legally British at the time and had risen within the then boundaries of the United Kingdom, they, or at any rate their cause, had more or less won in the end.

But every year, in what likes to think of itself as the most patriotic country on earth (it isn't, as the increasing prominence of China, Russia and several other places will make clearer and clearer), public officials pay fulsome tribute to men born in the United States who died fighting against the American Republic on the soil of that Republic.

Those men's battle flag even still flies from certain public buildings and in certain other civic spaces. It remains incorporated into the flag of Mississippi, and a very obvious influence on the flags of Bill Clinton's Arkansas and of Al Gore's Tennessee.

Once a year, on nothing less than Memorial Day, a wreath from the very President of the United States is sent to a Confederate Memorial (rather an impressive example of its art, but that is not the present point) within Arlington National Cemetery.

That monument's dedication in 1914, not even 50 years after the end of the American Civil War, was as "mainline" an event as it was or is possible to imagine, attended by the entire membership of both Houses of Congress, and addressed by the President.

The 5th Cavalry Regiment Band played, an invocation was delivered by the Rector of what is still one of Washington's leading Episcopal churches, a Union Army veteran who was by then the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic was among the speakers, a 21-gun salute was fired, the President accepted the Memorial "as a gift to the American people" from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and a benediction was delivered by the Minister of what is still one of Washington's leading Presbyterian churches.

No wonder that a thunderstorm broke towards the end. Yet a pattern had been set.

For we are not talking about the causes here, but about the Cause. This is not about slavery, or whatever else lay in the background to the Civil War. This is about armed secession from, and then war upon, the United States, unsuccessfully.

West Germany's general amnesty in 1969, when and indeed because numerous senior and middle-ranking Nazis were still alive at the time, was ultimately necessary and successful.

Those who lost the Irish Civil War became Fine Gael and got on with the business of the new state. No one, including the DUP, would now wish to return to the world before the incorporation of Sinn Féin into the government of Northern Ireland. Well, no one apart from certain London-based journalists and their fanboys, who do not have to live there.

By contrast, the de-Ba'athification of Iraq's institutional life, cheered on as loudly as the war itself had been by most of those hacks and by such of their fanboys as could have had any political consciousness in 2003, has been completely and utterly catastrophic, and has contributed directly to the emergence of IS.

But the Germans had overwhelmingly been conscripts in extreme youth, and they had been fighting for their country, not for an insurrection against it. It is important to remember that every side during the War, except perhaps the Americans once they came in (but even then), understood it in those terms.

It was not about "values". That is where the argument that Lincoln and the Union were just as racist in their own way, and not even anti-slavery as such, falls down. So what if they were?

The side that lost the Irish Civil War had provided the lawfully constituted government of the day, and neither side lost in Northern Ireland. They just came to an understanding that suited them both, or them all, depending on how you want to look at it.

Many, perhaps most, of the IRA never held British nationality, and there is in any case a fundamental philosophical difference between asserting a right of secession from a political entity and asserting that a territory had never legitimately been part of that entity at all. Classically, Irish Republicans take the latter view of the whole of Ireland in relation to the United Kingdom.

The Ba'ath Party, likewise, had been the governing party, and had fought precisely against an invasion of its country.

The Cult of the Confederacy is something else entirely, and wildly out of keeping with everything else that Americans believe about themselves, not necessarily without very good grounds for so believing.

Opposed by Democrats from North Florida who remained so Deep Southern that as late as 2001 they had still never been able to bring themselves to become Republicans, it was Jeb Bush who took down the Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol at Tallahassee. Hillary Clinton has some catching up to do. An intervention from her on this issue would be welcome.

Supporting statements by her husband, by Al Gore, and by Jim Webb, who last defended this flag in a speech as long ago as 1990 (i.e., longer ago than Bill Clinton was still delivering annual gubernatorial tributes), would be very welcome indeed.