“I fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the people of the South their dearest rights. … I did only what my duty demanded. I could have taken no other course without dishonour. And if it were all to be done over again, I should act in precisely the same manner.” Robert E. Lee

In a world of fools, it is now the turn of the Marine Corps’ commandant General David Berger to strut on the stage of insanity. He  put on his god-like robes and imperial diadem and announced his decision “forbidding the display of Confederate symbols on Marine installations.” (1) Berger, it appears, is just one more of the republic’s history erasers, but I tend to think the eraser at a Ticonderoga pencil’s tip has more perceptiveness than Berger-the-eraser.

I repeatedly have been told that all Marines must read the U.S. Constitution each year, so as to understand what he or she is meant to defend with their lives. And having walked through the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico — both when it was located in series of aircraft hangers and Quonset huts. and now when it is hosted in a beautiful new museum — their seems no single group of men and women who know more about their organization, their nation, and their role in its preservation than the U.S. Marines, from privates to — until now — general officers.

That is as it should be. The Marines have made much of the nation’s history, and their participation in that process is marked by heroism, unusual valor, and, sadly, large numbers of dead, wounded, maimed. Indeed, the Marine Corps was active in America’s defense since its formation in Philadelphia on 10 November 1775 — more than seven months before the publication of the Declaration of Independence. Through thick and thin, the U.S. Marine Corps has been the most dependable, proficient, and valorous branch of the U.S. military.

Given the Marine Corps’ historical consciousness and combat record, General Berger’s decision is inexplicable. At the most basic level, the best answer to anyone who claims to be offended by the Army of Northern Virginia’s (ANV) battle flag is “tough shit, it’s integral to U.S. history, it honors 600,000-plus dead Americans on both sides of the Civil War, so move on”. Berger, in his action, has aligned himself and, implicitly, all of the Marine Corps with those who are ignorant of American history and are busy destroying statutes and other symbols of the republic’s history; promoting sectional divisions in the United States; denigrating and seeking to eradicate the Founders’ memory and achievements; and siding with those trying to make America’s young into history-ignorant automatons, without critical thinking skills, and unable to do anything but follow and vote for those who hate the republic.

Those who want to forbid the flying of the ANV’s battle flag because it is considered a symbol of slavery, treason, and oppression are ignoramuses. During the Civil War, there certainly were those who believed those claims, but they were few. A far greater number fought for only one thing, to either break of preserve the Union. That question was settled temporarily at Appomattox in 1865, but there was no postwar amendment added to the U.S. Constitution asserting that the Union was thereafter inviolable or, as the Articles of Confederation said, “perpetual”.

What was settled at Appomattox was that North and South would give the Union another try and their success is seen today in the still, though barely, functioning Union. The ANV’s flag and the flag United States are both to be respected because they denote not just war, but probably a more thorough reconciliation of North and South than has ever been seen between two adversaries in history’s many other bloody civil wars.

The flag of the Union , of course, must predominate, but the ANV flag must be honored for both the war’s dead, killed, and crippled Southern Americans, and the willingness of the South’s fighting men and their families to follow General Lee’s guidance and resume being loyal American citizens and to join in the restoration of the Union, the south’s economy, and inter-sectional amity.

I wish I was surprised that General Berger does not understand the importance of the ANV flag to the Union, the South, and to so many of his own Marines. After 1865 and through the Spanish-American War, ex-Confederate soldiers and other Southerners served and often fought in all branches of the U.S. military. In the 2oth century, Southerners have served in all branches, but seemingly in none more often than the Marine Corps.

Berger’s despicable, cowardly, and politically correct decision has strongly implied that those Southern U.S. marines who might have worn an ANV flag patch on their shoulder; who respected and loved Confederate heroes and the fight they made; and whose family might have flown the flag at home, or placed a small ANV flag on the grave of a son or daughter killed in combat are racists and so unworthy of remembering, honoring or toleratiing.

The Marines’ bloody fights at Belleau Wood and Mont Blanc Ridge; at Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima, at Chosen Resevoir and the Punchbowl, at Hue and Khe Sanh, and in Helmand Province and at 2nd Fallujah were fought by men and women from all parts of the country. Now, in retrospect, General Berger has displayed his disdain, indeed, contempt, for the southern Marines who died in those battles, as well as those who have yet to die or be maimed in the wars that he and his fellow generals have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bergen may not be a bad man, but he is a historically ignorant one. At a time when the Democrats, the academy, and the media are tearing this republic apart, Bergen and other ahistorical fools, in and out of uniform, are knowingly trying to rip open the sectional wound caused by the civil war. Why? Simply because one or another permanently adolescent individual might claim to be offended by the ANV battle flag. General Berger must be an obtuse and very little man.

–Endnotes:

–1.) https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/the-army-should-rid-itself-of-symbols-of-treason/

–2.) https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/the-army-should-rid-itself-of-symbols-of-treason/

–3.) Lee quoted in Clyde Wilson, ” Robert E. Lee and the American Union,” 20 January 2016, at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clyde-wilson-library/robert-e-lee-and-the-american-union/