Let's Ban the Banning Before It's Too Late

The recent moves to ban Confederate flags, monuments and symbols reminded me of the description of a unique Confederate flag that I found in researching my book, Clear the Confederate Way!: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia.

An artist's rendition of the Emerald Guards flag.

 

One side of the flag featured the national colors of the Confederacy, the so-called Stars and Bars, with a standing portrait of President Washington super-imposed on its center. The reverse side of the banner was green, displaying a harp, the national symbol of Ireland, encircled by shamrocks. The Irish side of this most unusual Confederate flag included the inscriptions, “Erin go Bragh,” meaning “Ireland forever,” and “Faugh a ballagh,” the Irish battle cry translated as “Clear the way!”

 

This flag belonged to the Emerald Guards, a Confederate unit of Irishmen from Mobile, Alabama, part of the 8^th Alabama Infantry. They were the regiment’s color company, designated to hold the flags at the center of the battle line. They entered Confederate service in green militia uniforms and their banner was a ceremonial or presentation flag that remembered their Irish heritage but also showed allegiance to the Confederacy and to the founding of the nation under Washington. Washington after all was a Southerner who’d defeated the British in the War of Independence.

The intricacies of the Emerald Guards flag, its mixture of multi-cultural heritage and symbols, point up how this country’s history is layered, intertwined and complex. Pulling at the threads of history will unravel not just unpleasant images, but remembrance, and ultimately knowledge and understanding.

Banning historical relics seems a perilous step toward Orwellian dystopia. The Emerald Guards flag is lost to history, probably because of its fragile silk construction. But if we still had such a flag today, would it be banned? And who would decide? A banning czar? A banning panel? And how would they decide?

For now we ban the Battle Flag and its St. Andrew’s Cross.  But won’t other flags, other symbols replace it? For years, I am told, the Confederate battle flag was used by Irishmen serving with the British army as a symbol of their nationalist sympathies when the Irish Tri-Color was not allowed in barracks or mess.

The reverse of the Emerald Guards flag may have looked like this.

 

So what historical symbol will we ban next? The Stars and Bars seems already destined to fall. Eventually all Rebel flags will have to go, so says The Empire; even the Confederate national flag in its Emerald Guards incarnation, where it lurks behind a representation of the father of our diverse and tolerant nation.

We could ban all Confederate flags, but there were lots of different Southern flags. The Rebels could not defend their territory, feed their armies or win their independence, but they sure as hell knew how to design a flag. Who will even be able to identify the flag in its various forms? Who, after all, has the expertise to fathom all the symbols of every Confederate flag; the stars, the stripes, the bars, the crosses, the reds, the whites, the blues, the greens, the golds, the Irish harps, the nationalist sunbursts, George Washington?

To take this to its absurd yet logical conclusion, eventually the “Flag Police”, the "Department of Confederate Symbol Security," will develop the data collection systems and algorithms to detect and identify a criminal banner. They will move to protect the sensibilities of anyone who claims offense. But won’t those in the Underground, let’s call it the Flag Resistance Movement, like the Irish in the Queen’s army, find a way to preserve the meaning behind the discredited symbol by finding another one?

The symbol security bureaucracy will find other targets too. What if the meaning of a particular flag falls out of public favor--the rainbow flag say? Will the FP at the insistence of some furious mob of the future rip it down?

Perhaps we need to ban the banning before it’s too late.