Watching the PBS program about the Confederate Flag, which ran on OPB at midnight, Sunday, November 19th, 2001, I was struck by the points the creators,  obviously liberal academics, didn’t make. 

The approach reminded me of another PBS program about wild horses.  As all know, the Spanish introduced horses to the "Native Americans."  What most don't know is there were horses here prior to that introduction.  They once numbered in the millions.  This program mentioned that, and explained the disappearance of these earlier horses as the result of "climate change and human activity."  Do we know which "humans" were in America before Europeans discovered the place?  Do you know why PBS didn't say that the noble "Native Americans" were the humans who hunted them to extinction?

If these earlier horses had been wiped out by Europeans, would PBS have described the event in the same way?  Of course not.  Well, then, why do they do this sort of thing?

Do the words "political correctiness" ring a bell?  You may, if you wish, interpret PC in this case to represent an ongoing anti-European bias and pro-Indian bias which your tax dollars continue to subsidize. (The Spaniards are, in this mustang case, considered "white."  That changes at need.) Now to the flag program.

Truth Number One.

The first truth this flag program omitted is that American slavery was defended to the last by the Democrats.  The Civil War was caused by Democrats who walked out of Congress when they were told that slavery must be ended.  This event marked the founding of the Republican Party, whose first major political figure was the man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  His name was Abraham Lincoln. 

Just as with the mustang case, you may be sure that if the party that had demanded the continuation of slavery had been the Republican Party, you would have been told that over and over and over, again.  Indians eating a species to extinction is "human activity."  Democrats trying to destroy the nation in support of slavery are "the South."

Do you understand?  That flag they hate was created and raised by Democrats. 100%  Democrats.  All Democrats.  The South was solid Democrat.  Slavery was a Democrat institution.  When Oregon's constitution was being written, Democrats fought to make this a slave state!

The Stars and Bars is a Democrat flag.  Thousands of broadcast hours about the flag dispute, and miles of newsprint, and not once has this fact been mentioned.

Truth Number Two.

The second truth omitted is that the same people who detest the Stars 
and Bars, viewing it as representing white racism, are not equally offended by the slave trade in the Sudan, where black slaves are sold to this day.  Well, you say, that's in Africa.  This is here.  Okay, if that's the case, explain universal American black outrage over South Africa’s Apartheid.   The constant media din featuring black anger about that situation was deafening. So much for your "that's far away" argument.  That leaves us with a very uncomfortable thought.    To be brought to angry, frequent demonstrations by something less than actual slavery by whites, but not be stirred to hold  a single protest against the real thing because it is being done by blacks and Arabs?

What the hell does that mean?

Slavery was invented in Africa.

Flags of African Slave Coast nations, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon

Every slave America bought was captured by Africans, chained by 
Africans and sold by Africans.  PBS knows this.  Once,  the network even admitted it.   It was, considering the network's blatant bias, a strange thing to watch.  Imagine a serial killer, just for a moment, admitting his guilt.  It was on a PBS documentary that I saw this strange thing.  The program was about a black American professor with great joy experiencing his first trip to Africa -- until he stood near the walls of a compound on a West African strand.

Those walls are said to be in part made of the bodies of slaves.  The bones of some of the professor's ancestors may have been used to reinforce them.  It was when he met the hereditary scion of that compound, who is black, that he began to face a truth that left him unsettled as he walked later, alone, on the beach from which his own ancestors embarked as slaves bound for the Colonies.

As he looked out across the sea, at his back was 500 years of black
African wealth, a walled town of hundreds of black Africans whose
present day fortune is founded on the capture, brutal incarceration and
sale of his ancestors.

I will repeat that.  The black man whose ancestors got on the Dutch and Portuguese slave boats from that beach, was standing fifty feet from the black man whose ancestors sent them forth in blood-stained chains.

It must have been then that this highly-educated American black academic began to see beyond his lifelong prejudices.  Behind him was a black African town, flying the flag of a black African nation built on the profits of slavery.  Far across the sea before him was a nation that outlawed slavery a century and more before the one on whose land he now stood. You could see it in his face, in the language of his stance.  The experience was draining the purity of his anger at me for being white.  His own race was as guilty as mine.  I felt sorry for the man, but was reminded of the sorrow of Adam and Eve after they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Their world was forever changed, and not for the better.

I was also reminded of the brilliance of Nelson Mandella in not demanding retributution in his nation.  His reconciliation commission merely required that those who had done wrong admit it.  Not their children or grandchildren, you understand.  Just the ones who did wrong.  It was a recognition of a concept beautifully expressed in the Clint Eastwood film, The Unforgiven.  The Scofield kid, referring to a man he had shot, said, "Well, he had it coming."

Eastwood's character, William Munny, replied, "We all have it coming."

Score one for Mandella.

So, where are we?

PBS programming is, with the exception of the pure sciences like physics and astronomy, loaded with prejudice based on political correctness.  Most of their documentaries, most of their drama, even their teacher's service and children's programs, are infused with this bias. 

Except by accident, as in the case of the travelling black professor,  they represent only the liberal side of any issue.  The only question left to ask with respect to this matter is why?  Are, in other words, they a pack of liars, or simply people who are unaware that they are doing a bad job?  Hell of a choice, isn't it?  One is either a liar or a fool.

I have no proof that they are liars, and disbelieve in the kind of mass conspiracy such an approach would require, so my choice is that they are fools.  They look at the stars and bars and see white faces behind it.  They do not have the intelligence to see the black faces behind the white ones.

Black faces that stretch all the way back to Africa, and in time to the very beginning of the human species.

(LL)