". . . to the Flag . . ."

When I was a student at The University of Alabama, I was an active participant on the staff of The Crimson White, "the award-winning student produced daily newspaper." In the summer of 1986, I wrote an editorial column for The CW in which I ruminated on the U.S. flag.

One point that I made was that our flag, unlike that of any other nation, encapsulates our history at a glance:  from 13 fairly small, mostly agrarian states clustered along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, we have expanded to 50 states spread across the entire continent, embracing the geographic richness of North America in a wide variety of terrain, climate, sceniery and wealth of natural resources. I opined that the flag is a symbol to be saluted whenever possible, as I did whenever I passed, in uniform or in mufti, the large flag flying over the University Quadrangle.

Our flag does not make the bald expression of power, unlike the British Union Flag, which combines the crosses of St. George, the patron of England, and of St. Andrew, the patron of Scotland, symbolizing the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Nor does it make an ideological statement, as the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union, the supposed workers's paradise. Rather, it is a reminder from whence we came, and a celebration of what we have achieved.

In recent years, this celebration of our stature has itself come under pernicious assault from those who hold themselves out as the most ardent defenders of the symbol of our great country. It is in their defense of the flag that these citizens betray themselves as enemies of the ideals that they profess to hold dear.

The issue is flag burning, an protected by the First Amendment. The true attack on the Flag is the movement to pass an an amendment to the Constitution* that would ban flag burning.

The most noisome support for an amendment to ban flag burning comes from veterans's groups. I respect the sacrifice made by our veterans, and I especially reverence the ultimate sacrifice of those who gave their lives that I might be free. On this issue, at least, I have to feel that their arguments are not merely self-defeating, but self-refuting.

Proponents of a flag-burning amendment claim that to burn the Flag is an act of desecration. Can the symbol be of more substance than what it symbolizes? Indeed, it cannot. To take a pre-Socratic view of reality, the only thing that actually exists is the idea of the Republic. The Flag is only a symbol of a reality that does not actually exist in any kind of substantive, or temporal way.

Our flag is the symbol of the right that we as citizens enjoy to criticize the conduct of our government. That right, as suggested by my observation above that the only thing that actually exists is the idea of the Republic, is a characteristic of the Republic as manifested on the temporal plane. Freedom to criticize the government is a mark of the Republic; that is, it is one of the distinctive features that identify the Republic for what it is.

The right of the citizen to protest an action of the government of the Republic (which is an act by which the Republic is bound - government being merely an agent of the Republic) is an essential element in understanding the nature of our Republic. In burning a Flag, a citizen expresses his opinion that the Flag was already desecrated by an action of a government that is unworthy of that symbol.

Worse, from the standpoint of social discourse, is the argument put forward by veterans's groups that flag burning is an act of ingratitude of the sacrifice of veterans, especially veterans of World War II. In fact, by making such an argument, veterans themselves denigrate their own sacrifice.

Consider two scenarios:  First, during an annual Nazi Party rally in the late 1930s, Nuremberg is festooned with swastika flags while ranks of brown- and black-shirted storm troopers parade past Adolf Hitler. Out of the crowd steps an individual, carrying a swatiska flag, which e sets alight, shouting insults and imprecations against Hitler and the myth of Aryanism. How long would such a protest have been allowed to continue before the demonstrator found himself in a Gestapo cell?

Or consider the scene in Tokyo at the same time, or during the war years. The Emperor, divinity made flesh, is reviewing Japanese military might when a demonstrator steps out of the crowd, sets a Rising Sun flag alight, and screams racial insults in the direction of the Imperial Presence. How long would this demonstrator's head have remained on his shoulders?

Dictatorships - indeed, any repressive form of government - are institutionally, viscerally unable to tolerate any form of negative criticism. This includes criticism manifested by the destruction of symbols of the State. Criticism expressed in this way indicates that the critic is taking a skeptical look at the government's claim to legitimacy. When an illegitimate government - that is, any government that does not work primarily for the good, and the advancement of the people - faces a questioning populace, with the potential to undermine the faulty logic, or specious assertions that are the foundations of that illegitimate government, the first, instinctual response of the government is to suppress the critic, thus silencing criticism.

Hence, one of the marks of totalitarianism is the institution of a secret police force, with broad power to search and seize anything, and arrest anyone anwhere, in the interest of suppressing dissenting criticism.† Hitler had the Gestapo, Stalin the KGB, Ulbricht the Stasi. The militaristic Japanese junta of the World War II period. and Saddam Hussein's régime had their enforcers who worked in the shadows to suppress criticism of the government while sowing terror among the peoplel whom the government should have meant to serve. The excesses of those evil organizations, were justification for the efforts of liberal democracies to eradicate the régimes that sponsored them.

Yet, having triumphed over repressive totalitarianism, the modern model of Western liberal democracy is poised on the verge of imitating the evil purpose for which repressive secret police organizations existed. Having stood up against suppression and repression, the heroic foes of totalitarianism now claim as their due the right to impose the same limits on constitutional freedoms that they fought to break two generations ago.

How have the defenders of liberty come to exact the restriction of liberty as the price of the defense of liberty? We must consider the fundamental cause behind this misguided embrace of disgraced ideologies, if we are to understand why well-meaning civic groups, worth of our society's respect and gratitude, have fallen into self-defeating error. To find this fundamental cause, we must look back into our nation's history, for this erroneous consecration of our Anglo-Saxon heritage has its roots in our Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Fundamental to the human psyche is the urge to self-aggrandizement, the driving urge to make oneself supreme above neighbors and competitors. We call this urge "ambition," and within its proper bounds it serves a useful, worthy purpose. In the Renaissance Englishman, this ambition broke free from the bounds of moral propriety and became the urge to project English superiority around the world. Thus English imperialism, over the course of only a couple hundred years, established an empire on which the sun never set.

The English were certainlynot the first imnperialists; they merely applied lessons taught by imperial Rome. Nor were the English the last imperialists, as we have seen in the dreadful examples of Nazism, Japanese militarism, militant Communism, to name a sufficient variety, without even addressing American adventurism in the Middle East since 2003. However, the English were the first to abandonmoral restrain on ambition, to jettison the notion of a universal concept of justice in pursuit of ambition.

The English concept of "the King's justice" found expression in the legal maxim, rex fons iustitiæ. According to this maxim, the Crown became supposedly, ideally, the fount of justice, and the judges merely the spigots by which the King's justice was dispensed. The idea of the King as the fount of justice constituted one of the underpinnings of the English judicial system, which is capable of scrupulously fair play. When, in the course of centuries of development of the absolutist state, the King's justice became subject to the King's capricious notions of what justice was, from one moment to the next, and when justs became not merely spigots dispensing justice, but valves controlling justice's flow, the judicial system of late-Renaissance England was abjectly vulnerable to corruption and perversion.

Thus there arose phenomena such as the court of Star Chamber, where secret testimony was taken from "witnesses" whom the accused had no right to confront, and convictions entered despite the absence of any credible evidence of the accused's guilt, simply because the Crown desired the conviction. Consider the fates of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, both condemned to death and actually killed because Henry VIII wanted them dead. These cases were allowed to become blots on the history of English jurisprudence, and had a profound impact on the Founding Fathers. American jurisprudence, especially the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights of the individual, and the notion of judicial independence, are the Constitution's eloquent, elegant answer to the perversions of English jurisprudence that arose during the late Renaissance, and continued throughout the Age of Reason.

It is said that, "possession is nine-tenths of the law." This principle was not lost on the English landowners, nor on Parliament, nor the Crown during the final decades of Britain's colonial dominance of North America. The landowners possessed the land, and they knew it; for them, that was the end of the matter. No matter how they treated their property (or so they felt) there was nothing anyone could say otherwise. The feeling was that no matter the degree to which their possession of their colonial property was perceived by common men as obnoxious, the fact of ownership was sufficient to ratify and justify whatever highhanded means the landlords chose to employ in maintaining their enjoyment of their property.

The lesson taught by the American Revolution is that an owner, regardless of how complete his possession may be, must act toward his property in a morally appropriate way. When the English possession of North America became mroe obnoxious than the patience of the colonists could bear, they dispossessed the colonial masters of their property. This was not an ungrateful, much less sinful repudiation of the dominance of the landlords.‡ Rather, it was an assertion of the fundamental rights of all men who work and contribute to the common good.

The American Experiment was effected, at least in part, in repudiation of the rupture of moral bounds by English ambition. It was an attempt to reinstitute curbs on a perfectly proper human trait, the expression of which had reached an improper degree. For the most part, for over 200 years (with the notable exceptions of the white citizens's treatment of Indians, of the Black Africans brought to this land in slavery, and the further exception of the treatment of women of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and economic status), our society lived within moral bounds while spreading across North America. Manifest Destiny had its unsavory dark side, certainly, but for the most part, the United States's subjection of North America was restrained by a  proper degree of modesty in execution.

No matter how modest the exercise of human ambition, the urge to ascendancy over one's fellow man remains a strong motivating force in human behavior. The willingness and capacity to jump the bounds of propriety remains strong, and it is this subdued, but incompletely eradicated tendency that has lead modern American society into such social quagmires as the debate over flag-burning.

The men and women who conquered tyrants, whom Tom Brokaw has rightly called "The Greatest Generation," went ot war to eradicate corrupt ideologies that could only survive by suppression of all human freedoms. They went because duty called, a fundamental summons that no member of the human family can ignore. It would be absurd to suggest that more than a handful of profound political thinkers went to war.

Knowing what and why you do something is not a prerequisite for doing the right thing. The men and women who served this country - and, in a larger sense, all of humanity - did the right thing, not necessarily because they knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, but because they knew it was right.

Suppression of human rights is a self-evident evil, which neither requires proof, nor admits of refutation. It is this sort of suppression of dissent, an essential element of the establishment and maintenance of tyranny, which our veterans went ot war to eradicate from the earth. It is this sort of suppression of dissent that our veterans have now embraced over the issue of flag burning. In doing so, our veterans, and other anti-flag burning groups, have allowed their human ambition to dominate their fellow man to jump, at least to a degree, over the bounds of propriety.

In the interest of enforcing loyalty and displays of affection toward our Union, and the symbol thereof, our veterans are willing to turn their backs on their own sacrifices, their own lost youth, their own spilled blood and that of their corades whose graves hallow the soil from Guadalcanal to Pointe du Hoc. It is not the flag burners who are disloyal and ungrateful. It is the veterans themselves who spurn their own greatness.

Respectfully, I submit that this sort of rambunctious self-immolation is as unbecoming to its proponents as it would be to the rest of an informed citizenry, if we were to allow it. The Republic owes a great, inescapable debt to the men and women who took up arms to defeat tyranny, 70 years ago. We cannot pay that debt by allowing th eultimate triumph of the ideology against which they struggled.

Why else did our heroes go forth in struggle, if not to live and enjoy the freedoms for which they fought, and leave that precious freedom as a legacy to their children?A laborer goes about his duty with a view toward posterity, even if consideration of the future is no more than an unconscious impulse. It would have been pointlessly self-defeating in 1945 to have eradicated Nazism, Fascism and militarism from the globe, only to return home to embrace those ideologies by means of rest from their labor. For this reason, our veterans returned home from their victory determined that suppression of human rights should not take root in our land, have once been exterminated in other lands.

Yet now, with the passing of decades, and the passing of most external enemies from the stage of world affairs, the memory of shared hardship in a total, national commitment to the struggle against authoritarianism has begun to fade. Yet, there remains a need for an external enemy, a focus for the heterogeneous nation's collective identity, a distraction from domestic concerns. The need for an enemy or a scapegoat on whom to place blame has turned our champions's vigilant gaze from outward to inward. In their quest for a new rallying cry, they have settled on those who enjoy the freedoms for which they fought as the next objects of their ambition to superiority.

*On the subject of (post-)Reagan Era conservatives's fetish with changing the rules - especially rules that their ideological forebears imposed - when those rules no longer suit the changed circumstances of "the present," I shall have more to say later. How can one uphold "principles," or "fundamental values," when the defense offered changes with the shifting of the political winds?

†The United States is fortunate in not having a secret police force. But when the national-security legislation passed in the wake of 9/11 does not merely allow Executive-branch agencies to circumvent  the confidential processes enshrined in pre-existing Federal law (e.g., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] of 1978), but actually allows Executive-branch agencies to impose legal requirements in violation of Constitutional rights on citizens without due process (e.g., prohibiting libraries from informing their patrons that the library has provided records of those patrons's use of library-supplied computers and Internet access to the Executive agency), one wonders whether designating an agency as Stasi, or NKVD, or Kempeitai would be superfluous.

‡Candor demands the admission that the independence of the United States was predicated on the crime of dispossessing the King of his property without just compensation - a practice which, if not resisted, would render the capitalist system, or indeed any mode of production, impossible. Hence, such acts are properly criminalized, and equally properly punished severely - in the case of the United States, by many of the same men who had perpetrated the theft on a grand scale. The primary difference between the theft of the United States, and any of the thefts that characterized English colonization of what became the British Empire, was that in the former case, the King of England was the victim, rather than the beneficiary, of the theft. Of the criminal independence of the United States, and the seditious process of developing the legal framework for the Republic, I will have more to say later.