TOM EATON: Nasty halfwits and their favourite flag
'You can be as offended as you like‚ but the fact remains: if the old flag is anything more to you than a relic in an attic‚ you’re either a nasty piece of work or a halfwit'
On Monday‚ as it emerged that a few Black Monday protestors had waved old South African flags‚ I posted a fairly uncontroversial opinion on Facebook. “An old South African flag is not just something you have lying around and decide to take out to express your bad mood from time to time‚” I wrote. “If you've still got one‚ 23 years later‚ it means it's precious to you‚ a carrier of potent cultural symbolism and treasured history‚ and I have a right to assume the absolute worst of your character and intellectual abilities.” The overwhelming majority of responses were supportive. As I said‚ it is not a wildly radical position to suggest that endorsing a crime against humanity is‚ you know‚ wrong. And yet‚ inevitably‚ there they were: the outraged and the offended‚ crawling out of the 1950s to tell me that I was being terribly unkind; that people have all sorts of reasons for waving racist flags in public and that I had no right to judge either their character or their intellect. One co...
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