The young man who, on Wednesday evening of this week, shot nine black parishioners of Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church, was motivated by pronounced racial animus.Explaining to the murdered why he was taking their lives, he told them stupidly, “I have to do it. You rape our women, and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.” He was, his former roommate informed the press with a disgraceful understatement of tone, “big into segregation and stuff” — intent, even, upon starting “a civil war.” A much-circulated photograph, taken appropriately next to a filthy swamp, depicts him wearing a jacket that boasts two unmistakable signs of white supremacy: an apartheid-era flag from South Africa, and the segregationist colors that once flew ignominiously over Rhodesia. There, as now, he resembles a silly and angry child — a fool and an ignoramus who has managed to adopt as his own some of the worst instincts within our culture.

Since the news broke, it has become fashionable to play up just how prominent those instincts supposedly are. This is a mistake. What happened in Charleston was a tragedy — no, an abomination — and it understandably served to reopen some of America’s deepest historical fault lines. But it was not part of a contemporary pattern, and for this we should be grateful, not frustrated. Whatever one believes is the modern value of the Confederate battle flag — and for my part I see little at all to admire — the interpretation that the killer appears to have indulged puts him out on a limb.

Source: Charles C.W. Cooke, http://www.nationalreview.com