War & Peace Quote by Alan Keyes

Keyes doesn’t merely criticize America’s past; he hijacks its most sacred shorthand and forces it to testify against itself. By saying the “Stars and Stripes” was the true “symbol of slavery on the high seas,” he’s staging a reversal: the reflexive villain in U.S. memory is the Confederate flag, safely quarantined as Southern, regional, and defeated. Keyes drags the indictment north and federal, insisting the nation’s core icon carried the stain.

The specific intent is polemical and strategic. He’s arguing that slavery wasn’t an aberration confined to the Confederacy but a national enterprise protected by federal policy, enforced by law, and defended economically. “On the high seas” is doing heavy work: it conjures the Atlantic slave trade and maritime power, hinting that U.S. commerce, shipping, and state authority were entangled with human trafficking and slaveholding interests. Even when the U.S. later interdicted the trade, the earlier complicity lingers in the symbol.

The subtext is a rebuke to selective moral bookkeeping. Condemning the Confederate flag can become a comforting ritual: denounce the obvious racist artifact, declare the present redeemed. Keyes punctures that narrative by suggesting the easier target is also the safer one. His “sadly” signals mournful patriotism rather than gleeful provocation; he wants to keep the flag’s emotional gravity while refusing its innocence.

Context matters: this kind of line plays in culture-war arenas where symbols stand in for history. Keyes leverages that symbolic battlefield to argue that reckoning requires more than outlawing a banner; it requires admitting what the national banner once covered.