Posted on 06/25/2015 11:59:12 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
During a discussion several years ago over renaming Confederate Memorial Hall at Vanderbilt University, a black professor made a shocking statement that might be correct: "The race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless free slaves."
This incendiary expression of descendents' regret is mentioned in a 2005 book by John Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. It goes without saying (though perhaps, given the occasion, the professor said it) that this thorough destruction would have encompassed the eradication of the battle flag and every other symbol of the Confederacy. The swastika is forbidden in Germany. I suppose a lunatic fringe could argue it would help us remember the Hitler who was an earnest German nationalist devoted to tradition. To everyone else the swastika symbolized war, conquest, and genocide and it had to go. The Confederate battle flag is a comparable symbol of tyranny—if you equate slavery with tyranny, which not everyone does. It's enjoyed a much gentler fate.
Why? Hitler was toppled from without, by nations he'd gone to war against. The Confederacy was defeated by American coconspirators. Coski explains, "'Southern' attitudes towards states rights and race are not just southern but are in fact American attitudes. Historians acknowledge that 'anti-slavery' impulses in the antebellum era were based on antipathy toward blacks and that the nation's willingness to allow the South to handle the 'Negro problem' in its own way at the beginning of the twentieth century revealed common racial attitudes. . . . When faced with demographic circumstances resembling those of the South, white people of other regions turned against blacks as quickly and ferociously as white southerners."
When I was a kid Jim Crow was the way things were. You could disapprove of it, and most people up north did, but their hearts weren't in it. In civics classes in high school Jim Crow was discussed as something that would disappear in the better world we all hoped to live in when we grew up. Cancer got the same treatment, except that cancer was more personal and frightened us a little. But curing cancer was someone else's fight, and ending Jim Crow was too. At least researchers out on the frontiers of science were admired; civil rights zealots were dismissed by southerners and northerners alike as pinko agitators.
Coski calls the battle flag the "second American flag" and observes that it represents something real about the south—which is "simultaneously an integral, even fiercely patriotic, part of the country and a distinct, sometimes alienated region that carries the unique burden of having fought and lost a war against the rest of the nation." As Coski points out, the south hasn't turned its back on the Stars and Stripes. Northern liberals might recall that during the great campaigns of the 1960s, southern conservatives protested federal civil rights laws by restoring the Confederate battle flag to a place of prominence, while to oppose war protesters, conservatives north and south waved Old Glory.
One of America's more prominent college fraternities is Kappa Alpha, founded in Virginia in 1865 and proud to identify Robert E. Lee as its "spiritual founder." Its members were known to deck themselves out in Confederate army uniforms on ceremonial occasions and to gallop across the field at football games flourishing the Confederate battle flag. I turn to their pages in my college yearbook, and there they are in their regalia, swords held high. Another picture finds uniformed KAs on horseback, one holding the battle flag. If I recall correctly the general response to KAs on campus, it was to vaguely disapprove of them, be amused, and enjoy the show.
A nice guy I've known since high school pledged. "I was never very comfortable with the sometimes expressed sympathies that the South was not beaten, they were just waiting for supplies," he writes. "While I don't remember any verbal prejudice expressed against African Americans in casual conversations among the fraternity brothers, I'm sure it existed below the radar. I picked KA because I liked the guys and the brand-new chapter house was to die for. For me, the fraternity's southern leanings meant magnolia blossoms and Southern belles in hoop skirts."
But in 1984 KA passed a resolution ordering chapters to conduct their annual Old South Balls "with restraint and dignity and without displays of trappings and symbols which might be misinterpreted and objectionable to the general public." (As of 2010, these trappings and symbols explicitly included Confederate uniforms.) In 1988 KA ruled out the possession or use of an "operable cannon." As of 2001 the battle flag could no longer be displayed in a frat house or anywhere else.
The Sun-Times's Neil Steinberg, who draws from Coski's book in his Wednesday column, doubts that the battle flag is going anywhere—"because the bigotry it symbolizes is still at gale force." Maybe. But if you know just where to look, you'll find progress.
The Chicago Reader is a FREE/throw away, faaaaaaaaar lefty, fish wrap paper.
Because the South didn’t have concentration camps where they executed Jews?
Because they are not the same thing.
I can still buy a swastika, not that I want one. Just sayin’.
“Why didn’t the Confederate battle flag go the way of the swastika?”
Why didn’t the Soviet flag? How many Americans were killed by communist in Korea and Vietnam? Last time I checked that was not 150 years ago.
Oh yeah. I'm sure that would have resulted in widespread feelings of tolerance, forgiveness & brotherly love among all the participants...
It wasn’t just the Jews that Hitler ordered “cleansed” from German society, it was all opposition or potential opposition - sound familiar?
Maybe William Tecumseh Sherman had something to do with it?
Well the commies ARE the current political parties. (Yes, both of them)
The swastika may be forbidden in Germany, but it is not forbidden in the United States. That is because [until recently] we enjoyed freedom of speech in the United States - even the freedom to use hateful, hurtful speech.
Because Confederates were not Nazis but fellow Americans, champions of civil rights—who insisted on the Bill of Rights and accepted the federalists’ blandishments ... and the great majority of whom were non-slave holders, with the courage of their convictions who said, like America’s founding fathers:
“If we have to choose between your federation or going back to the confederation, once again—if we must choose between freedom and death, we choose to fight.”
?
Lefties and debate ... it’s like trying to talk 19th century English jurisprudence with an Irish setter:
OK Ginger, why do you think Austin was an act utilitarian, opposed to Mills’ rule utility, and compare both to Kant’s categorical imperativism? Slap your paw on the ground twice girl, OK, if you ....
“We have to pass the legislation so we can begin determining how much we can squeeze from you wage slaves ...” Nanzi Pelosi
And yet those liberals who condemn a historical flag have no shame wearing a Che (a slimy communist genocidal POS if there ever was one!) T-shirt.
That flag belonged in a museum since the end of the Civil War. Glad to see finally on its way there.
...Talk of nazis....
Slaveowners were an earlier version of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party? That is definitely news to me.
People may not know it, but the various states (Laender) of Germany were very jealous of their power, still are, because they were there long before there was anything like a German nation. The Nazi regime was nowhere near having a unified and undying support of all the citizens of these various Laender, and despite of a widely held belief, a lot of good German folk really did not like the system forced upon them. But dissent was widely suppressed, as the consequences were uncommonly severe, and the Germans paid a cruel price for the intransigence of those in the regime. It was the revulsion expressed by the Germans themselves that drove the Nazi symbols into near oblivion, and even today it is illegal to display any of those symbols ANYWHERE in Germany.
The battle standard of Northern Virginia, on the other hand, was a symbol of faded glory, a symbol of something that many of the citizens of the South saw as an honorable and even commendable expression of independent initiative and and a greater ideal, that of states’ rights. That the states’ rights got conflated with the preservation of slavery, is purely the harvest of fruits of the DEMOCRATS that ran the southern states from the end of Reconstruction (about 1875) until the time of the Civil Rights act of 1965.
Because they are not the same thing.
Very true, they are just flags. The entity that should have gone the way of the swastika and Nazi party; the party that gave us slavery, the war, the KKK, etc; the democrat party.
They are and always have been our own National Socialists.
The party should have been outlawed, hunted down, and extinguished (like the Nazis) in 1865 and its leadership North and South publicly executed.
Because, unlike the Nazis, The South Was Right!
Whenever the leftist/liberal media doesn't like something they always inevitably tie it to the swastika or Nazi's ....
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