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.
And where Old Glory will likely be joining it shortly.
They DID lynch Jews, in the South, though.
"The culture of the Confederacy was probably the furthest from the Nazi culture of any in the world over the past century & a half. The ignorance of social history by those who parrot such a line is astounding.
"Similarly, one might consider what I posted this morning on another thread:
"That there are many Leftist crack-pots who pontificate against traditional values with little or no knowledge or understanding of history, is a given. The real question is how and when to respond to them, in a manner that is effective.
"The idea that because the Confederate South had an hierarchical system, such as that in Biblical times; such as that in the Classical era of Greece & Rome; such as that in almost all of Europe from the fall of Rome until the modern era; there was an idea that the lives of workers did not matter, is a ludicrous form of angry myopia that needs to be addressed.
"For an example. From the standpoint of whether "Black lives mattered" in the days of the Confederacy: Contrast the relative standing of urban Blacks in most American cities today, with their standing (cumulatively, both as free men and those technically in bondage--as were some we honor from Classical Greece to this day) in the actual days of the Confederacy?
"Most of your skilled construction workers, carpenters, masons, shipwrights, etc.., were Black in the deep South. (Some "free," many still technically not; but certainly respected, in the early 1860s.) What happened? The end of the War generation were not able to pass on their skills to their children--corrupted by Leftist politicians of that era, promising instant equality from Government--entitlements just from existing.
"White Americans are certainly being victimized by the present Administration in Washington. But, frankly, as anyone who understands the dynamics of human motivations (positive & negative); it is a very close call, which race is being victimized more. Looking at what has been happening in Black neighborhoods in Baltimore, Greater St. Louis, Chicago, etc.; it does not really appear to be the Whites.
"Nor is the victimization that terrorizes law abiding Blacks, the result of Policemen doing their jobs; or of Southerners who honor their very American heritage that comes closer than any other to reflecting the values & traditions of the Founding Fathers. To understand what is destroying the quality of "Black lives," you need to look to the centers of Leftwing agitation, and the White House & the hopelessly compromised Republicans, who sit silently--if not providing a friendly chorus--while America is being deconstructed.
"(And do not forget who is being most directly victimized by the open Southern border.)"
For a clearer understanding of race relations in the old South, visit Booker T. Washington's witness in 1895: Booker T. Washington Address. Unlike the hate filled Marxist fanatics, mentioned above, Washington loved his Southern homeland.
The Reader ??????????? LOL
You deserve to be in a history classroom where maybe you could learn something.
The’’new’’ Civil War IS about slavery. We are all slaves now. Kinda ironic, huh?
If that had happened, Southern partisans would have taken to the hills, forests and swamplands to wage guerrilla warfare. The war could then have gone on for decades as has the Burmese civil war, which began in 1948 and is still going on.
The ridiculous notion that Southern culture was based on hatred of anyone, is belied by the fact that many of her large Negro population were actually more advanced occupationally than they have been since. (No, that is not a defense of a feudal legal structure with regard to the labor system. But it is certainly something that needs to be understood, before one passes moral judgment on anyone else. 'Let he, who is innocent,' etc.)
No, don’t diss the US flag because we are finally putting the Confederate flag in a museum. Two very different considerations. Can’t believe you don’t see or appreciate the difference. It is a matter of whether you believe in, respect, and support America or not. Waving the Confederate flag and defending it over or equating it with the US flag suggests otherwise.
For starters, the Confederacy had a Jewish Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin.
Aside from my nuclear and electronic engineering studies, I was a history major, with focus on US history. And I have no problem defending and respecting the US. No conflicting loyalties, like equating or putting the Confederate flag above the US flag. CSA deservedly lost the Civil War and it is long past time to get over it and move on. What alternative, move to Mexico?! The Republican Party and conservatives will be better for finally and very publicly shedding the Confederate flag. Anyway, give it a few days and you will feel better with some perspective. And, sorry, I cannot feel your pain on this one.
why?
because they needed to get rachel dolezal off the front page ASAP.
it was threatening to unravel the trans crowd and race based politics in one fell swoop. they needed a lightning rod immediately.
The KKK was originally formed to terrorize blacks but later expanded to include Catholics and Republicans.
More here: http://snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.com/2012/04/jews-and-kkk.html
Actually, the collectivist/egalitarian, seeking a monolithic society, is the ideological equivalent of the Nazi under Hitler--who ranted about achieving a "classless, casteless" Germany, in "Triumph Of The Will". Those we mistakenly call "liberal," in today's sloppy parlance, are fanatics at war with reality, most of whom share the same Compulsion For Uniformity, as drove the Bolsheviks and Nazis.
Because Germany outlawed the swastika. Where-as we used to believe in free speech.
Right and in Communist Russia for a kid in school to be called an ‘individualist’ was a harsh slur.
Where we are headed?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3291368/posts
Liberal Academic Says America’s Founding Document Outmoded
Accuracy in Academia ^ | May 19, 2015 | Cliff Kincaid
Posted on 5/19/2015, 7:18:43 AM by Academiadotorg
Top Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs says that when Pope Francis visits the United States in September, he will directly challenge the “American idea” of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.
I submit that images of every "bigoted" personality from our history is now up for grabs. From Washington to Lincoln, Malcolm X to Jimmy the Greek - you go down this road and there's no telling where it leads.
“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 guy is extremely dangerous.
More akin to Moslem thinking than Christian.
And I’m sure he wouldn’t like Lincoln if he had lived on. Lincoln just wanted to give them a spanking. Not good enough for this monster.
You wouldn't know a republic if it bit you in the rear end.
I am giving you a pass however because I like your tag line.
Please get a clue, how does one "get over" the death of the republic?
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