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.
> Because the South didn’t have concentration camps where they executed Jews?
The South had Andersonville and the North had Elmira. They didn’t execute Jews, but a huge number of captured men never came home from them.
One of my great great uncles died in Elmira Military Prison 7 days before the end of the war. As it was, every male member of my family over the age of 12 was killed in the Civil war. My family were just poor white peckerwoods from Arkansas. (for those who’ve never heard the term, peckerwood is the Southern equivalent of the Northern term redneck).
He’s not “dissing” it. He’s predicting.
Screwy Louie of course has already suggested it.
We all knew this would happen - as it always does - “the US is oppressive from the get-go and any symbols are to be despised”.
Come on, it’s not new that liberals - who hate America - would suggest they will not celebrate America or its symbols, including the Flag.
What I don't get is why the Star and Crescent and Hammer and Sickle have not gone the way of the Swastika. They are all the symbols of mass murderers.
POW camps are not the same as concentration camps just because you don’t like the people.
Sorry.
"The race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy Democrat Party was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless free slaves."
“The Republican Party and conservatives will be better for finally and very publicly shedding the Confederate flag.”
The Republican party has no relevance for conservatives. It does not represent us and actively works agains’t us. It needs to die.
The Republic formerly known as the USA is dead and has been replaced with an Oligarchy.
Southerners don’t give a rat’s azz what a bunch of ignernt Yankees (I guess that’s you) thinks about the Confederate flag, Southern history or much of anything except how to disengage from you and build a fence along the Mason Dixon line. :-)
That means that the States define their own social values. By what rationale do we purge the symbols of one another for some form of compulsion driven uniformity?
The attack on Southern symbols is an attack on the heritage of the most consistently American Conservative group of voters. Nothing could be more counter-productive to the rights of any other segment of Americans; nothing more destructive of fundamental liberties.
Understand the hate promotion that is behind the current assault. See Promoting Hate In America. This is not some spontaneous eruption.
I also found out, attending a Confederate POW burial-ground ceremony for my gravesite group at Pt. Lookout in MD, that Cherokees honored the Confederate side. At this ceremony many organizations laid wreaths, and 2 of them were from Cherokee tribes (and yes, they were actually Indians, not white boys with 1/32 Indian ancestry).
The swastika is alive and well you idiot at the Chicago Reader...proudly displayed by Islamofacist.
That’s an interesting perspective.
We do in fact have to remember that there was only a “Germany” since “unification” under Bismarck in 1870. Seems lightyears to us, but that is only about 60 years removed from the NAZI rise. Not enough time had passed to “settle”.
Germany often is a microcosm of European problems.
I’ve visited Andersonville and the cemetery there. I’ve also read about POW camps both North and South and more Southern soldiers died in Northern camps then did Union troops in the South. There was a lot of pro/con about Andersonville as to how the camp was run under Wirz where a monument to him is in the town square.
Yes, the Leo Frank case is the most famous/well known one, but there were a few others.
When I was young, I was on a bus trip from NYC to Richmond. We stopped for a tour of the Museum of the Confederacy but half the occupants of the bus refused to get off because viewing it would be “honoring” the Confederacy. Those people, if they’re still around today, would probably want the flag burned. So, some will not be happy to know that it’s simply consigned to a museum. The only way forward would be to suppress it.
Of course, they were all too stupid to know that NYC was a hotbead of Copperheads.
Why did the north not treat its prisoners better? We hear so much about Wirz and the fact that the struggling Confederacy didn’t have enough food for its troops much less prisoners but what was the North’s problem?
Thank you for the reasoned discussion. I know we all have different perspectives on this and it really is great to discuss them without unnecessary insults and rudeness that others sometimes like to throw around to kill discussion. Again, thanks.
African Americans, As If. As if you were the only ones in history who went through atrocities. The woman who walked in and took free possession of my great-grandparents’ home the day they were taken to the death camp still lived there in the 1980s. My family did not get that house back.
Please look around and see that man’s inhumanity to man has always been and will always be. Choose good. Choose civilization. Try and bring light to the world. Don’t have your children focus on victimhood.
The swastika is not gone.
Who got this crap started?
Lefties and debate ... it’s like trying to talk 19th century English jurisprudence with an Irish setter:
Love this. But you do need an Irish Setter who knows how to yell ad hominem attacks.
Nice of you to use the same 'museum' talking point as Obama and Jeb Bush. Very original.
Glad to see finally on its way there.
Nah, the media and progressives only succeeded in creating a Streisand effect with the flag. It's definitely flapping in the breeze in more places in the South now than it was two weeks ago.
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