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.
It will certainly be flying for our July 4th deck party alongside the Gadsden.
Actually you are right. In recent years more people have been displaying the Confederate flag than I can remember in 30 years. This will just make it worse.
“The Republican party has no relevance for conservatives. It does not represent us and actively works agains’t us. It needs to die.”
Needs to be repeated.
“The Republic formerly known as the USA is dead and has been replaced with an Oligarchy.”
Sadly, you are right.
“The Republican party has no relevance for conservatives. It does not represent us and actively works agains’t us. It needs to die.”
Needs to be repeated.
“The Republic formerly known as the USA is dead and has been replaced with an Oligarchy.”
Sadly, you are right.
You are right on about Judaism in the South.
I have to do a lot of research into slave life and I am finding it hard to explain the truth to 2015 politically correct people of any race. Not being free people was absolutely horrific. Yet since many had known and couldn’t imagine anything else, they had grown used to it, and their existence was validated in the strict hierarchy of society (friends and comrades, plus some deep interracial relationships that were friends within boundaries — mistress and personal servant, master and trusted ally slave — I’m not taking about sexual relationship). And roughly half of slaves were treated well within the wrong that was slavery.
However, at least half were treated very cruelly. Their lives were dotted with horror, rape, families ripped apart, no escape from drudgery, whippings, torture. Because all masters were given the freedom to treat the people they “owned” any way they liked, there was no recourse for treatment far worse than King George treated the colonists, meaning our Constitution offered no protection to these people. Against the will of Gd. That needs to be said.
Still, African Americans just out of slavery, with brains and ambition, did so much to make the world and country a better place. Where is that leadership now? Blacks in America, some anyway, are in chains today of their own doing. They could use some real pride and leadership today.
“The attack on Southern symbols is an attack on the heritage of the most consistently American Conservative group of voters.”
That was the whole idea! The left knows it must isolate and demean the most conservative section of the country in order to solidify its power.
“but what was the North’s problem?”
Hatred. It is that simple.
“The Republic formerly known as the USA is dead and has been replaced with an Oligarchy.”
I’d like to see what someone like Ted Cruz has to say about this. Of course, as a candidate for Preisident, he would have to couch it in the format of “why our country is BECOMING an oligarchy, and what we need to do to stop it,” but how I would love to see this subject get out into public discourse.
We need civics. If only we could pause a few hours of gender studies and have our kids learn their personal power in the USA, as owners of our government, because they have no clue. They have been marched and shaped since preschool and don’t even realize they have power. We don’t need more sheep. We need more individuals.
People wearing the confederate flag fought in WWII against the Nazis, need we say more? The gay flag is just another traitor no-flag.
When govt and communist progressives try to take away your culture and heritage there is no reasoned debate. Get real!
The democrats belong in a museum. The flag long ago surrendered and repented honorably, but it is democrats within which are unrepenting.
The Confederate flag was worn by honorable patriots fighting both world wars, korea vietnam and what not in various DDay national guard units, I will be damned if these people are forgotten for their honorable service.
We are tourists in our own country. Now Southerners whose National Guard units fought the Nazies on D-Day are going to have to let the islamics open mosques and raise their shariah flags because the no-flag liberal pu$$ies will not fight.
The “new” civil war is just the old one on replay- the north ginning up hatred for the south. At least this time they aren’t killing southern boys. Yet.
***...that Cherokees honored the Confederate side.***
The Cherokees had their own version of the Stars and Bars. A few extra stars for the indian tribes and the words CHEROKEE BRAVES sewn on the middle bar.
The LAST Confederate General to surrender was Cherokee Stand Watie.
Are they being sold anywhere in the US? Are they being displayed anywhere in the US? I’ve not seen one on anything.
See or appreciate the difference? What do you think the difference is to those forces that are behind this? Do you really think Liberal Fascists see a great deal of difference between the US and Confederate flags? According to them, we are all racists who need our property stripped away from us and we need to be sent to gulags or extermination camps.
I don't think you grasp the forces at work here, but perhaps Pastor Niemöller can enlighten you.
This effort to ban symbols or speech that they disagree with is simply Nazism on the march again.
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