Posted on 04/22/2003 9:21:28 AM PDT by WhiskeyPapa
Banning banner banter The Battle Flag -- and the Stars and Bars -- are racist symbols: Dump them
BY JOHN SUGG
Monty Python couldn't have done it better. One of the British comedy troupe's fave sidesplitters depicted an incensed John Cleese trying to return a decidedly deceased parrot to a pet store owner, Michael Palin. Part of the sketch goes:
Cleese: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Palin: No, no, he's not dead, he's, he's restin'!
So it goes in the Georgia Assembly in the endless posturing over the state flag.
Forget that Georgia is broke. Forget that legislators have again unleashed rapacious bankers to prey on those least able to protect themselves. Forget the assault on your rights to recover just damages from incompetent doctors and reckless (if not criminal) corporations. Forget that schools are sardine-can overcrowded and educators don't have a prayer of keeping up with growth. Forget that in all but a few elite schools, Georgia's woefully underfunded public education ranks so low, it almost falls off the list of states and into competition with countries like Uganda. Forget that ethical standards among public officials are so non-existent that even patchwork, impotent proposals are hailed as courageous. Forget about the environment. Forget about poor people railroaded off to jail without competent counsel, an affront to the most basic constitutional principles.
Forget everything because Georgia is on the brink of reinstitutionalizing raw, rancid racism. Whether we opt for a slightly retooled Confederate Stars and Bars or the Rebel Battle Flag, we still end up hanging the banner of a diseased and defeated excuse for a social system above our public buildings.
That the Legislature's Ultimate Wacko, Rep. Bobby Franklin, wants to scrawl "In God We Trust" on a flag whose 19th-century cause was anathema to any teaching of Christ I can find in the Bible is delicious irony. (And, there's nothing patriotic in Franklin's ploy. Rather, it's a blatant -- and thoroughly anti-American -- attempt to impose his view of religion on the state. As Rep. Doug Teper, who is Jewish, quipped, what Franklin is really stamping on the flag is: "In Jesus We Trust.")
In short, it's all very Republican.
Here's how the jolly chaps at Monty Python might act it:
Cleese (playing The Rest of the World): Look, matey, I know a racist emblem when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Palin (playing Gov. Sonny Perdue, the GOP and no-scruples white Democrats): No, no, it's not racist. It's just HERITAGE!
The Civil War ended with the surrender of the last Confederate army, in Texas, on May 26, 1865. But y'all know that. Let's think about another war for a moment. Almost 80 years later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered.
All other issues aside, Germans and Southerners have something in common -- how to address a collective, culture-wide crime of murderous racism. We're talking guilt, writ large.
The South embraced the enslavement of one race as a romanticized economic system. Nazi Germany wasn't defined by slavery, but it employed the practice -- hideously so -- justifying its crimes through a twisted mythology of racial supremacy. One could argue that the Confederacy was slightly more egalitarian than the Nazis -- Southerners generally regarded all white folks as superior, while the Germans excluded from their club all but those they considered the purest of the race.
The crushing defeats of the South and Germany forced their citizens to abandon, at least officially, the slavery and racist underpinnings of their societies. That's only the beginning, however, of rehabilitation. Survivors who had participated in the crimes -- lesser ex-Nazis and almost all Southern ex-slave owners -- remained, and many regained success and status after the wars.
More important, their causes might have been defeated, but the mythologies (whether Wagner-whistling Teutonic knights or Margaret Mitchell's delusional depictions of "gray" chivalry) didn't die. It's hard, both as individuals and as peoples, to accept that what was patriotism one day is verboten the next. Germans and Southerners fervently believed their causes were just, and were blessed by God and/or Destiny. Then, one day, all that was sacred became profane. Whiplash on a national scale.
Those who had fomented the wars -- at least the ones who avoided Yankee and Allied nooses and cells -- often stood to gain through continued criminality. Many ex-Nazis found it convenient to morph into apparatchiks and Stasi commanders in East Germany. The Southern ruling class used terrorism and racism -- epitomized by the Ku Klux Klan and the "Citizens Councils" -- to divide and conquer poor whites and blacks.
Germans, after the war, realized the only way to heal their society was to strip away and trash the mythology. Occasionally with reluctance, and never with total success, they ripped out the vestiges of Nazism. Oh, sure, behind closed doors in beer halls, "they" gathered, clicked their heels, bellowed the "Horst Wesel" song and toasted the memory of "him." But those nasty fellows had to hide their nostalgia.
The new German government ruthlessly banned Nazi imagery. For many reasons -- including, I'd argue, the self-surgery that purged the emotional and symbolic vestiges of Nazism -- Germany's democracy flourished after the war, eventually undermining the totalitarian East German government.
Back yonder in Dixie, collective guilt was assuaged via another method: denial.
Rather than eschew the immoral system that had brought so much calamity to the South, racist demagoguery was elevated to gospel and treason was transformed into "heritage" -- all in an effort to dodge guilt.
It's poignant that while the loonies and incompetents who masquerade as Georgia legislators were fixated on the state banner, the U.S. Supreme Court this month ruled the Confederate Battle Flag's co-emblem of race hatred, the burning cross, could be outlawed by the states.
(A quick aside: I'm a free speech absolutist. I disagree with the Supreme Court, and I'd even support the right of those with sick minds to dress up like Nazis and burn crosses. That said, my heart is with those who detest such symbols.)
There is justice that the Republicans are being saddled with the flag albatross. Perdue winked when folks in rural Georgia harnessed his yard signs with "Boot Barnes" Confederate flag signs. I don't think he believed he'd have to pay the piper -- because he was probably as much surprised at his victory as Roy Barnes.
As the saying goes, if you choose to sleep with serpents, you're going to wake up with snake bites. And that's what Perdue has discovered, much to his dismay. After the November election, he tried to downplay the flag issues. But the "flaggers" or "flaggots" weren't about to let the new Republican governor off the hook.
It started on election night, when Perdue egregiously misappropriated Martin Luther King Jr.'s "free at last" speech. Perdue neglected to notice that behind him a yahoo was waving a Battle Flag. The TV cams got excellent footage, however, and it was a message to the world that the Klan's ghost was again stirring in Georgia -- right smack in the governor's mansion.
Perdue has promised that resolving the flag issue would heal the state. Had he been a leader, he would have simply cauterized old wounds, left the Barnes flag on the poles and shooed away the "heritage" flaggers (aka mostly angry white boys who, with no one else to blame for their sorry conditions, want to whup up on black folks one more time by reviving the Battle Flag).
The bizarre machinery of deciding the flag will only inflame passions more. First, next March we vote up or down on the slightly altered Stars and Bars (with its Christian proselytizing add-on). If the vote is "nay," we choose in July between the pre-1956 flag (another variation on the Stars and Bars) and the 1956-2001 Rebel Battle Flag motif. The 1956 Battle Flag state banner, as everyone knows -- but that flaggers, Perdue and the legislators feign ignorance of -- was the hateful and racist reaction of Georgia to integration.
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin puts it best: Why should anyone, especially African-Americans, be forced to pick between two symbols of slavery and oppression?
We can't do what the Germans did -- banning speech, even when clearly corrosive, is repugnant to America principles. But our leaders can -- and should -- send the message that, as official symbols for all citizens, we're not going to tolerate racist devices. Forget the crap about heritage. The swastika is a 3,000-year-old symbol that has lots of heritage in many cultures, primarily Hindu, and is generally associated with good. But it came to represent something else, and we're not likely to slap it on a state flag. Same goes for the Battle Flag, the main decoration at Klan cross-burnings and lynchings.
The only sweet part of this is that Republicans -- whose "Southern Strategy," disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida, economic policies and much else are nothing but racism incarnate -- are going to have the Confederate flag wrapped around their necks in the 2004 elections. Live with it, boys.
The rest of the Ladies Temperance League will be around to help WhiskySoakedTroll bang the drum and shake the tambourine.
Some people are offended by the American flag. Remember the statue in Baghdad.
But you fit the above description?
I live in Atlanta; born in Chattanooga.
Walt
I personally do not find the Confederate flag offensive, but it's not a good idea to fly one imho because of the continued slicing and sectionalizing of American culture. We have Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, Albanian-Americans, etc, etc, ad-nauseum.
Match that with the heartfelt need by some in those groups to remind others of their "roots" or "heritage" by prominant display of flags of their ancestery and you really wonder who the "Americans" are nowadays.
The Confederate flag simply plays into that mentality without meaning to imo.
The Atlanta Journal did an investigation on this and could find no proof that this is the case.
Why would you tell a big lie like that?
There is no Atlanta Journal, there is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And THAT paper has suggested repeatedly that the flag was imposed in 1956 to say "F$$$ off to the Civil Rights movement."
In fact, this was in the AJC on 3/26/03:
1956 flag flew to defy desegregation
Email Tucker
RECENT COLUMNS
The 1956 Georgia General Assembly was a House afire -- and a Senate, too -- with anger over federal orders to desegregate public schools. The Legislature charged to the defense of white supremacy with a fusillade of resolutions, proclamations and laws designed to keep black Georgians in their place.
That year, Georgia legislators rebuked the FBI and the U.S. attorney general for intervening in a Cobb County case in which a black man was accused of raping a white woman; they declared the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education null and void; they required segregated waiting rooms in train stations and bus depots; they required the State Patrol and the GBI to enforce segregation laws; they commended an Ohio federal judge for "his determination to ignore the absurd directives" ordering desegregation; they opposed the Federal Aid for Education Bill; and they set up the All-South Centennial Committee for the centennial celebration of the Civil War.
Oh, yeah. They also changed the Georgia state flag to feature the St. Andrew's cross and stars, "such remainder being popularly known as The Battle Flag of the Confederacy," according to the act passed by the Legislature.
As Gov. Sonny Perdue drags out the debate over his proposed referendum, he should bear in mind that the claims of "Southern heritage" held aloft by the flaggers don't hold up to historical analysis. A look back at the segregationist agenda of the 1956 General Assembly helps to explain why so many Georgians, especially black Georgians, view the 1956 flag with hostility and suspicion.
The anti-integration fervor that fueled the Georgia Legislature through the 1950s has been meticulously documented by State Court of Appeals Judge Alan Blackburn in his master's thesis, "Brown v. Board of Education: A Southern Response."
". . . [The 1956 flag's] defenders contend it was intended solely to honor the Southern soldiers who fought in the Civil War and arose out of the 'all-South Centennial Committee' activities. [But] the 'committee' . . . which [was to] promote the centennial celebration of the Civil War, wasn't approved until March 9, 1956, while the 1956 flag had already been approved by the Georgia Legislature on February 13, 1956," Blackburn noted.
Besides, the pre-1956 flag honored "Southern heritage" as much as any banner could; it closely resembled the first national flag of the Confederacy. (According to the late Denmark Groover, an influential former legislator, the United Daughters of the Confederacy opposed the 1956 flag change for that reason.)
But the all-white Georgia Legislature chose the St. Andrew's cross with stars for a clear and compelling reason: It was the in-your-face banner adopted by the scowling, hate-filled face of Southern resistance as it burned crosses, beat civil rights protesters and threatened black schoolchildren. The 1956 flag had little to do with the Civil War, but much to do with the war against civil rights.
Two years ago, at age 78, Groover made a courageous appearance before the General Assembly to urge its members to put to rest this "most divisive issue on the political spectrum." He reminded legislators that he had been instrumental in the passage of the 1956 flag, since he was floor leader to then-Gov. Marvin Griffin, who had vowed to defend segregation.
"I presented the matter to the House," Groover recalled, "and . . . probably used some rhetoric indicating that the new flag was to symbolize our defiance of the action of the federal judiciary on matters involving race." It was that rhetoric -- "This will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for," Groover said at the time -- that overcame opposition from the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
And that fiery defiance of desegregation is the "heritage" embodied in the 1956 flag."
[end]
Why would you tell a big lie like that?
Walt
I hope you are intelligent enough to know that the Confederacy did not launch a multiple front war against multiple nations, was not in danger of conquering an entire continent, and did not try to exterminate a race (no, the Confederacy did not try to exterminate black Americans). You and I both know why you posted the Nazi flag, and it does not wash.
As we both know, the politically correct jihad against southern pride is a recent phenomenon - led by those who need an simplistic issue to be relevant (NAACP, DNC, etc). The chief architect of this on FR has been outed as a Clinton and democrat party supporter.
And I see his thread is in the backroom, where it belongs.
That statement is a flat lie because the AJC DID find evidence of the origin of the flag being based in a desire to fight desegregation, as Tucker's piece indicated.
Walt
Walt
He does, and so does the individual who posted this article here, WhiskeyPapa aka Walt. Walt is an admitted liberal Democrat who voted for both Clinton and Gore for president, among many other Democrats. He despises the GOP and regularly calls our current president an "idiot" on this message board. He especially despises all things southern and shouts "racism" at every corner (this may have to do, among other things, with the fact that the South literally carried President Bush into office against his candidate of choice, Gore). For some inexplicable reason though, he is permitted to disrupt here and has been doing so for several years.
Tucker cites a master's thesis that documents what the orginal person said: The 1956 flag was a F$$$ off to the civil rights movement.
I would think that thesis was done since 1992. Tucker's piece was in the paper less than a month ago. You tried to mislead people and you got caught.
Walt
I haven't seen what he said, so I wouldn't know. I have, however, seen you attacking the Republican Party, our current Republican president, our Constitution, and the south as a whole many times though, Walt. You are one of the few, if not the only, poster here who posts articles of this type not because they disgust you in their PC-Nazism and race mongering, but rather because you actually believe in what they say!
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