SC Governor calls for removal of Confederate flag

[Metahive]

German commemoration of the war dead looks like this:





Notice the absence of any kind of flag.

...and I now wanna' go and cry.

[cmdrjones]

Second you analogy of nazi germany and the current german laws is flawed because the Confederate states and nazi germany were two very very different things oh and

One was a state of white racist supremacists that caused suffering and mayhem, the other was Nazi Germany?

#1 Who are you again?
#2 I'm not responding to you inane ranting.
#3 to break it down barney style for the slow learners: Dylan Roof is a NUT who was responding to PERCEIVED persecution, it does NOT MATTER what you or I think of it. My position is that if you continue and intensify these efforts at "Banning racist flags" you will create MORE Dylan Roofs. I speak AS A CONFEDERATE PATRIOT... I know who I am talking about. Now, you can go on all that you want about banning confederate symbols (even if you are successful, it won't really matter, as I linked above, all you do is create a black market in the stuff and make it "cool" again.
The stars and bars were largely irrelevant until last week, now, nobody will shut up about it.

#4 Nazi Germany: 80 million people, Arms of Krupp, World power, Kriegsmarine, Automatic weapons, Tanks, Stuka, Heinkel, Thyssen, Panzer DIVISIONS, Luftwaffe, Zyklon B....
Confederates: Regional power, Flintlocks, Horses, Napoleonic tactics... etc etc.

Get it yet?

[cmdrjones]

Yeah. Memorials are generally IIRC municipal, state, or Federal property; tomb memorials are typically the only exception. I can't think of a whole lot of memorials that are owned and administered by private entities. So there's a justification, IMO, for regulating flags that can be displayed at memorials.

Of course, I can see a run of memorials throughout a bunch of little and not-so-little towns in the South being sold hastily to the nearest Sons of the Confederate Veterans or whatever in order to squirt out from under such regulations...

After perusing this Elheru's contributions to the thread, I can see reasonableness creeping back in. his ideas about limiting the States participation in honoring Confederate war dead are fine. Some of you have stated that things change, fine, let the people of SC vote and change their own damn flag.

Remember, to YOU all you see when you see the stars and bars are people in chains being whipped bloody over and over again, forever.

What people like me see, is Great Great Grandad fighting a rich man's war against hopeless odds largely to defend what HE regarded as his HOME from an overwhelming invader, and doing so with great skill for several years.

I see no one has tried to answer my questions to Grumman and FST target Drone above. Not surprising.

Let's frame it another way:
Would you all suggest that Japan Ban all rising sun flags from their war memorials to WWII?
Would you find any Japanese who honored WWII era Japanese soldiers to be terrible people?
Do you think all memorials or remembrances or KamiKaze headbands, scarves, goggles, helmets, Samurai swords, haikus and other memorabilia should be banned?

[Metahive]

#1 Who are you again?

Someone putting his boot through your broad asshole, asshole.

#2 I'm not responding to you inane ranting.

O man, and I was, like, trying to follow your example.

#3 to break it down barney style for the slow learners: Dylan Roof is a NUT who was responding to PERCEIVED persecution, it does NOT MATTER what you or I think of it. My position is that if you continue and intensify these efforts at "Banning racist flags" you will create MORE Dylan Roofs. I speak AS A CONFEDERATE PATRIOT... I know who I am talking about. Now, you can go on all that you want about banning confederate symbols (even if you are successful, it won't really matter, as I linked above, all you do is create a black market in the stuff and make it "cool" again.
The stars and bars were largely irrelevant until last week, now, nobody will shut up about it.

Eh he he, "confederate patriot", really? Then I am a proud patriot of the Empire of Choson which lasted longer and went down way after your little congregation of slavemongering shitbits so I get twice the true underdog cred. Also, is this some kind of threat? Don't take away our flag o' we'll git some murderin' on! Do you really think that's an argument for catering to your racist ways?

I guess the US also ought to introduce Sharia law then. After all, some nasty Muslim extremists threaten violence on you if you don't!

Fucking terrorist, go sodomize yourself with a crowbar.

#4 Nazi Germany: 80 million people, Arms of Krupp, World power, Kriegsmarine, Automatic weapons, Tanks, Stuka, Heinkel, Thyssen, Panzer DIVISIONS, Luftwaffe, Zyklon B....
Confederates: Regional power, Flintlocks, Horses, Napoleonic tactics... etc etc.

Nazi Germany lasted 12 years and needed the whole world to be put down, the Dixie Chickenhawks went down in four and it only took the other half of the same nation. Nazi Germany wins. w00t!

Get it yet?

That your father should have spanked you a lot harder in your impressionable youth to prevent your poor little mind from going off the rails? Got that from the very beginning.

[Batman]

So basically, you are saying that you shouldn't ban an obviously racist flag...because there's a ton of racists who aren't gonna like it.

So...the Confederates were a completely different thing from Nazi Germany because they were less industrially advanced and smaller, and not as efficient at killing people. Is that your position?

[Thanas]

I am against removing names from places because that will just push history out of the general consciousness. Several cities in Germany have renamed streets in the past two decades and that was just stupid.

But why the heck does the confederate flag needs to fly? That just lends credence to the idea that this is an official position by the Government. Take it down.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Brief rundown of the Civil War for cmdrjones: The Confederates shot first. Their vice president explicitly stated that they were seceding over slavery. The first state to secede did so before Lincoln was inaugurated. Lincoln said he wasn't going to end slavery where it already existed, just stop it from being a thing in new states. The Confederate states were pissed off because non-slave states were refusing to ship escaped slaves back. In short: They rebelled because they had a persecution complex and wanted to deny non-slave states their right to allow escaped slaves to continue living as free men and women outside the South. They were the bad guys. They were the attackers. The Confederate States of America sprang forth because they wanted to own human beings as property. They said outright they were seceding over slavery. It was in the words of their fucking vice president. They shot first. They were the aggressors. The heritage of the CFA is slavery. By saying you're proud of that heritage you're saying you approve of them owning human beings as property and starting a goddamn war because northern states refused to capture escaped slaves and send them back. In short, it's proudly proclaiming yourself to be a racist scumfucker.

Which comes as absolutely no surprise, based off your posting history.


As to flying the Japanese flag? It would be horrifically inappropriate in Southeast Asia, where Japan committed many, many atrocities. Atrocities the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge, much less apologize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre If someone were to celebrate having an ancestor that participated in that event there? They'd be a shitlord. Being proud of an ancestor that fought in the name of atrocities makes you a bad person. And atrocities are what the CFA was all about. But hey, I'm sure you'd be proud if you had an ancestor that helped implement Jim Crow laws.

The South wasn't the victim in the Civil War. They were the aggressors. Get it through your skull.


Honestly, every history course that covers the Civil War should quote the CFA VP's statements regarding why they were seceding. Every day the subject is covered. Remind the South that it was the South that started the war and why they started the war. Acknowledging your ancestors did something bad isn't saying you yourself are bad.

[Joun_Lord]

I speak AS A CONFEDERATE PATRIOT...

Honest question but how in the holy hell are you a Confederate patriot? Its like being a Neo-Nazi, its just not something most intelligent people would be. While the CSA wasn't arguably as terrible as the Huns led by Charlie Chaplin, they were still pretty freaking bad.

And the center of their whole existence was the want to perpetuate human bondage, and not the kinky pinch and tickle kind but the human slavery kind. Yes the Civil War might have been about state rights and stopping government overreach but it was about the state's right to allow its citizens to own other people and to stop the government from interfering in their culture of enslaving doods.

I mean I can understand being interested in the Confederacy, appreciating their martial history and like some of their values (some people feel the same way about the Nazis though the only worthy Nazi value I can think of them having is.......uhh fast cars on the autobahn maybe) but to call oneself a patriot and defend them, god no bro.

[Knife]

Perhaps..

Prior to Amazon’s announcement, Vanity Fair reported that sales of the Confederate battle flag went up by 3,620 percent on Amazon.

http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2015/06/23/ ... rchandise/

Perhaps not....

PS For your regularly scheduled dose of democratic hypocrisy:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/06 ... flag-pins/

Does not matter. 100 people buying 10 flags bumps sales by 1000 percent. Meh.

[Knife]

Remember, to YOU all you see when you see the stars and bars are people in chains being whipped bloody over and over again, forever.

You can justify it all you want in any way you want, but that is what it mean. You can go straight to slavery, or meander your way to it by economical means by ... slavery. The Old South was the Old South because of Slavery. Old rich white guys with free labor made the south and all that it was. You cannot separate it.

What people like me see, is Great Great Grandad fighting a rich man's war against hopeless odds largely to defend what HE regarded as his HOME from an overwhelming invader, and doing so with great skill for several years.

Translation, my grandpappy fought the Northerners to keep his plantation and all his slaves. Your version makes no difference, the reasons for the war are well documented and a vast majority come back to slavery.

I see no one has tried to answer my questions to Grumman and FST target Drone above. Not surprising.

Meh, restate them and I'll give em a shot.

Let's frame it another way:
Would you all suggest that Japan Ban all rising sun flags from their war memorials to WWII?

Yes, easy answer. You do realize that China and South Korea are very touchy about that very subject, aren't you? It's not even a one nation thing, but multinational.

Would you find any Japanese who honored WWII era Japanese soldiers to be terrible people?

Depends on context. Most WWII Japanese vets are honored that I'm aware of, both in Japan and really the US. Plenty of WWII vets on all sides have met and tossed a beer or two. That said, would a WWII Japanese vet be looked down on if he still shouted Imperialistic bullshit for all to hear? Yes.

Do you think all memorials or remembrances or KamiKaze headbands, scarves, goggles, helmets, Samurai swords, haikus and other memorabilia should be banned?

Depends. In the context of this discussion, I'll go with the notion of 'Confederate Battle Flag' belongs in a museum for the comparison. For morons waving the shit around on facebook? Sure. Actual Confederate Flag belong in museums, wannabe's from Walmart? Burned after spit upon.

[Batman]

Okay I seriously stink at math and 'I' know that doesn't work.

[Executor32]

Without specific sales figures I don't think you can get an exact answer, but you can easily estimate. A 3,620% increase would mean sales for that particular item were 37.2 times higher than during whatever period they're using for the baseline. So, if they were selling, say, 100 of that particular item per day before, they were now selling 3,720 of them per day, still a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the overall population, even if you limit it to white Southern conservatives.

[Knife]

Okay I seriously stink at math and 'I' know that doesn't work.

Actual numbers pulled out of my ass to prove a point. Sales of the Confederate flag going up during this issue are not more indicative of the public's opinion than when Chic Fi La's numbers went up after social conservatives jumped to back them up when their CEO went all bat shit anti homosexual.

* but you are right, should have pointed out hyperbole in the original post, my bad. Never meant for it to construe actual numbers.

[FSTargetDrone]

I see no one has tried to answer my questions to Grumman and FST target Drone above. Not surprising.

I care fuckall for what other countries do with their war dead.

I speak AS A CONFEDERATE PATRIOT...

And now it becomes clear. As far as I'm concerned, you're just one more piece of filth, along with the rest of the ass clowns who venerate that doomed rebellion.

If it were up to me, I'd take every highway, school and town named for Lee, Davis, Jackson and the rest and rename them for prominent Blacks and other Civil Rights and US Civil War notables. I'd melt down or demolish every single memorial to the Confederacy everywhere in this country. I'd take artillery, load them with rounds made from those melted-down statues and shell Stone Mountain until the effigies of the traitor-in-chief and his miserable generals are pulverized from the rockface. I'd wrap up my little fantasy by exhuming the moldering remains of Lee and Davis and dump them off the coast of old Virginny.

But I'd be happy enough just to see confederate symbols removed from public lands.

[Imperial528]

Would you all suggest that Japan Ban all rising sun flags from their war memorials to WWII?

Not to nitpick (or dogpile at this point) but the rising sun flag is still Japan's naval flag, and a modified version is the post-war Japanese army's flag. So in that case it's more complex, especially since unlike the Nazi or Confederate flags the rising sun represents a nation that still existed after its defeat in war, albeit as a nation that changed greatly post-war.

[Channel72]

My position is that if you continue and intensify these efforts at "Banning racist flags" you will create MORE Dylan Roofs. I speak AS A CONFEDERATE PATRIOT... I know who I am talking about. Now, you can go on all that you want about banning confederate symbols (even if you are successful, it won't really matter, as I linked above, all you do is create a black market in the stuff and make it "cool" again.
The stars and bars were largely irrelevant until last week, now, nobody will shut up about it.

Ha... you guys lost so bad, it's not even funny.

Anyway, we have a black President, and there's enough hatred to go around for more Dylan Roofs and other garbage to crawl out of the woodworks. White supremacy is alive and well on the Internet and elsewhere, and it's not like Dylan Roof got the idea to shoot up a church in some kind of a vacuum. He was obviously influenced by other white supremacists (regardless of whether or not it was his unique idea to actually kill people.) It doesn't matter whether their stupid iconography is legal or not, and in my opinion the risk of pissing off a few more White Supremacists (who, by definition, are already pissed off, since their entire life revolves around hatred) is minimal and needs to be weighed against the enormous goodwill such a gesture would mean to African Americans living in the former Confederacy.

Now shut up about this stupid flag or we'll have re-Shermanize you. (In, Sherminator 2?)

[Metahive]

It's funny CmdrJohnnyReb's bringing up Japan since they have just as much a skewed perspective of their past misdeeds as the neo-confederates.

Listen, when japanese raise the Rising Sun Banner*, when they worship war criminals who were responsible for untold amounts of suffering in East and South-east Asia at the Yasukuni shrine, when they purge their crimes from their school history books and when they shed tears at the "beautiful sacrifice" of the Tokkotai (the kamikaze flyers) then they're at best misinformed and at worst unrepentant imperialist scum and get called out as such. The Japanese have fucked with the country of my ancestors (noticed my avatar, did you?) in a violent and barbarian way and did even worse things to China and the countries further south. They used biological weapons on major population centers, they abducted women to be used as cumbuckets for their soldiers, they did human experimentation which among other things involved slicing people open and then smearing feces into the wounds, they've made extensive use of slave labor (hey kindred spirits to you lot of shitweasels) and they left a trail of rape, murder and pillage wherever they went. In some aspects the Imperial Japanese topped even Nazi-level savagery. If some modern Japanese expresses his sympathy for this horde of human abortions you can be sure they'll cause offense and rightfully so.
So if this is the sort of company you neo-confederate assholes think are in the same boat as you then, he, nobody even needs to point out what kind of majestic human failures you and the Old South were.





*
this flag here:

[Borgholio]

The flag has just come down in Alabama.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /29210283/

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — With no fanfare, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley ordered the removal of four Confederate flags from a memorial at the Alabama State Capitol on Wednesday amid a growing controversy over their official display in the wake of the killing of African Americans at a South Carolina church.

The first to be taken down was the so-called battle flag, followed by the First National Confederate flag, known as the "Stars and Bars," the Second National Confederate Flag and the Third National Confederate Flag. All four had been removed by 10 a.m.

"The governor does not want the flag to be a distraction," said Jennifer Ardis, a spokeswoman for Bentley. "There are a lot of other things we are focused on. We have a tremendous budget issue."

Five workers, including two wearing yellow "landscape operations" tee-shirts, unceremoniously removed the flags by first lowering separate flag poles, then unsnapping and folding up the individual banners. As a handful of photographers recorded the scene, the men worked quickly, without comment, then left the enclosed area around the monument, locking the gate to the small fence behind them.

The flags were hung at the Alabama Confederate Memorial in 1994, a year after then-Gov. Jim Folsom Jr., ordered the removal of a battle flag that had flown over the state Capitol since 1963.

The 88-foot-tall monument to Alabama's more than 122,000 Confederate veterans of the Civil War was dedicated in 1898, although it had been planned since 1865. The cornerstone was laid in 1886 by former Confederate president Jefferson Davis before a crowd of 5,000, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Senate Minority Leader Quinton Ross, D-Montgomery, praised the move, saying he hoped it would show that the state had "grown beyond what its past history is."

"We understand history has its place, but as we move forward being a United States, a united Alabama with all citizens recognized, I think we have to have the sensitivity to understand we don't want to be intentionally offensive," he said.
Workers remove the Confederate flags from outside the State Capitol building on Wednesday, June 24, 2015. (Photo: Shannon Heupel/Advertiser)

Richard Cohen, president of the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said Wednesday Bentley's decision was "a step in the right direction."

"In today's political climate, (the flags) sent a message of divisiveness," he said. "I think some might argue they weren't put up in reverential fashion, they were put up in a historical way. But I think the more prudent thing to do is what the governor did."

Cohen called for the state to drop holidays celebrating Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Official displays of the Confederate flag have come under fire since nine people, all black, were killed in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last week. Online photos of the accused shooter, who is white, show him wearing or posing with symbols of white supremacy, including the Confederate battle flag.

Ardis could not comment on the status of Confederate flags in the Old House and Senate Chamber.

Rep. Alvin Holmes, D-Montgomery, said Tuesday he would introduce a resolution in a special legislative session this summer to have all Confederate flags removed from state buildings.

South Carolina flew a Confederate flag at a Confederate soldiers' memorial. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for removal of the flag on Monday. Taking it down requires a two-thirds approval of the South Carolina Legislature.

[Civil War Man]

I found an opinion piece by Tony Horwitz, who wrote Confederates in the Attic, which happens to be the book that originally got me into Civil War reenacting (and also contributed to why, on principle, I only reenacted as a Union soldier). This piece goes into the troubling trend of intentionally downplaying the racist attitudes that directly contributed to the conflict, while the attitudes themselves continue to fester in the shadows.

How the South lost the Civil War but won the narrative

I have a box in my office filled with hate. It contains bumper stickers, literature and t-shirts I collected while researching Confederates in the Attic, a book about Civil War memory in the South.

“Coon-ard Lines: Boat Ticket to AFRICA,” reads one '90s-era item I picked up at a store selling rebel-themed souvenirs. “This ONE-WAY ticket entitles ONE nigger” to passage to Africa, as well as “axel-grease for hair,” “chicken coop and watermelon patch on deck” and “crack and other refreshments.” (A similar version is pictured below.)

The flyer of a white supremacist group features Nathan Bedford Forrest—slave trader, fierce Confederate general, and founder of the KKK—emblazoned against a rebel battle flag. Forrest fought against “race-mixing” and the federal government’s attack on “freedom for the white people,” the flyer notes. “Today we are being recalled to defend our race and nation.”

The journal of the South Carolina Council of Conservative Citizens shows photographs in 1992 of demonstrators waving the rebel banner at pro-flag rallies. Adjoining stories carry headlines like “Malcolm X Followers Rape, Murder White Woman,” and “Charleston Rape Downplayed by Liberal Media.”

In the mid-1990s such materials were widely available and I kept them as a sort of reliquary of an unapologetic racism I believed would soon go extinct. Last week’s massacre in Charleston proved me wrong. Dylann Roof often photographed himself with rebel battle flags and cited the Council of Conservative Citizens as one of the sources for his race hatred and obsession with black-on-white crime. Before opening fire he spoke about the black rape of white women.

It now appears that Roof’s fusillade backfired. Seeking race war, he’s instead spawned racial reconciliation and calls for the rebel flag to be removed from the capitol grounds in South Carolina, from shelves in Walmart, and from the annals of Ebay. But listen carefully in coming days as legislators and others debate the flag’s fate. You’ll hear over and over again that the flag represents “heritage, not hate,” and that if the banner must now be furled, it’s because Roof, the Klan, and other extremists have hijacked and tarnished its meaning. What you’re unlikely to hear, at least from whites, is an honest and historically accurate reappraisal of the Cause for which Southerners fought.

Some of those who invoke the “heritage, not hate” mantra are disingenuous. On the day of the shooting, I was in rural east Texas, touring a small town with a businessman who displayed the rebel flag on his truck. After telling me “it’s heritage, not hate,” he proceeded to refer to a black neighborhood as “Niggertown” and rant against the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

Most flag defenders, however, are sincere when they say they cherish the banner as a symbol of their ancestors’ valor. About 20 percent of white Southern males of military age died in the Civil War. In South Carolina the toll was even higher, and thousands more were left maimed, their farms and homes in ruins. For many descendants of Southern soldiers, the rebel flag recalls that sacrifice, and taking it down dishonors those who fought under the banner. No one wants to be asked to spit on their ancestors’ graves.

Flag defenders also note, correctly, that what we now call the rebel flag served only as a battle standard in the Civil War. The political flag of the Confederacy had a different design, and in any event, it flew over Southern statehouses for only four years. The Stars and Stripes, by contrast, waved above government buildings during the 80-plus years that slavery was legal and Constitutionally protected in the United States.

In the decades after the Civil War, the rebel battle flag appeared mainly at historical and memorial events honoring Confederate veterans and the dead. Not until the 1940s did it frequently serve as a baldly racist banner, brandished by segregationist Dixiecrats and by the Klan and other groups during the Civil Rights era. It was also at this time that the flag appeared atop Southern statehouses, first in South Carolina and then in Alabama, where Governor George Wallace raised it ahead of a hostile meeting in 1963 with Robert F. Kennedy, then U.S. Attorney General. A few months earlier, Wallace stood beside a rebel flag as he took his oath of office at the precise spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as Confederate president.

“From this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” Wallace declared, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Thereafter, no amount of historical parsing could cleanse the flag of its association with white supremacy and defiance of federally-mandated integration. It would take several decades, but black-led opposition to the flag finally forced it from atop Southern statehouses. Only in Mississippi, where the rebel flag is part of the state flag’s design, does the distinctive cross of the Confederacy still fly above a capitol. House Speaker Philip Gunn has now called for it to be taken down. And after Nikki Haley’s speech this week, it’s likely to be removed altogether from the capitol grounds in South Carolina, where secession and the Civil War began.

This is a welcome and long-overdue development. There’s no justification for displaying a flag on capitol grounds that’s hateful to African-Americans, almost a third of the state’s citizenry. Should the flag be retired, I suspect most white South Carolinians will also be pleased, if only because they’re weary of a debate that’s been a distraction and taint on the state’s reputation for decades.

But a deeper problem remains, and not just among those who cherish the Confederacy. Nationwide, Americans still cling to a deeply sanitized and Southern-fried understanding of the Civil War. More often than not, when I talk to people about the conflict, I hear that it was about abstract principles like “state sovereignty” and “the Southern way of life.” Surveys confirm this. In 2011, at the start of the war’s sesquicentennial, the Pew Research Center asked more than 1500 Americans their view as to “the main cause of the Civil War.” Only 38 percent said the main cause was slavery, compared to 48 percent who answered states’ rights.

This belief also seems to be growing. According to Pew, respondents 30 and younger were the likeliest to cite states’ rights, by a margin of 60 percent. And there was no difference between northern and southern whites in the plurality citing states’ rights as the war’s main cause.

It would take a book to explain the history behind this belief, and some excellent ones have been written (to name one, David Blight’s Race and Reunion). The very short version is that white Southerners lost the war but won its aftermath and the battle for how the conflict would be remembered. Violent Southern intransigence and Northern war-weariness killed Reconstruction; the nation chose regional reconciliation over racial justice; and ex-Confederates constructed a potent ideology—the Lost Cause—that romanticized plantation life and cast the war as a noble, doomed defense of Southern freedom and an agrarian way of life.

In the 20th century, mass culture and commerce spread the Lost Cause nationwide, most notably in movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. The moonlight-and-magnolia virus grew so strong that the U.S. Senate approved the construction of a Mammy monument in Washington in the 1920s, and after World War II the rebel flag became a faddish adornment on vehicles, beach towels and other products, a generalized emblem of independence, Southernness or good ol’ boyism.

With the Civil Rights struggle, scholars of the Civil War era gave new emphasis to race and slavery, and this trend has continued ever since. The evidence is overwhelming that Southern states seceded and fought to maintain slavery. Don’t believe me; believe the words of secessionists and Confederate leaders. Among the most often cited is Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens who in 1861 declared the Founders “fundamentally wrong” in judging all humans equal. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—the subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

The same view was expressed by the secessionist conventions in Southern states that published their reasons for leaving the Union. The authors sometimes couched their declarations in Constitutional arguments about sovereignty, but left no doubt about the state right at issue. Mississippians bluntly declared, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Texans cited a Northern “crusade” against the “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery,” and Texans’ conviction that bondage “should exist in all future time.”

There are countless such statements, scores of scholarly works documenting the cruelties of the slave economy and how much it was bound up with Southern life and politics. Most textbooks follow suit. Yet the prevailing popular view of the Civil War still reflects a strong Southern bias: that the Confederacy fought for vaguely defined “states’ rights,” and its battle flag isn’t intrinsically racist, it’s an anodyne emblem of Southern “heritage.”

I’m not very optimistic that the debate over South Carolina’s flag will bring a deeper reckoning. Furling the statehouse flag may bring temporary relief to South Carolinians, but what we truly need to bury is the gauzy fiction that the antebellum South was in any way benign, or that slavery and white supremacy weren’t the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Only then, perhaps, will we be able to say that the murdered in Charleston didn’t die in vain, and that the Lost Cause, at last, is well and truly lost.

As an aside, I recently talked to my parents about a trip they made to Charleston on their anniversary years back, and they described how unsettling they found it while they were down there, from the veneration of Confederate officials to a tour of an old plantation they went on that very deliberately avoided referring to the slaves who lived there as slaves (the tour called them "servants" instead).

[Thanas]

The coopting of the battle flag is akin to what happened with the Imperial War Flag and the Imperial/Prussian flag in Prussia - the neonazis used them because the swastika was banned and people looked at them funny. Now those idiots have coopted the Imperial flags.

[Elheru Aran]

A little different in that the Imperial flags are more or less 'legitimate' in that they belonged to an internationally recognized state which existed for decades, versus an illegal secessionist revolutionary nation that only existed for four years... It does raise the question of whether Bismarck and the Prussians would've ever tolerated such a movement as the Nazis.

[Thanas]

Depends. Bismarck definitely not, but the Prussian state of the 20s was - after Versailles - highly antidemocratic and a breeding ground for fascism, even if it was more highbrow fascism than the rabble of the SA.

[Metahive]

Huh? I've learned the exact opposite, that until von Papen's Preußenschlag Prussia was a bastion of democracy in the Weimarian Republic. The hotbeds of anti-democratic reactionaries were the southern german states like Bavaria, which was about to secede when Hitler interrupted their plans with his Beerhall Putsch.

[Thanas]

Huh? I've learned the exact opposite, that until von Papen's Preußenschlag Prussia was a bastion of democracy in the Weimarian Republic. The hotbeds of anti-democratic reactionaries were the southern german states like Bavaria, which was about to secede when Hitler interrupted their plans with his Beerhall Putsch.

Yes, Preußen the state was. But Prussian officers, administrators etc. were not.

[Elheru Aran]

I should clarify, by 'Prussians' I was referring mostly to pre-WWI Germany as opposed to the interwar period... or are they essentially the same politically? I have to admit that German history up to approximately the WWII period is a weak point in my European historical knowledge...