Via Tampabay.com:
The Sons of Confederate Veterans this morning erected a massive flag — 30 feet high and 50 feet long — atop a 139-foot pole. The group claims that this is the “world’s largest” Confederate flag.
The Confederacy, you’ll recall, was a group of states that committed treason against the United States of America to ensure their continued right to own people.
Adams insists the flag isn’t about racism or slavery. “It’s about honoring our ancestors and about celebrating our heritage,” he said. “It’s a historical thing to us.”
Despite Adams’ assertions, there is no getting away from the central fact of the history in question being treason in defense of slavery.
Let’s take a hypothetical. Let’s say I go to a party and crap in the punch bowl. It ruins the party for everyone, perhaps even causing sickness among people who continued drinking the punch. Years later, I may celebrate the event as a reduction in bowel pressure, and insist that my celebration isn’t about fecal matter or a ruined party; but I probably can’t expect other people to honor my accomplishment.
In an unrelated story, CBSNews.com has found it necessary to turn off comments on stories regarding Obama due to the volume of racist comments those stories attract.
Heh, heh, heh (on the hypothetical).
The Confederate flag isn’t honoring the long dead (whatever one thinks of their actions long ago). The Confederate flag is the living making a statement. Distasteful, though it is.
Of course, one might get it removed on the separation of church & State clause. Those people are kind of doing the veneration of the dead thing.
I agree with you that this about the living making a statement. I recommend Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. He travels around the South looking at some of the adherents to the Lost Cause mythology, providing some insight into some of the cultural ramifications of the veneration of the Confederates.
I think I’ve mentioned before that my mom’s mom, who was born and raised in Georgia, told my brother and I that the south “quit” the war because they were “gentlemen” and didn’t want to see any more bloodshed. For that reason she thought their cause was valiant.
I don’t recall her having confederate flags around her house, and the issue of slavery was never discussed; at least not in her presence.
Her’s was a mixed-marriage, because my grandfather was a Lincoln-loving, dyed in the wool Republican, Union-loving Civil War buff; who also told my brother and I the real reasons for the war. (BTW grandmother was a “southern democrat” who thought that Jimmy Carter was the best president EVER!)
I have always been disturbed by the confederate flag, because of the tyrrany and racism that is implicit in that symbol. If there is any justice at all a giant straight-line wind will come and rip that flag to shreds.
Fecal Punch; wouldn’t that be a great name for a punk band?
I have no veneration for or allegiance to the Confederate Flag, but I don’t understand the revulsion. Indiana’s government was ran by the Klan at one point in time, but we didn’t throw out the flag when we threw out the KKK. The Stars and Stripes flew over a slave nation for about 150 years and we’ll still fly it today. We’ve fought several wars with Britain, but we don’t forbid the Union Jack. Sure the Confederate flag has lots of bad things associated with it, but surely there were some good things too. States rights and what we’d call today the right to self-determination. You can’t selectively remove the bad parts of history and I understand why states might feel allegiance to a former flag.
I think the Confederate flag is special because it was created specifically because the southern states bolted the union over the issue of slavery.
States’ rights doesn’t quite capture it, because the defection wasn’t triggered by hypothetical states rights independent of the federal government or over a variety of states’ rights. It was the states’ rights with respect to slavery that led to the defection
From the CBS story:
“If you’re an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments,”
Do you have to be an African American to be offended by the term “porch monkey”?
I read Grant’s autobiography a few years ago and was struck by this passage:
If only you knew, General Grant. If they had had any inkling that confederate nostalgia would remain in fashion 140 years later, I wonder how much more harshly the likes of Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee would have been treated.
I think it is partially because of how war criminals were handled, and the botched way that reconstruction happened that some of this sentiment has continued on.
The Confederate flag does mean different things to different people. I’ll never forget being positively stunned to see it flying in Quebec in 1998. To the Quebecois, it symbolized the right to secede.
Not justifying. Just saying.
In much of Europe, the Nazi Swastika flag is absolutely banned so the usual substitute is the Confederate Stars and Bars. The fascists and neo-Nazis know full well the real meaning of the Confederate Flag!
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By the way, the Confederate Flag didn’t fly over a slave nation for 150 years: it existed only for a brief period of 4 years when some slave-owning states were in active rebellion over the issue of owning humans as chattel slaves.
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The Confederate Flag was also only resuscitated in the 1950s as the active, aggressive symbol of the segregationists against the rising Civil Rights Movement. Until then, that flag was in the dustheap of history of failed and defeated treasonous plots…
I was reading somewhere about the sentiment that for many Southerners, Southern heritage and history had mostly been telescoped into the few years of the secession.
Oh man, those crapping-in-the-punchbowl parties, don’t remind me…
From the sons of veterans’ website, I get a kind of slide from “it’s not only about slavery” to “therefore, it’s not about slavery,” which seems to me the same sort of slide we’ve done in recent history with “it’s not only about oil.”
Regarding the unrelated news item, I expected this and even more and nastier. So be it. This legacy is ours. North, south, east, west — all of us. We are just gonna have to do our best to get through the crap!
Wilson,
He wasn’t saying the confederate flag, he said “Stars and Stripes”, our US Flag. His point was that we ALL were a slave nation for 150 years, but didn’t throw out the flag.
However, I agree with Doug on this one. The confederate battle flag (See Wikipedia on the subject. “Stars and Bars” isn’t what you might think it is) was flown by the side that separated for the REASON of slavery.
If we thought that “taxation without represention” is no longer a noble thing to fight against, I can see us no longer flying the Union flag. That was one of the main reasons we had our revolution.
However, one of the main reasons for the US civil war was slavery, so I see no reason to celebrate the side that was wrong.
Oh, if you want to fly a flag and celebrate “States Rights”, try the Bonnie Blue Flag
IT has nothing to do with slaves, and all to do with states rights. If you ignore this one and fly the battle flag, then that (to me) just says your trying to spread hate & piss people off.
“We are very clear that the Confederate flag is a symbol of hatred, bigotry and racism,” said Rick Kaufman, the Executive Director of Community Relations at Bloomington Kennedy High School.
“It’s truly unfortunate that the bad decision they made will prevent them from walking across the stage in graduation,” Kaufman said adding that the school has dealt with students bringing confederate flags to school before.
found this on the KARE website, the NBC affiliate for the Twin Cities, of all palces. It appears three high school seniors in Bloomington, MN (home of Mall of America ™)showed up for school with confederate flags flying from their pick-em-up trucks. When asked to remove them, they refused. They also said they were big “Dukes ofr Hazard” fans (so was I, but then I started the fifth grade!) But here’s the clincher in their explanation:
Damn that Abe Lincoln and his big business policies!
If someone took to flying a massive Mexican flag in downtown Dallas to “celebrate the heritage”, I wonder how that would go over.
The irony here is these are probably the same people who would like to seal the borders, yet they like to fly the flag of a foreign nation (a foreign nation that fought a war against the United States).
Doug:
I grew up in Maryland and lived and work there and in Virginia until 1993. Confederate flags are placed in veterans cemeteries on both sides of the Potomac. In Maryland, of course, they are interspersed with US flags. That practice seems to have a certain dignity to it because the general sense there is that the stars and bars rest only over the very soldiers who met a tragic and misguided fate. Old line Virginians and Tidewater Marylanders know that the Civil War was an absolute disaster for the region and it set it back 100 years in every way imaginable. Read anything by Faulkner (set and written during those 100 years) and this theme emerges. Thus, there is a twinge of regret and sadness attached to the display of the confederate flag in the proper historical context.
Virginia is one thing; what I can’t fathom is the widespread display of the confederate flag in Northern Indiana. Doesn’t history tell us that few states in the 1860s were more pro-Union — but not necessarily pro-civil rights — than Indiana? The federal victory in the Civil War, the occupation and Reconstruction made Indiana into an economic and political powerhouse. I hope the neo-rebels realize that flying the stars and bars in a Union stronghold like Indiana is like displaying the Rising Sun at Pearl Harbor.
Barry, go read my post 14 above. Stars and Bars isn’t what you think it is.
Yes, I’m being an ass. Sorry. :)
Jason:
Thanks for the clarification. My comments should be seen in reference to the popular confederate battle flag that one sees in cemeteries above the graves of the fallen, on Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts, and shading the rear window of pickup trucks.