Re: Take Down the Rebel Flag

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Joe Fortune wrote:
>     True what was said about that Nazi flag but that is not even
> comparable to the Confederate states. The nazis sought racial cleansing
> and murdered to do so. The south did is have slaves which so did many
> other countries such as Britain, but noone is complaining about their
> flag are they?

So, you open by excusing slavery because everyone else did it.  Go ahead
and cheat on your taxes, someone else is doing it.  Steal from your
locally-owned business, someone else does.  Beat your wife, the guy down
the street does it.

Do you see something in common?  They're all unequivocably morally wrong.

As to your second point, that no one is complaining about the British
flag, there are two counterpoints I can make.  The first is that many,
many people have (successfully) complained about the Union Jack flying
over their sovereign territory.  Do the names Palestine, India, Pakistan,
and The United States of America mean anything to you?  These former
British colonies all rejected British colonial rule, and replaced the
Union Jack with their own national banners.

The second counterpoint is that, although the United Kingdom's past is not
free from slavery, the Union Jack is not routinely used to symbolize an
era in which racial oppression was the norm.  In this sense, the
Confederate battle flag has more in common with the Nazi swastika, which
is used to symbolize the neo-Nazi movement.

> Yes, slavery is wrong but thats not what the soldiers of
> the south were fighting for. Nobody would die just to have a slave. They
> were fighting for political power for their half of the country,

Even if the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery (and of course it
had *everything* to do with slavery), the Confederate battle flag has been
used as a symbol of racism in modern times.  If the flag had nothing to
do with racial segregation, why does it figure so prominently in
photographs of lynchings, white mobs blocking the doors of schools, and
KKK cross burnings?  Did these flag-wavers honor their ancestors by
spitting on, turning firehoses on, or unleashing dogs on people of color
asserting their right to participate in civil society?  Did they respect
the tradition of Southern gentility by draping the Confederate battle flag
over the head of a corpse swinging from a tree?

If I were on your side, and genuinely believed that the Confederate battle
flag represented nothing more than Southern heritage, I would, first, be
very angry that it is being used to represent hatred and bigotry, and
second, work very hard to establish a new symbol for my heritage, one
uncorrupted by decades of misuse.

> and for
> anyone in the south to reject the rebel flag is to reject the very
> ground you stand on, soaked with blood from your ancesstors.

As a newcomer to the South, I should note that the ground is not soaked
with the blood of my ancestors in the way you mean it.  To be sure, the
ground around here is soaked with the blood of Confederate soldiers, and
it is also soaked with the blood of Union soldiers; but even more so, it
is soaked with the blood of the native Americans who lived here before the
first colonists, and were forced off the land that had belonged to them
first; and the blood of the African slaves who worked the soil and made
the plantation system work.

I guess the only blood that counts is that of white men?

Niel

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Niel Bornstein     +1 404 784 0696     niel-eVhvBAtfTHk423YV9hPXO9/[email protected]
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