In the wake of the racist hate crime in Charleston, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley apparently felt that residents of the Palmetto State weren't ready to discuss removing the Confederate flag just yet.
You know, right now, to start having policy conversations with the people of South Carolina, I understand that's what ya'll want, my job is to heal the people of this state... There will be policy discussions and you will hear me come out and talk about it. But right now, I am not doing that to the people of my state.Apparently, this sort of flag talk is very traumatizing in South Carolina.
Eternal debutante Lindsey Graham positively got the vapors at the thought.
If at the end of the day, it is time for the people of South Carolina to reconsider that decision, it would be fine with me, but this is part of who we are.Well, here's the thing about history, Scarlett. You aren't required to celebrate it. Particularly when it's the history of a group of people who felt they were allowed to keep other people as livestock, because those other people happened to have a darker skin.
The flag represents to some people, a Civil War, and that was the symbol of one side. To others it is a racist symbol, and it has been used in a racist way. But the problems we have today in South Carolina and across the world are not because of a movie or because of symbols, it is because of what is in peoples' hearts.
How do you go back and reconstruct America? What do you do in terms of our history?
There are things we shouldn't be proud of. Slavery is one of them.
The "heritage" argument has been around for years, and it's always been a fairly thin argument. As Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention put it:
Some would say that the Confederate Battle Flag is simply about heritage, not about hate. Singer Brad Paisley sang that his wearing a Confederate flag on his shirt was just meant to say that he was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped, "Little known fact: Jefferson Davis - HUGE Skynyrd fan."Or, to put it another way,
And it's not like this is a big secret, either. It's literally known around the world.
And yes, that is a fact.
So let's consider not clinging to your slave-owning past, and put away the symbols of racism. Maybe it's time to move on.
I didn't know that the Confederate flag was used as a substitute for the outlawed Nazi flag. Another source of "pride" for America. After a week or so, everything will go back to where it was before this massacre, and then we'll become enraged, again, over the next one.
ReplyDeleteA flag is a flag is a flag as Gertrude Stein would have said had she said it. There are contexts in which neither flag is a celebration of things done under the aegis of either flag.Slavery was upheld under the United States flag and constitution long before the rebellion. Do we revile the Constitution?
ReplyDeleteTrue, In Germany one cannot even display the Swastika in a historical drama as anyone who saw Das Boot will remember. I wonder about displaying Native American artifacts that use it frequently, or Buddhist art for that matter, but that's for another day. I've seen a flag that looks Nazi but is different used in Greece by right wing militants too.
Personally I think forbidding the CSA flag or any other symbol, cartoon or words because it offends someone is very much like shutting down Charlie Hebdo because it offends someone and I suspect that some of the Je suis Charlie rhetoric wasn't all that sincere. Je smell hypocrisy.
The rebel flag absolutely does not belong on Government property, but on private property I don't think any government has the right to tell someone what something stands for or what he can say or think, which is an opinion I apply to that idiotic Pledge of Allegiance, but that's also another matter.
I'm obliged to point out as well, that the atrocities perpetrated under theUSA Stars and Stripes are at the very least as bad as the CSA did. I'm obliged to point out that to some the Stars and Bars represent a rebellion against the Government many in the South still abhor even though few would still advocate for slavery today. Not all Southerners were for it even back then, but were against military acts against their cities and homes.
Which gets me to my other point -- broad generalizations and stereotypes. When Muslims attack us because they hate what they say we are and stand for, the cry is "Don't Blame All Muslims" yet when a lone White man attacks some black people "America is a racist country" or worse"All white people are guilty even if they're not all racists." Some even claim that all white people are secretly racist and guilty.
Some insist that racism against other minorities is irrelevant which quite frankly brings out the militant in me. Ask a Cherokee sometime. Police brutality against native people is as bad and probably worse but where's the rage, the riots and the Irate Rhetoric. I belong to a "hated race" too and to me a cross reminds me of murder, genocide, torture, deportation and kidnapping. As I said before I protect anyone's right to display a cross on private property as I can't protect my own rights without protecting everyone's rights. To some people that Roman murder instrument means peace and love. à chacun son goût.
My last point is one I made before, race relations in the US are stage productions put on by all sorts of competing groups and parties and anyone who tells me I'm this or that because I use my own words instead of reading the script can kiss my white ass.
"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (Voltaire).
ReplyDeleteSimple words for a simpler time, but these are no longer simple times when defending free speech becomes tantamount to slitting your own throat, Kristalnacht notwithstanding. Here is the fundamental hypocrisy: In the state of South Chinalina, you can lower or remove the American flag but not the Confederate flag -- BY LAW. You can lower or remove the state flag but not the Confederate flag -- BY LAW. Why is that?
To clarify a comment I left yesterday, here is a revision of it:
"The moment does not belong to the NRA or clueless politicians. The moment belongs to the victims of a vicious crime and their grieving families. The murders were no accident; religious persecution was not the motive; drugs were not the cause; there is nothing enigmatic and incomprehensible about this crime. The reason was abundantly clear from the start: The gunman spared one victim at the scene to pass along his hate-filled manifesto: To start a race war.
What accounts for these fallacies of mystification, erroneous attributions, and milksop sound bites? A brutal crime demands from us nothing less than brutal honesty. Instead, our presidential candidates sacrificed candor for political expedience. Read between the lines: They don’t want to antagonize their base of Southern white voters, the NRA vote, or the neo-Confederate vote comprised of bigots, racists, and reactionary extremists.
Mass murder should never serve as an advertisement for the NRA nor serve as a platform for sleazy politicians. The circus of vapid sound bites and depraved indifference is frankly appalling.
Indeed, the Confederate flag represents exactly who we are … a nation of moral cowards, hypocrites, bigots, racists, renegades, enablers, and shameless snake oil salesmen."
It's time to drive old Dixie down once and for all....
DeleteNothing more romantic than a lost cause, it seems. I once saw a photo of words painted on a wall, taken as the Allies moved into Germany in 1945. "Unser Mauer fallen - unsere Herzen nie." Our walls may fall but not our hearts. It doesn't seem that the nobility of a cause matters all that much and some in the South, especially in the Cradle of the Confederacy - South Carolina, have romanticized the Secession by redefining it as a fight for "freedom" "The second American Revolution" some call it,.or the War of Northern Aggression. America lives in a fantasy.
DeleteWhat the US didn't do during reconstruction and did do in Germany after the war is begin a heavy duty program of propaganda, teaching schoolchildren that the cause of the war was the very thing they had been callling patriotism.
Is it too late to end the Cold Civil War? Can we continue to have half the country pretending their great grandfathers cause was noble and about freedom? I don't think it can help to make them feel more like martyrs than they already seem to feel, but it's never too late to start preaching true history to the willfully ignorant.
How can we kill this stupid notion of the Rebellion as a romantic thing? One way or another we have to teach people that it wasn't about preserving a gracious way of life, but about seceding from a secular democracy based on the innate freedom and equality of mankind. They can't have it both ways.
So no, the battle flag stands for firing cannons at the Union -- a military act of rebellion by an illegitimate government and while I refuse to advocate telling people what symbols they can tattoo on their asses, that damned flag has no place on a State Capitol or post office, or dog pound. Take it down.
How do we keep worshiping the stars and stripes while putting the symbol of a "cause" that killed 600,000 and enslaved millions next to it? There's much I love about the South, but that anti-American flag isn't one of those things - or the people who fly it.