(A Googlebomb for Steve Gilliard.)
This is not the Confederate Flag.
This is the Confederate Flag.
If you google “Confederate Flag,” you will not find a single, real Confederate Flag on the first page, and few examples after that.
Not only has”Confederate Flag” changed to mean something it should not, the phony “Confederate Flag” has changed in significance over time, too. It began as a battle flag, a way to tell Confederate from Union forces on the field, since their two flags weren’t that different, and units’ uniforms and individual banners were anything but standardized. The phony Confederate Flag seems to have borrowed the Cross of St. Andrew, seen on the Scottish flag, or maybe St.Patrick’s cross, incorporated into the Union Jack, but that’s just me guessing.
For longer than the Confederacy lasted, and for more than a century after the American Civil War, the phony Confederate Flag has stood for the defiance of the South, for America’s own, premodern apartheid. It has become, simply, The American Swastika.
The comparison isn’t inflammatory, it’s deliberate and appropriate. This wouldn’t be the first time an old symbol changed meaning due to its abuse by the sick and twisted.
One Bad Apple From Germany Killed Millions. Hitler didn’t just leave behind a mnemonic for all students of astronomy in the English language. He took an ancient good luck symbol, a nearly universal one, and turned it into a universally recognized symbol of evil.
It can happen. And it did happen here. Don’t give me that bullshit about slavery not being relevant to most of Southern society, or not being a factor in the Civil War, or not being the monopoly of the South. This is a Southerner you’re talking to, and I’ve heard it all before and I know better. I know my region’s history, and it is unique within my country. Something different happened here. The South cannibalized their entire culture, even their supposed religion, to justify the racism that justified first slavery and later (and for much longer) the political subjection of African Americans. The truly sad thing is that even those who never owned slaves (and ante-bellum middle class Southerners were more likely to buy a slave and rent him out than they were to buy their own land) were part of this conspiracy of justification. After the American Civil War an even wider portion of Southern society was directly involved in the subjection of African Americans. The Civil War didn’t sweep away a civilization based on slavery, it merely displaced its ruling class and began the South’s long, slow march away from its top-heavy, agrarian, aristocratic society. American apartheid had been democratized, and with it, the Confederate Flag became its egalitarian symbol against the Civil Rights movement and all other aspects of integration for generations.
The Confederate Flag resonates, as a symbol, throughout Southern culture.
People all over the world know what they’re looking at when they see the Confederate Flag. Regardless of what those who display the Confederate Flag may say it means, the Confederate Flag is never far from the Klan and like groups, and the Confederate Flag is never displayed by their historical victims. Showing the Confederate Flag doesn’t just leave the displayer with a burden of proof, to show that for them it’s something other than what the Confederate Flag has stood for, now, for generations. Rather, the Confederate Flag’s history, both long and recent in this country, are such that the Confederate Flag cannot be displayed in good faith. The meaning of the Confederate Flag is utterly unambiguous. At best, venerators of the Confederate Flag can plead ignorance, not innocence.
I grew up with the Confederate Flagand there was never any question what it meant. The South would rise again, that’s what the Confederate Flag meant. We flew the Confederate Flag at my high school. The Confederate Flag appeared on bumpers, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia. “Dixie gonna do it again!” and similar slogans accompanied the Confederate Flag.
There was simply no question. The Confederate Flag is not a symbol of heritage. That should have been obvious enough in Mississippi, where more people fought for the Union than the Confederacy, and yet the Confederate Flag’s defenders insist it is part of that state’s “heritage.” No. It’s part of the “heritage” of that minority of Mississippians whose “heritage” involved the subjection of the rest. That’s their “heritage.” Hey, if the pointy hat fits, wear it.
So, if you’re going to attack a people, demonize and destroy their language and religion, hold them up as a threat to civilization and “your” womanhood, destroy their families, rape, murder, mutilate, crush them in labor camps and then, when someone justifiably smacks your racist ass, take that whole murderous shame underground, don’t be surprised when your precious symbol, the sign of all you hold holy but that all the world recognizes as the sigil of your sickness, becomes, quite simply, your Swastika. That’s all the Confederate Flag which is not the real Confederate Flag will ever be, now.
It’s The American Swastika
What I love about these places are the surprises.
You take a little diary headline and you think ‘ oh that’s some nutter with an axe to grind’¨but you click it anyway.
And then you get a great insight that changes your mind about stuff – in just a few minutes of reading. When was that ever possible before?
and it’s free…
yup, this is why I love the internet. and this place..and did at kos..I learned so much…I taught myself how to function online and am still learning on a daily basis…it is fasinating to me. Just to think what I could have done in my younger days with this internet..
What a shame for things to have gotten so out of hand with matters like here in the south..When I moved here from the northern state I was born and raised in, I never really knew the situation, but when I was touring thsi state, educating and such for the Vietnam Womens Memorial, now Foundation, I learned so much about the souths history and how they think…What an eyeopener..If you will permit me to say this and not get angry with me, They are still fighing the civil war here in many many ways…not just flags either…
Nostalgia is another way of saying ‘I don’t understand the world today’. When we say ‘the Good Old Days’, what we really mean is that our habitat disappeared.
What we really mean is that we like stasis – balance, predictability etc.
My parents knew what music they liked. My mother always referred to the music I liked as noise. I still love Sixties UK R&B, but its mostly noise to my kids, just as their’s is to me (mostly).
It was on another thread somewhere, just today, that someone said that someone said that nostalgia is another word for looking backwards with bullshit in your eyes.
Thanks Grand Moff, for opening up some doors that have been left closed for a very long time. My neighbor state, MO, who’s Governor just stated that this psuedo Confederate flag will be allowed to fly over the graveyard of former Confederate soldiers, causes some uproars. Me personally, I find that flag and the nazi flag repugnant, so vile and distasteful as to leave me wanting to wash myself, because of their symbolism. The Nazi swastika is actually a perversion of the actual symbol in native american cultures, the nazi is drawn the opposite direction.
This is an incredibly powerful and effective way to look at it, GMT. It’s one of those things that makes a person think, wow, why is this the first time I’ve ever heard it put this way? I’ll never think of that flag again without thinking, “American Swastika.”
Couple of questions for you. . .
Do you know who changed the flag, when, and why? And do you know if that change in the design had any direct connection to its change in meaning/significance? Or would the original flag probably also have come to mean the same thing?
Maybe I should just read the book? 🙂
I wish I could Recommend this more than once.
from a number of knowledgeable commenters over on the KOS version, there were two more flags late in the Confederacy, but neither was the American Swastika.
The true Confederate Flag, above, still flies in front of the Texas capitol building, along with the old flags of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic, and the present Republic. This was the flag for the first two years of the Confederacy, before they began experimenting with other flags and accidentally came up with something that was mistaken for a flag of surrender!
So, the version above is that preserved in polite circles.
As for how the American Swastika came to replace it, the battle flag’s elements were part of the later Confederate flags, and later found their way onto several US state flags during the civil rights era (w/ the exception of Mississippi, which had added it earlier).
…that reproduction “Confederate” flags around the turn of the 19th century were given the rectangular shape of the U.S. flag (and the Confederate Navy jack) instead of the square battle flag mandated by the Confederacy.
As I noted on your blog, nice work, Grand Moff. I see that Steve Gilliard appreciated what you wrote, and so do I.
I know a lot of people think this stuff ought to be forgotten, but, as we Dixie-born know, old times there are NOT forgotten, they’re just misremembered.
The summer of ’64, when 550 or so of us went door to door in Mississippi trying to register black voters – while three of our compatriots lay moldering in their secret graves – Confederate swastikas were everywhere, including on the uniformed shoulders of many police officers and even flying sometimes from patrol car aerials. We knew what they were thinking even though they weren’t wearing their sheets. It was all about Southern “heritage,” and it had nothing to do with Southern cooking or Southern belles.
The rectangular version of the battle flag is actually the flag of the Army of Tennessee.
Aside from the three national flags of the Confederacy, there were a bewildering number of flags for various military units and even individual commanders. There were also a number of flags that, like the Revolutionary War “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, never achieved any official status but which were widely recognized.
I object to the characterization — well, no, “demonization” would be a more accurate term — of Confederate symbols as the “American Swastika”. The desire to oppose the more regressive elements of Southern culture should not be an excuse for obscuring the profound complexities of the issues of the Civil War or its long aftermath.
There are an awful lot of people who display one or another Confederate flags as a statement of racism. There are also an awful lot of people who display the flag for relatively benign cultural or political reasons. There are also folks like me, who would display the flag for purely cultural reasons, but who decline to do so for fear of being lumped in with KKK assholes whom we would just as soon shoot as look at.
Once upon a time, I was actively involved in a few modern secessionist groups. During that time, I did not run into a single person who was consciously racist in any way. (Not that there aren’t such groups who are very actively and overtly racist, but I didn’t belong to any of those.) We had minority members. We had interracial couples with biracial children.
I ultimately left because of the unconscious racism. The dominant view was that, because overt racism had been largely conquered, the minority population should just pick itself up by its own bootstraps and move on. It wasn’t that view that bothered me, though; that was just a product of simple ignorance of what life is like for minorities. It was that minority populations were always referred to as “they”. I believed strongly in a Southern nationalism built around an inclusive “we”. The idea of black Southerners as some sort of other was and is absurd; much, if not actually most, of what makes Southern culture uniquely Southern is the product of black Southerners.
But even there, that particular class of modern secessionists are not people who are out of our reach. Their position was one of ignorance, not malice. A lot of them were very smart people who were open to rational argument and demonstrations and willing to change their minds. Those people — and they are surprisingly numerous — are, however, not going to listen to anyone who comes around bandying inflammatory terms like “the American Swastika”.
One of the reasons I was never terribly thrilled with dKos was because of the period paroxysms of vicious anti-Southern rhetoric that would erupt there from time to time. Yes, the South is almost totally red right now. But that’s because of the electoral college. Southern liberals are a very large minority; we just don’t count in the American system because we are less than the magical 51% that makes your vote count. Yes, there are some very ugly elements in Southern history, from slavery through sharecropping, lynchings, and the various forms of racism that still exist there. But there are also a lot of positive elements about Southern culture, not the least that there are a very great many of us committed to the struggle for a truly egalitarian society.
And for that group, it is extraordinarily galling to have so much vitriol aimed at a symbol, when the reality is that much of the South is way ahead of the rest of the country in terms of racial comity. I’ve been living in Portland, Oregon for the last several years, and I am appalled by the segregation, the police brutality, and the very, very discreet racism here. It is in many ways very much like Birmingham in the 1950’s. There’s hardly a Confederate flag to be seen here. There’s also hardly ever an African American who strays outside of “their” quadrant of the city.
There’s a real danger in taking an extreme and simplistic view of symbols like the Confederate flag and Southern culture in general, and that is that you can end up expending a lot of energy on an ambiguous symbol that would be better directed at building bridges and fighting the real problems of racism. Every last Confederate flag on earth could vanish tomorrow, and there would still be job and housing discrimination, police brutality, racist sentencing, harrassment, random violence, unequal and inadequate schools, and insufficient medical care. These are the real problems of racism. Going after the Confederate flag is going to have zero effect on the racists who fly it, and a negative effect on otherwise ignorant but open-minded people who might become our allies in the struggle for an egalitarian society.
You provide some uniquely insightful information on this subject and I thank you for bringing a different perspective on viewing this symbol. Both of you give me many points to ponder and disseminate this information so I can come to a more clear understanding of what this symbol has been, is and will be in the future. Your analysis of cultural identity struck home with me as a mixed race Native American. Thank you and thank Moss for bring this information forward.
… I suppose it is rude of me to get into a dispute with you over the flag’s origins and meaning. However, the flag that today has become a symbol of the white South was proposed as the first national flag of the Confederacy but rejected by the Rebel government. It was, in fact, used by a number of troops in the field, including the Army of Tennessee, although most used the more common battle flag, which was officially square. From 1863 to 1865, the rectangular navy jack flew on Confederate ships. It was this rectangular flag – not the “real” Confederate flag – that came to be adopted and used on thousands of caskets of Civil War veterans after 1900. And it was this flag that flies over courthouses and Rebel memorials and Klan rallies right up to the current day.
I’d be interested in knowing how many Southerners fly other Confederate flags than this one or sport other ones than this one on their bumpers and belt buckles or window decals. It’s THIS flag, almost exclusively, that we see displayed.
I’m sure that many Southerners do display this Confederate flag without a racist thought, just for I’m-from-Dixie reasons. Maybe that’s the majority. But how many of these folks are black? Doesn’t that tell you something? Because the Confederate flag is about WHITE Southern pride and identity, not Southern pride and identity. What do you suppose a descendant of the 17-18,000 black Mississippians who fought for the Union thinks when s/he sees that Confederate flag ensconced in the state flag?
I was born in Georgia, lived there until I was 10, went back to do civil rights work, have relatives who live there still. It’s a beautiful place and some teensy piece of me still calls it home even though Indians weren’t even legally allowed to live in Georgia until the 1980s. I certainly agree that covert racism is a problem in places far removed from the South. Funny you should mention Portland, where my wife grew up, and where we, as an interracial couple, are still looked at askance by more than a few citizens in the 21st Century. But to call it anything like Birmingham in the 1950s is absurd. Unless you think there is no difference between state-imposed apartheid backed up by vigilante violence and the cultural and social racism that afflicts much of modern America, North and South.
I have to tell you, this notion that the Civil War arose out of “profound complexities” is galling to me. I know it is popular in those modern secesh and Southern heritage groups to argue that it was really all about states’ rights and overbearing federal authority. My third-grade text reminded us that 1861-65 was the “War of Northern Aggression.” This cock-and-bull story is an affront to history. This is not to say that Abe Lincoln and the radical Republicans didn’t expand constitutional authority beyond what I would like to see. Nor that Union armies didn’t commit their share of atrocities. Nor that carpetbaggers and scalawags didn’t take advantage of the defeated South.
But without one overriding issue, the Civil War would not have occurred. Anybody who doubts this need only read the secessionist documents. Some examples:
Georgia:
Mississippi:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.
South Carolina:
Texas:
The Confederate flag is an emblem of racism. Just because some fly it for “cultural” reasons does not and cannot ever change that fact.
During times I have displayed the flag, it has either been the square battle flag, the Stars and Bars, or the Third National. It’s been a long time, either way.
I don’t know what the descendants of Union veterans think when they see a Confederate flag. Probably much the same thing I’ve thought my whole life seeing the Union flag and knowing that I am an American citizen because of armed conquest rather than voluntary assent. There is a very real sense in which America is not my country; I am merely its subject. That recognition apparently inspires bitter resentment in right-wing Southerners; for me, it is one of the driving forces behind my own commitment to liberalism and racial equality.
I respectfully disagree with you that slavery was the only possible cause of secession. The New England states had threatened to secede only thirty years prior to the war over fiscal policy. There was for some time in the 19th century considerable concern that California would secede for a variety of reasons. That slavery was the wedge that split the country is not open to dispute, I will grant you. That it was alone sufficient to trigger secession is, however, open to debate, as is the matter of whether the North-South cultural divide would have eventually resulted in secession even if slavery had never existed. It’s also quite clear that Lincoln would have invaded if the cause of secession had been tax policy, import tarriffs, or anything at all else. It is in that last sense that the states’ rights argument for the war is particularly true. Can you imagine any plausible case in which seccession would not have triggered an invasion?
You are also quite correct that there is little or no vigilante violence in Portland. There hardly needs to be; the local police provide all of the necessary violence and intimidation. I actually live just south of Portland in Oregon City. Save for two families that live within a couple of blocks of me, the only time I see African Americans here is when they are being pulled over by the police. Portland cops have in recent years shot more than unarmed one black suspect at point-blank range.
The statement, “The Confederate flag is an emblem of racism,” is, however, a misleading statement. It has been and is being employed as such by some people. But no symbol is anything. Its meaning is in the minds of its beholders. There are many countries that use the eagle as a national symbol; is the eagle American or Russian or Roman or Nazi German or Austrian? It’s all of these things.
The first time I purchased a Confederate flag, it was from a black family selling them at a county fair in Alachua County, Florida. Their view was that it was a Southern symbol, and since they were Southerners, it was as much their symbol as it was for white Southerners. There was for a while an African American-owned clothing company called NuSouth that produced clothing bearing the Confederate flag, but rendered in the red-black-green colors of the old African nationalist movement. The proprietors promoted it as a symbol of Southern racial unity. They eventually went out of business, but I liked the idea.
I don’t believe the symbol is going to go away. It has too much history, and too many people feel too passionately about it. Rather than demonize it, it would be far more effective to co-opt it. The NuSouth folks, in my opinion, had exactly the right idea. Make it a symbol of unity and inclusiveness, and the racists will be the ones who find it repugnant. Ceding that symbol to the haters after so much struggle is to hand them a victory they don’t deserve. It would be on a par with Christians abandoning the cross because idiot Klansmen use Christian symbolism.
…Confederate flags on bumperstickers and belt buckles appear in Day-Glo colors, or African nationalist colors, I’ll stop railing about it.
For the record, I didn’t say that slavery was the only possible cause of secession. Certainly, other ante-bellum states tossed the idea around from time to time. What I did say was that, despite Southern heritage revisionism, the Southern and border-state secession that actually occurred and initiated the Civil War took place because they wished to maintain slavery.
I’m no defender of police who shoot unarmed black men (or anybody else). I am no Pollyanna about racism, and know from personal experience it exists throughout America, not just the South. But however bad Portland is today is incomparable with Birmingham of 50 years ago. Nobody would have seriously investigated a lynching in Birmingham, in part because some cops – even the police chief – might well have been in attendance when the victim was hanged. Whatever the racial divide in Portland, blacks CAN live where they want there, eat where they wish, stay in any overnight accommodations they can afford, enroll at any school.
The Confederate flag – which enjoyed a huge revival during the civil rights era – was and is an emblem of a South in which black people “knew their place” and kept it.
We can split hairs about 1861 all we want, but the ultimate practical point at hand is this: what are you accomplishing by railing against the display of the Confederate flag?
1 and 2 are just wastes of energy, while 3 and 4 are actually counterproductive.
As far as present-day Portland goes, no one seriously investigates police shootings here because, um, the cops are investigating themselves. Every shooting, no matter how outrageous, is judged to be justified by the police. And while there is no formal system of apartheid in Portland, blacks who want to live or stay wherever they can afford can often expect to find that there are no vacancies, or that the apartment in the paper was just rented by someone else. And that’s provided they can afford it in the first place with the lower paying jobs available to them.
Overt, state-sponsored racism has one big advantage: you can abolish it by gaining control over the legislature. Covert racism is a hell of a lot harder to fight. It’s also a lot easier to ignore, which is a big part of the problem in getting white activists to lend a hand in Portland. Out of sight, out of mind.
One of the things that really turned me off about the frothy flag rhetoric at dKos was that it was basically dishonest. The people complaining the loudest about Confederate flags were mostly interested in just coming up with a new avenue of rhetorical attack against Southern conservatives. Please bear in mind that this is not aimed at you, Meteor Blades, but racism in Democrat circles is a fundraising and GOTV tool. “Vote for us, because Republicans are racists!” The last piece of major civil rights legislation sponsored by Democrats would be… what? The only thing Dem activists have been talking about for the last year has been putting more voting machines in minority precincts — which certainly says a lot about the extent of Dem interest in minorities.
This focus on the trappings of bigotry comes at the expense of real action. As I pointed out before, the sudden disappearance of every Confederate symbol on earth would not solve a single race problem. The racists would find a new symbol, and decent people would still be denied justice.
But it’s a free country. We obviously disagree on this point, and that’s fine. You’ve been civil and I respect that. But I would like to ask you what specific, practical initiatives you think American liberals ought to be fighting for on the equal rights front.
…a lot more to reduce real racism. No argument there.
And you’re right about covert racism. In fact, a lot of legislators – most of them Democrats by the way – had a saying along those lines in the 1960s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act: You can’t legislate morality – meaning you can’t make people believe people of color are equal with a statute.
True enough.
I spend very little time fighting against the Confederate flag. But symbols DO have power. If that weren’t so, you and I wouldn’t be having this debate right now.
Initiatives? Making “inner-city” schools models of learning. Investigating every instance of purported attempts to stop blacks from voting. Federalizing investigations into police shootings. Equalizing penalties for drug use. Funding literacy programs in prisons – where more than half the inmates are now people of color.
Cheers.
I have to say that I agree with many of your thoughtful remarks, but not all.
Before comments, let me make my confession of bona fides: I was born in Mississippi, and lived most of my life until adulthood within 50 miles of the River. I love the South, and am unashamed to be a Southerner. By ancestry, 4 direct relatives fought in the Civil War, plus at least 4 of their brothers: Missouri (Union), Kentucky (Union), Tennessee (Union), and Tennessee(Confederacy). A relative imprisoned at Andersonville.
All but the Mo soldiers were residents of Tennessee and they had voted against secession. At least In the part of the South where my relatives lived, the votes for secession were stongly and directly linked to slave ownership. Where slaves were held, secession votes prevailed. In places without slaves, votes for the union prevailed. Similarly, most areas without slaves produced a lot of soldiers for the Union, many fewer for the South.
Yes, it is the Tennessee battle flag that has become the symbol of the racist South, and that flag isn’t the true flag of the CSA. But I can say the terrible history of that flag and its racist use is written into my family history. One of these grandparental Union soldiers married a woman whose 3 sisters married members of Forest’s raiders who became Klan members after the war. My maternal grandfather, who spent a goodly part of his life as a sharecropper, talked to me about it a lot when I was a child.
And I have detested the anti-Southern screeds on dKos, the recurring jeremiads against all things Southern as being the equivalent of stupidity; mindless, bigoted religion; sink-holes of illiteracy, poverty, and moral degredation. I want to force every one of these folks to sit and listen to Randy Newman’s song Rednecks – which aptly puts such thinking in its place. (I live in Detroit. That is, in Detroit, not in a Detroit suburb. If you know Newman’s song, you know what I mean.)
As an adult I have lived in Texas, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Michigan. And the single most racist place I’ve ever been is right here in SE Michigan. I have seen more progress on racism in the South than here in the North, so I agree with much of what you say about the modern South.
However, I think that the symbol of the flag that a majority of American see as the Confederate flag makes it unusable, whatever it may represent historically in a personal sense. I do think that it is linked to racism and our history of slavery – as a code word for persons who may not agree with overt white supremacy, but who do believe that white people are losing jobs and educational slots to less qualified minorities. They do not interpret that set of beliefs as racist at the core, or they are not troubled by those policies being trumpeted by frank white supremacists. In my experience, a lot of people do not interpret their own prejudices as any form of racism – and I include my own prejudices in that.
Although I agree that the flag is not a worthwhile “first target” against racism, I think it should also not be tolerated without comment among people who claim no racism. I personally do not argue with such persons, but I do tell them what my perspective is. I want them to think, rather than engage in defensive argument, just think. I have seen some quietly stop using the flag after they thought for a while.
Fascinating diary. I didn’t know that the two flags were distinct. I was thinking about this today because when I was driving home from work (I live in rural New York State), someone had the Confederate flag hanging from their porch. And, of course, the first thing I thought was “must be a racist.” I look at that symbol and I see strange fruit hanging in the trees.
This is the polite excuse Southerners customarily use for flying the Confederate battle flag. How, I always wonder, does it honor one’s ancestors to continually remind the world that they fought honorably for a cause which was deeply and profoundly wrong?
What would they say to Germans who flew the red swastika flag, protesting that they didn’t support Nazism but were merely honoring their ancestors who fought and died in WW II? Would our white Southerners see that for the provocative hypocrisy it is? Probably. Would they see that their own flag is its precise analogy? Undoubtedly not.
Until we become a more humble, self-reflective country, we will continue to head down a dangerous road.
And I’m happy to know that there’s another southerner around here to commisserate with (I’ve exiled myself to the West Coast from Tennessee).
Your diary actually reminded me of antoher quote – about fascism coming to the U.S. not wrapped in a swastika, but in the Stars and Stripes. The Confederate Battle Flag has been a repugnant symbol for a long time. I fear that the Stars and Stripes is increasingly being tarred with that same brush.
Thanks for this outstanding work.
It’s always a pleasure to read your diaries, GMT. I’m so glad you’re posting here.
Decades ago, when we took possession of a house, I found a box in the basement. Inside was an original Confederate battle flag, hand sewn and a bit frayed around the edges. It was a hundred+ years old and I couldn’t bring myself to destroy an authentic piece of American history. Nor could I bring myself to show it to anyone except my husband. So, I folded it neatly and sealed it in a box.
Over the passing years, I have moved repeatedly — even to the UK and back again — carrying that damned box with me. I never dwelled on why I kept it, never meditated upon the possibly deeper meaning of a Southerner carrying a emblem of hatred secreted in their baggage.
During every move, I would come upon the box, open it, finger the frayed edges and visualize a woman pains-takingly stitching it together. I’d feel a bit of awe for her effort and wonder how many battles the flag saw and be reminded of the arrogance, stupidity and venality of some of my ancestors. Certainly, I felt shame because I kept this possession a secret.
I moved last month and the box came out of hiding again. I unfurled the flag for my current husband in the privacy of our windowless garage. We contemplated its obvious antiquity and discussed the value it might have on eBay. But, then, people would know we had it and were willing to sell it to someone who actually wanted it. Ah, but, my husband suggested, we could make a private sale to any number of Confederate museums. Don’t they already have enough of these things, I countered, it’s not like this damned symbol has been forgotten.
So, we burned it in the fireplace, reduced it to ashes.
History is such a tricky beast. This country has never faced up to the “arrogance, stupidity and venality” of many of our ancestors, and anything that happened more than 50 years ago tends to get a sugarcoating of “well, he/she was just acting according to the standard morality of the time.” There is a tendancy to see an old confedrate flag as a relic of another time, not as the living symbol of the deep rooted hate and fear that this country has yet to deal with.
Growing up in New Orleans, symbols of the confederacy abound, although most New Orleanians are very clear that they “were different” from the rest of the south.
At first, I succembed to the “wait! It’s history!” motive. But after thinking about it, I agree with what you did (not that you need my approval). There are plenty of confederate flags in museums, and the private collectors of confederate items are a strange bunch. Why cart around this strange tether to the past?
Good to see you!
Yea, too few people realize now that the “Confederate flag” was a battle standard. It wasn’t a “National Flag of the Confederacy.” Hell, people call it the “Stars and Bars.” The TOP flag was the “Stars and Bars.” Can’t tell that to the ignorant fucks who still fly them.
But you’re right, that’s what the battle standard was for: not giving up “the fight.” And “the fight” means only one thing.
Err, bottom. My dyslexia must be acting up, and listing slightly to the left.
My understanding was that every state, and sometimes every militia, had its own Confederate Flag. This made things on the battlefield very confusing, so they went with the Southern Cross as the battle standard.
I also found This site that may have some good info on it. I haven’t had a chance to look through it yet.
Let’s say a you’re driving through Bavaria and you get pulled over for a traffic violation. The law enforcement official has a swastika sewn onto his/her uniform. That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?
Yet we see southern law enforcement and southern governments proudly display a symbol that is racist at worst, and traitorous at best.