From what I can tell, use of Nazi flags is banned in Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, and Israel. Their use is somewhat restricted in several other countries. As a matter of free speech, their use is unrestricted in the United States. But, it’s clear that the flags, and other Nazi memorabilia, are a touchy subject. I think most Germans can point to an ancestor who served in the Wehrmacht under the banner of the swastika. And I can understand that some of them might want to honor their grandfather’s sacrifice, despite the horrid and unprecedented crimes that were committed during the Holocaust. Germany will allow that, provided people don’t start dressing up like Nazis and waving the flags around. Obviously, America will allow people to use the traitorous Stars & Bars Confederate flag, despite it being the most iconic symbol of slavery in existence. I fully support people’s First Amendment right to wave the Confederate flag around. But putting it on state-issued license plates is another thing entirely. Imagine if Germany put the swastika on license plates under the same principle that people wanted to honor their ancestors. Unless you think there is something forgivable about seceding from the Union before Lincoln could even take office and starting a war that killed or wounded over 600,000 people, all to protect the institution of slavery, you aren’t going to support putting a Confederate Flag on license plates. So, Rick Perry has a choice.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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We already have those on plates in Virginia. Here’s what a Civil War Historian has to say about our Confederate Museum in Richmond:
Welcome to the club, Texas.
Also, off topic, Booman…but Steve Kornaki is making the point I made about your Ron Paul media thread:
No,Ron Paul is not getting screwed
Le Perry va s’addresser a cette question par moyen de son astuce primaire, le venerable “plus grosse salope trainant dans cette salope.”
For them the Stars and Bars represents freedom, not slavery. After all, they may have seceded, but if the Union had just let them be free there wouldn’t have beenh a war or the 600,000 casualties.
It all depends on your POV. Rationale people would see it like you do. Others see it not as honoring their ancestors (although that may be what they say) but as sticking a middle finger into the air towards those damn Yankees that wouldn’t let them just be free.
Give it a rest:
What;s that old classic song say?
Oh yeah: “Don’t know much about history …”
Germany went through a deliberately designed program of “de-Nazification”. Even at its “harshest” moments, Reconstruction never aimed at destroying the racism that propped up slavery. In the post-Civil War era, the war was looked at as an unfortunate regional conflict. Much like the Scottish and Irish rebellions that the UK faced in the 18th and 19th centuries. So the Confederate flag became associated with a region and the idea that held it in being were never expunged. Mainly because the majority of folks outside the South held the same ideas.
The continued emphasis on pushing the Confederate flag as “heritage” has more to do with legitimizing racism today than celebrating a supposed lost age or lost cause in the past. It is intended as a slap against the federal government that desegregated Southern institutions and still has control over certain parts of the election process and public education in order to prevent the reinstitutionalization of discrimination that these folks so much want. There has not been serious moral discussion in the South, even in the mainstream churches, about the guilt that the South still bears for holding racism in being. And there have been only weak pro forma apologies from governments and other institutions to African-Americans for the enabling of slavery and segregation.
Germany and South Africa were led through processes of repentance and reconciliation. The American South never was. The reconciliation of 1876 was a capitulation to the power of the former slaveowners, now turned capitalist, to decide a close election. Plessy vs. Ferguson was a capitulation to the reinstitution of slavery without actual property ownership, which is what the full system of segregation and discrimination amounted to.
Unfortunately, we still even with the election of Barack Obama, not having that conversation.
And I doubt we ever will until a more accurate history of the United States is taught in the schools, especially in those private academies across the South that just happen to be filled with white kids.
Then again, when the biggest publishers of textbooks rely on the standards set by the Texas Board of Education, well …
Ps., not slamming the South, since we have defacto desegregation up North and out West. However the large black populations in the South make it harder to find public schools that are lily white. My conservative brother-in-law, when he was working as an exec for a since merged telecom company in Little Rock sent all of his kids to a 99% White “Christian Academy.” Two reasons: public schools in Arkansas are shot since they aren’t funded adequately and he didn’t want his kids in an “unsafe” environment at a public school as he told me.
Throughout the history of the US, attitudes outside the South have allowed the shapers of Southern culture to escape accountability. The closest we came to that not being true was the 1970s, and then it was Louise Day Hicks that let the South get off the hook for its racism. And permitted urban ethnics to vote for Ronald Reagan.
BTW, all of my kids went to public school. And the situation even in the best of school districts is uneven. In NC, we have school districts in majority black counties in which the whites control the school board, starve the schools, and send their kids to a “Christian school”. In the 1970s, Southerners nicknamed those “Christian schools” as “segregation academies”. So now we have Minnesota, Iowa, and New York members of Congress advocating for these same schools.
In South Carolina, Bob Jones University networked these schools into a private accreditation association. In Virginia, Jerry Falwell, the pre-eminent segregationist preacher in the US, networked them into feeding the enrollments at Liberty College (now Liberty University) and Pat Robertson did the same at Regent University.
I don’t know for sure but Oral Roberts University most likely did that for Texas and Oklahoma, plus appealing to conservative Midwestern fundamentalists. Ergo. Michelle Bachmann.
Easier to change the laws than the attitudes, and as we all know, every law ever made has loopholes.
I’ve noticed that it is very easy to change attitudes — in a negative direction. Just look how quickly Americans have gone from being concerned about poverty to heaping scorn upon their unemployed middle class neighbors.
It is much harder to walk that back.
I think your example isn’t people changing their attitude so much as people being given permission to openly express a bad attitude they privately held.
Shame as a civilizing force is on the decline. Paul Krugman, in his The Conscience of a Liberal, observed that no law prevented corporations from paying their CEOs 400 times what their lowest paid workers were paid, yet it didn’t happen until recent decades. What had stopped them? Something more effective than law — social stigma.
Oh we’re having it, but it’s all in sublimated hostile nonsense from the right and self-appointed centrist drones acting as if the truth were a funny little thing you don’t worry about too much since it’s television talky time.
Well, that is a good point.
It’s the same conversation America had when Birth of a Nation was released.
I still think Romney will be the last man standing. The money power wants him. Bachmann is a better SNL skit than Palin, Ron Paul has the same shot as last time (none), Huntington is unknown, and Perry is a clown. At some point the money to fund Perry’s campaign will dry up (probably when Romney makes a deal with Big Oil to gut the EPA). If Perry wasn’t a Texas Governor with ties to Big Oil and the religious right foot soldiers he’d never be in the race. The smart GOP candidates are waiting for 2016.
Then again, I’ve been known to be wrong before. God help us if another idiot like Perry gets elected President.
Not to worry about Perry actually winning the general. Very unlikely. Winning the nom — that’s what Dems should hope for, as he’ll be easier to beat than Romney.
The TX Confederate license plate news confirms my hunch that 2012 will most closely resemble 1864, with secession returning oddly as an issue, and Obama-Abe pulling it out late against a Confed-coddling extremist opponent who openly disrespects the sitting president.
Honor whose ancestors? Certainly not the vast majority of the 35-40% of Texans that are non-white.
And honor them for what – committing treason? I’m trying to imagine the uproar from the wingnuts if, say, at the height of the 2002 hysteria around John Walker Lindh, he’d come out and said, “Yes, it’s all true, I took up arms against American soldiers in Afghanistan. I went there specifically for that purpose. I tried to kill as many of the bastard infidels as I could. I’m proud of it. And I think the state of California should publicly celebrate my bravery and courage.” Just trying to imagine that.
Of course, Perry’s already made a name for himself throwing around the idea of a modern-day Texan secession. And Palin’s husband belonged to an Alaskan secessionist party for years. So I guess treason to America is OK in some GOP circles, so long as you’re loyal to the notion of an imaginarily idyllic, much whiter America circa 1950, or 1850.
Yep. Texas is a strange place when it comes to honoring ancestors.
You have Spanish ancestors who stole land from Native Americans. And the Anglo ancestors who stole land from Mexico and brought in slaves who had their labor stolen. Who in turn were bought out by sharpies who knew that there might be oil under that worthless rangeland….one theft after another.
Honor whose ancestors? Certainly not the vast majority of the 35-40% of Texans that are non-white.
And honor them for what – committing treason
Lord, I loved that part of your comment