Remember this solemn parole of honor?
The official surrender document of Lee’s troops to the Union Army, signed at the Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865:
We, the undersigned Prisoners of War, belonging to the Army of Northern Virginia, having been this day surrendered by General Robert E. Lee, CSA, Commanding said Army, to Lieut. Genl. U. S. Grant, Commanding Armies of United States, do hereby give our solemn parole of honor that we will not hereafter serve in the armies of the Confederate States, or in any military capacity whatever, against the United States of America, or render said to the enemies of the latter, until property exchanged, in such manner as shall be mutually approved by the respective authorities.
Done at Appomattox Court House, Va., this 9th day of April, 1865.
Translated into modern English, that says that the goddamned rebellion is over. You don’t serve in the Confederate armies; you don’t render service to the enemies of the United States of America, and you sure as shit don’t fly the banner of Robert E. Lee.
On your honor.
And if honor doesn’t mean anything to you, consider that General Lee advised his troops that “valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that would have attended the continuance of the contest.”
The victims in Charleston are just the latest losses that have attended the continuance of the contest. How many other victims have there been?
Do you know how small you look when you retail shop for Confederate merchandise?
Walmart.com currently carries the Confederate flag as well as attire featuring the flag’s design, such as T-shirts and belt buckles.
“We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer. We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment — whether in our stores or on our web site,” said Walmart spokesman Brian Nick. “We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly — this is one of those instances.”
When you meet an ambulatory belt buckle, you’ll be the first person to discover an “item” that can make its own way onto the shelves of Walmart or into your shopping cart. Blaming t-shirts for acting improperly is pretty sad, as is any “process in place” that profits off the dishonor of continuing a contest that can accomplish nothing that could compensate us for the damage.
But the focus on the Confederate Flag can have an unfortunate side effect. What, after all, does that flag mean when it doesn’t simply mean white supremacy?
It’s meaning in those cases in nearly identical to the meaning of the modern conservative movement. It’s about disunion, and hostility to the federal government, and state’s rights. It’s anti-East Coast Establishment and anti-immigrant. It’s about an idealized and false past and preserving outworn and intolerant ideas. It’s about a perverse version of a highly provincial and particularized version of (predominantly) Protestant Christianity that has evolved to serve the interests of power elites in the South. It’s about an aggrieved sense of false persecution where white men are playing on the hardest difficulty setting rather than the easiest, and white Christians are as threatened as black Muslims and gays and Jews.
“Those blacks are raping our women and they have to go.”
That’s what the Confederate Flag is all about, but it’s also the basic message of Fox News and the whole Republican Party since the moment that Richard Nixon promised us law and order.
But it’s not black people who have to go.
It’s this whole Last Cause bullshit mentality that fuels our nation’s politics and lines the pockets of Ted Cruz just as surely as it has been lining the pockets of Walmart executives.
Today, maybe the governor down there had an epiphany. Maybe this massacre was the last straw. But, tomorrow, we’ll all be right back where we began with Congress acting like an occupying Confederate Army.
If we solve a symbolic problem and leave the rest untouched, then what will really change?
You can’t bury the Confederate Flag without, at the same time, burying the Conservative Movement.
Let’s get on with it.
It will difficult, but not impossible to bury the flag and the conservative movement. Barry Goldwater spawned the Southern Strategy; Richard Nixon perfected it; and Ronald Reagan institutionalized it. That’s 50 years of some nasty policies.
Goldwater et al. didn’t so much create the Southern Strategy so much as our neighbors and friends demanded a figurehead for the racist id that was later called Southern Strategy. And Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan were just ahead of the other assholes in the pack.
1968-2000 would’ve played out more-or-less how it did regardless who helmed the movements. That is, an inexorable decline into plutocracy that piggybacked on top of sublimated WASP Heartland identity politics where the opposition had to rely on positive black swans just to slow the juggernaut of ressentiment down.
I’m glad to see the flag issue getting some hopeful movement toward resolution (even if it might be just temporary). I suppose some will be able to claim some modest victory, the media will move on to the next culture war debate, and this horrible event can be forgotten. I’m guessing even the NRA will be happy that all were distracted by the flag on the statehouse grounds in SC. It’s sort of a cheap victory, but such are the low expectations for change in America.
I would have preferred that the protesters ripped the flag down rather than wait for the SC legislature. Although I can certainly understand why no one wanted to provoke the police in SC. I think the “Black lives matter” graffiti on the traitors statue was a better protest than letting politicians grandstand and pretend to lead. Time will tell if the SC legislature actually does take down the flag… or just moves it to another location. There is no particular reason yet to think this epiphany was real or long-lasting.
http://news.yahoo.com/charleston-confederate-statue-graffiti-black-lives-matter-184427816.html
A relative of mine shared this that Walmart story IA a post of mine on FB. One of her white coworkers or friend or family member (not quite sure, but she is married to a white man, so it could have been a relation) responded with the whole “Southern Pride” meme. Now, normally I don’t like to detail another person thread on FB or social media, but with the events of past week, I felt the need to say something to this woman. I pointed out all the things you mentioned. Threw in sone Ta-Nehisi Coates links for good measure. Then I guess cause I was calling her on her BS she started throwing up some Conservative talking points on the “myths” of the Confederacy aND then had to nerve to say I was the ignorant one, cause excuse me for ya know…facts.
Then she threw up this but of commentary and I knew it was time to give up this discussion with this woman.
I finally just gave up cause I didn’t want to continue to threadjack my fam. But I find myself in the age of Obama and approaching 40 that I’m tired and done with to move some folk Black or White, especially on social media. Its just not worth the time or effort to try to reach a grown ass person to challenge their world view. I’m as emotional as the next person and yes I see defend some things based on emotions & sentiment, but as a scientist when confronted with facts, I listen and I try to re-evaluate my emotional defense. People like the woman I mentioned are just not worth my time when I don’t know them personally and I can just ignore or block them anyway.
I consider myself to have a nice diverse group of friends & coworkers. But I’ll tell ya if it came to having a less diverse groups or acceptance of folk in my social group who truly believes that the Civil War was about “states rights” then I’d prefer less diversity in my friends and acquaintances. Those “friends” will find themselves with one less friend and those coworkers will find me less inclined to acknowledge them outside of work related subjects. Life is too short and I have enough friends that I don’t need to associate with folk who are willing to cling to such ignorance.
Well, she isn’t wrong provided that you are flexible with your timeline and don’t focus on who seceded from the Union and fired on federal troops.
Northern states did have slaves, it’s just that they had already given them up voluntarily by the time of the Civil War. Some of the border states, like Maryland, had slavery during the war.
Lincoln’s original war aims were not to abolish slavery throughout the South, but those became war aims when the losses mounted and needed to be justified.
But the war was about slavery plain and simple. Most directly, it was about whether new states would be allowed to practice slavery or not, which would determine if the Congress would continue to protect the practice where it already existed or would move to abolish it.
South Carolina decided to leave the Union when Lincoln was elected and before he was even inaugurated. He had not run on a platform of abolishing slavery where it already existed. South Carolina could have kept its slaves for the foreseeable future, at least until new Plains State senators tipped the balance of sentiment in Washington.
What South Carolina did was make a determination that the election of Lincoln spelled political defeat in the medium term and act preemptively. Very preemptively.
This is why calling it a war of northern aggression is so dishonest. If Lincoln’s views on slavery were going to prevail, it would have been over the long haul, and in a peaceful political way. Congress would lead.
He did not take up arms. Initially, all he was trying to do was restore order so he could restart a civilized negotiation. They were called the Union army for a reason. They were not called the Anti-Slavery Army.
In the end, however, after so many young boys had been sacrificed, something bigger was needed to make it all somehow worth the sacrifice. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, many people in the Union were very disturbed by it. That wasn’t why they were fighting, at all.
But making the South pay for their intransigence was something these skeptics could get behind.
It’s one thing to point out that the North’s side in the war wasn’t as high-minded and enlightened as it is often portrayed.
The North’s leader, however, is revered for a very good reason.
In the end, he was high-minded enough.
If the result is good enough then no one cares about the motive. Who gives a shit that the abolition of slavery was more of a Machiavellian masterstroke from the protohumans of the Gilded Age? They dismantled the slave pits in the United States decades early and even Sherman gets to be revered as a saint.
I really despise all of the talk about how the Civil War was avoidable and the 13th Amendment was an opportunistic grab. It’s whitesplaining of the worst sort and even super-liberals like Howard Zinn and Upton Sinclair do it. ‘Oh, yeah, millions of slaves lived in torture camps and a more peaceful path would’ve kept them in said camps for at least another generation, but what about the poor soldiers who died?? And those captains of industry, there were only scarcely better than the plantation owners’ harrumph harrumph!
I think that even Lincoln’s initial offer of command of the army to Robert E. Lee was conciliatory. Besides his military prowess, I think that Lincoln felt it best to have a prominent Southerner in command of the Union army to avoid it turning into a sectional war. But then, I’m not a Lincoln scholar.
We could just take President Lincoln’s word for why the civil war started…
“Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html
It always seemed pretty clear to me.
You need to keep a copy of some of the Confederate statements for why they wanted to leave the US: it was all about keeping slavery. In their own words, in 1860, when it was a hot issue.
So if people are saying now “the south seceded because of ‘States Rights’, not ‘slavery’, then they are calling their ancestors in 1860 a bunch of LIARS.
Which, I guess, is better than a bunch of SLAVERS.
Excellent, Booman. Simply excellent.
Booman writes:
Indeed she did. A political epiphany, more than likely. That’s all this Confederate flag furor really is, in the short run. It is further evidence that neanderthal U.S. racists (nationwide, not just in the south) are a dying breed. They are headed for the tarpits. Not flying that flag or even refusing to sell it in mainstream establishments is not going to change the minds of the racists, and as long as they held political power in a voting sense…as long as their votes were deemed necessary for politicians to win elections in many parts of this country…politicians catered to them. So it goes.
But now the anti-racist vote is being seen by some those same politicians as the one that will turn elections, and they are doing what politicians have done from time immemorial. They are taking (largely symbolic) actions to please necessary voters.
Nuthin’ new here, Booman. Maybe in the long run making the Confederate flag persona non grata in the culture will effect the attitudes of people as they grow up in the U.S., thus accelerating the demise of the neanderthals, but the real deal? Cheap labor kept cheap by by hook or by crook? That will not even be touched by some right wing southern governor…and make no mistake about it, Nikki Haley is a died-in-wool Republican or she wouldn’t have been elected there…making a statement that “It’s time to remove the flag from the Capitol grounds”. That’s all she said, by the way. She is throwing the burden of actually doing something right back on the neanderthal-dominated legislature, and it’s just about that flag and the grounds of the capital.
Here’s what she said before this latest tempest.
An epiphany? Riiiight…a political epiphany, one that will be resisted by the legislature more than likely. It’s just political theater, Booman. Nothing more.
Where the real rubber meets the real road?
We shall see.
Eventually the truly racist old guard will for all intents and purposes be politically dead. Then we’ll see if economically-supported de facto segregation ends in this country.
Then we’ll see.
My bet?
Not a chance.
Big Money needs cheap labor and at least a semi-affluent middle class to buy its goods. Segregation works two ways. It keeps the middle and working classes separated from the cheap labor classes, and it mostly does so through physical markers.
The old black street line still holds.
Bet on it.
It’s all about economics.
Capitalist economics, which can be profitably reduced to the following phrase:
Dassit, Booman.
Cheap labor producing products that can be sold at a profit.
This is not changing anytime soon, looks like.
Not here, anyway, and not in any other capitalist country that has encouraged darker workers to move there for about 50 years or more.
So that goes as well.
Later…
AG
P.S. This is by no means a “new” idea, this skin marker thing. In the Indian caste system, the Untouchables were the darkest of the dark and the Brahmins were the lighest of the light. Like Lenny Bruce once said, the real question is “Who’s gonna clean the shithouse?” Like dat. Bet on it.
Those paleoracists can’t die off fast enough.
Someone needs to tell them that all of the Medicare blood transfusion/organ transplants/pharm stuff comes from “mixed race” sources.
Because Obamacare.
this is who they are. this is who they’ve always been.
Booman – well said, well put. I believe you put the matter to rest – once & for all. Let’s “Get On With It” AMERICA!
E-bay joins WalMart & Sears to stop selling confederate flag merchandise
To quote a Southerner somewhere, “Fuckin’ A Bubba”
Well said Boo.
The North had its foot on the South’s neck at Appomattox and chose not to twist and press it until the neck broke.
That enlightenment saw that was the only route to a lasting peace. Too many people of the South in 150 years have responded to that forgiveness with all too little gratitude and humility.
We saw that enlightenment in the words and forgiveness shown by the victims’ families in Charleston last week.
The time has come to hold the South to its claims of honor and under the threat of another foot on neck demand that their status quo is absolutely unacceptable. The UNION will not leave SC (or any other racist institution) to “decide for itself what is best” because for 150 years they have shown little ability to know what is best for ALL their citizens especially minorities and their constitutional rights.
I desperately hoped for something like that in the aftermath of 9/11. Not to be. Vengeance trumped justice and forgiveness.
I desperately hope for better today in the South. It is one thing for embarrassed politicians to say, “The time has come…” just as they did during the height of the civil rights movement. But unless leaders say, “OMG I have been wrong. We’ve all been wrong for 150 years.” there will still be too much room and legitimacy for the asshats who will say, “See? I told you what would happen if we let that Yankee nigger become president.”