Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Yes. Flying any flag is making a statement, and the confederate flag definitely makes one.
Anyone who knows the history of it knows this - it's not so much the origins of the flag. It was originally a battle flag. What's more important is how the symbol was used AFTER the Civil War.
It was a symbol used to glorify the memory of the confederacy and the confederacy was about slavery. Period. Alexander Stephens himself - the vice president of the confederacy said that it was founded on "the great truth that the negro is inferior to the white man." Among historical scholars this debate was over years ago.
I suggest this book if you want to learn more about the values of the Confederacy:
Now, I think a lot of the people that display the flag think it means something else. I also get annoyed at people who display Che Guevara's image on a T-shirt or poster. There was nothing to respect about him.
If a flag is just a piece of cloth & has no meaning, then why do a certain group of people get overly incensed if there is a mexican flag hanging from someone's house?
I think those who fly the confederate flag know exactly what they're doing it & their mindset behind it. They then turn around in all fake innocence & claim "What? Why are you so offended? It doesn't mean anything, it's just a piece of cloth!" knowing full well what that flag means to the majority of people in this country. Talk about being obtuse.
When people see the swastika-it creates an emotional response. Even though the symbol's original meaning was that of good luck, the Nazis destroyed that meaning because now it comes to mean the symbol of genocide and a dark period of history. It is something that Germans are trying to make amends for what their nation did.
The same can be said for the Confederate flag. The flag is now seen as a symbol of a dark time in history when blacks were enslaved. The way I see it, the people of the south are not doing what the Germans are trying to do. They are are proud of that part of their history which is why the Confederate flag is still waved today. Personally, I don't understand why they would be proud of that part of their history.
Good Grief. The United States of the Offended I am living in. I am a northern new england yankee. And I have lived in the south where southerners hated me. And I couldn't care less whether anyone flew a rebel/confederate stars and bars. As far as I am concerned it is all behind us. And yes, I have been educated, not indoctrinated, in college. Yes I studied the civil war. And have been in the military. And no, I am not taking sides. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not "either you are for or against us". And as someone says "White people don't get it". That statement reeks of prejudice itself. So does that somehow make us inferior? I certainly don't feel inferior. Some people always have to have something to rant about. Next time you see someone flying the stars and bars ask them why. Maybe they will tell you.
It was a symbol used to glorify the memory of the confederacy and the confederacy was about slavery. Period. Alexander Stephens himself - the vice president of the confederacy said that it was founded on "the great truth that the negro is inferior to the white man." Among historical scholars this debate was over years ago.
I don't know what historical scholars you are referring to. The major reason for the North to fight in the Civil War was much deeper than slave ownership; primarily : The South wanted to secede from the country. The South may have seen it as something different but Lincoln's most difficult decision (according to the many historical bio's) was Civil War vsThe Confederate States of America. As far as Mr. Stephens views I am sure they were shared by many at the time; but the decision to go to war; for the ruling majority was the division of the Country. As to the conferderate flag; I think there are pockets of people who really believe the South will rise again.
The confederate flag is an historical piece and doesn't represent anything more than a few states who got sick of the federal government involved in more than they should be.
States rights were what they defended...maybe we need to do that today.
Interesting that those same states were perfectly happy to use the power of the Fed Govt to run roughshod over the rights of non-slave holding states when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act.
They weren't sick of the Fed Govt. They saw the writing on the wall that they were losing their hold on the Fed Govt, and it would only be a matter of time before slavery was outlawed. Lincoln only wanted to stop the expansion of slavery.
Both James Madison and George Washington would have considered Lincoln a hero had they lived.
Here is what Madison had to say about Nullification and Secession:
And by the way, The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank. Just saying that before you trash this source.
Calhoun’s concept of a single state veto provoked a storm of controversy, in part because it claimed the authority of Madison and Jefferson. For example, a southern Senator described nullification by a single state veto as settled “Republican doctrine.” He traced its origins to Madison’s “celebrated ‘Virginia Resolutions.’” This heritage alone ensured that the doctrine, like Madison’s Report of 1800, would “last as long as the Constitution itself.”[47]
Learning of such arguments, Madison felt compelled to enter the fray. Madison insisted that neither he nor Jefferson was responsible for nullification, a doctrine with a “fatal tendency.” Rather than protecting the diverse interests of the Union, Madison believed, nullification put “powder under the Constitution and Union, and a match in the hand” of any faction, leaving it to their whim whether “to blow them up.” Secession was a “twin” to the “heresy” of nullification, warned Madison. Both doctrines sprang “from the same poisonous root.” The growth from this root would bring “disastrous consequences.” By 1832, he noted how inexpressibly “painful” it was that Calhoun’s doctrine might cause the Constitution to be “broken up and scattered to the winds.”[48]
Madison distinguished carefully between interposition—groups of citizens or state legislatures identifying unconstitutional laws—and any effort by individual states to nullify such laws. A single state lacked constitutional authority to nullify national laws or secede from the Union, Madison maintained. He considered the people of the states the ultimate judge of the constitutionality of acts of the government. A majority of the collective sovereign held the ultimate constitutional authority to render national laws void or give constitutional text final meaning.
To me the Confederate Flag is not a symbol of racism but a fight for independence that was thwarted...but good results (end of slavery) came out of an unjust War as sometimes happens. There are racists that fly the Flag as a racist symbol but it's not that to me.
To me the Confederate Flag is not a symbol of racism but a fight for independence that was thwarted...but good results (end of slavery) came out of an unjust War as sometimes happens. There are racists that fly the Flag as a racist symbol but it's not that to me.
Fighting a war for independence to keep slavery alive and kicking is more like it. I hope you inferred the "unjust" part was on those fighting for the independence and the right to keep slavery. And the independence part was more a rebellion than anything since there never was a right to secession via legally in the Constitution. The only way out was thru revolution.
I see them and I don't automatically think racist or skinhead or whatever, but I don't think the person really cares if they are making another group uncomfortable but more likely daring anyone to say anything to them or they can launch into some anti PC tirade about how their rights are being abused and that there is no White History Month. And to me that's just stupid.
It is internet style flame bait for the real world and serves no real purpose for 99% of the people they display it IMO. The other 1% are the Duke Boys, and I'm okay with the one on top of the General Lee - but only that one.
As a White person from the northern US I never made the connection to the Confederate flag with slavery until after I was in college and better informed. I did, however, make the connection to it with the hundreds of Minnesotans who were killed in the Civil War.
And how much of your reasoning in "making that connection" was inspired by people who had determined that it was Politically Correct (or whatever properly-sanitized term was used at the time) to do so???
When I was an elementary student,we were taught that slavery was the central issue that divided the United States, but not the only one; as we advanced through the secondary grades, other issues and political undercurrents were studied and evaluated. Admittedly, we were not taught, for example, that the cotton-based economy depended upon further westward expansion, which would have doomed slavery in any event A seventh-grader simply would not have had the economic exposure to fully grasp this.
But beginning about 25 years ago, (right about the time of Ken Burns' famous documentary) there seemed to be a push to lay all the fault for the Civil War at the door of the plantation economy, and the violation of human rights that made it possible. Never mind that slavery still existed in various other parts of the world, or that the effort to outlaw it was underway in all the advancing societies, as or that the industrial economy was still so little developed that what went on in agrarian regions was little better than peonage.
It had to be simplifies into absolute good vs. absolute evil. and distorted into an American issue alone: and very little attention was given to the zealotry of the abolitionists who stoked the flames; just as some of the most simplistic of the "progressives" are sowing the seeds of discord today.
There is a rush to judgement underway in contemporary America, and the people at the center of the lynch mob are seeking the symbols which can be most easily demonized in the eyes of the young, the impressionable, and the recently-arrived.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 08-05-2014 at 05:45 PM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I think there are pockets of people who really believe the South will rise again.