Burn the Confederate Flag Day is a protest against the exploitation of racial and religious prejudice for political gain.
The Confederate flag is a long-time symbol of racial hatred, a flag of treason against the United States of America, and a symbol of both race and religion-based terrorism.
Is there anything better to burn to show your support for America?
Here's how you can join the movement.
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12 comments:
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I cannot support this anymore than I can support Michael Blumberg stating he defends right of the pastor in Florida who is planning to burn the Koran. And the reason being is that these "upcoming acts of jingoistic patriotism" feed the worst behaviors in other Americans.
These acts shall only encourage more of the same and worse. These are cowardly acts, not the actions of Americans.
I'm from Virginia, and I live a mile from Robert E. Lee's house.
Virginia is steeped in the Civil War like no other place in this country -- we drive roads that ran red with blood, and we hunt fields where musket balls are still found.
So please don't get confused: there is nothing neutral or positive about the rebel flag.
It was once a political symbol for insurrection and ripping this country in two under the banner of subjugating people based on the color of their skin.
The Confederate flag is the banner of slavery, Jim Crow, and Lychings.
It's the banner of anti-semitism, gay bashing, and the Klan.
It is akin to the Swastika, not the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or even a Zippy the Pinhead cartoon.
Absolutely burn the Confederate flag.
Standing silent while bullies terrorize is how we got Hitler, Lester Maddox, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party.
Burn the symbol of American disunity, burn the symbol of American treason, and burn the symbol of American racism.
There is nothing positive in the rebel flag. There was nothing positive in the Confederacy. I say this as a Virginian. Burn it and tell everyone you did.
P.
Amen on this, Patrick. Truth is truth, no matter how it's obfuscated for modern times.
Seahorse
The overwhelming majority of men who fought and died under that flag were Americans who owned no slaves and believed that they were participating in a second American Revolution. Moreover, there was legal slavery in the North and the South during the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation liberated slaves only in the south and only then in areas not under Union control. Slavery was not illegal until the 13th Amendment was passed.
A slave owning elite used that flag to rally thousands of poor men to die for a cause that could not have benefited them.
Today the Confederate flag has become all of the things that you have accused it of. It has been used as an implement of terror and thinking people of all stripes are right to leave it behind. While it has no legitimate place in modern American discourse, I disagree with it's being burned as a public statement against the South.
It is too easy for Americans to comfort themselves with the idea that race is the South's problem and only the South got it wrong. Surely a better way of promoting racial harmony could be found.
Nonsense, Sean.
The Civil War was NOT a "second American Revolution".
Complete poppycock.
The Civil War was about slavery and people as property, plain and simple.
There was no other issue -- not religious differences, not language differences, not unfair taxation.
The Civil War was all about slaves as property.
It was about maintaining slavery as an economic engine in the South.
The first states to secede were seven cotton states in the Deep South. Within a month four other slave-dependent states joined on, including Virginia, my own state.
The fact that most of the people that fought and died did not own slaves themselves hardly matters; the economies of the South were fighting to maintain slavery and EVERYONE KNEW IT AT THE TIME.
To make an analogy: most of the folks fighting in Iraq and Kuwait and stationed in Saudi Arabia today also do not own oil company stock, but they KNOW they are fighting for oil and an oil-dependent way of life.
The Civil War was similarly fought because the South wanted to maintain a slave-dependent way of life.
As for the Rebel Flag waived around today, it was created AFTER the Civil War, and it is not part anything but the Ku Klux Klan. It is a symbiol of racism, lychings, synagogue burning, and gay bashing.
I am a southerner. My wife is from Mississippi, and I am from Virginia (Northern Virginia, to be precise). I know the South. And I know what is good in it and what is true, and what is evil and what is fake.
The Confederate flag is both fake and evil.
Which is why burning it is the right idea. There is NOTHING right about it, and never has been.
P.
" If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
Abraham Lincoln
Source: August 22, 1862 - Letter to Horace Greeley
www.brotherswar.com/Civil_War_Quotes_4c.htm
Or
Confederate Flag defender, political activist, former President of the Asheville chapter of the NAACP and 52-year-old black man, H.K. Edgerton was recently accosted by two black men while standing by his confederate flag in front of Asheville High School. Though he was appalled by the alleged violent actions of 19-year-old high school drop-out Andre Dewayne and 32-year-old Kevin Miller, he concedes, "I know and understand their pain because they've been lied to for so long. A lot of people know nothing about that time in history."
http://www.ashevilletribune.com/archives/blackleader.htm
Or
"I am marching for freedom," Hervey said. "The battle flag stands for freedom and states' rights. The U.S. flag is the flag of slavery. It flew over 100 years of slavery, and Native Americans were annihilated under that flag."
Anthony Hervey
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/black_confederates.html
So its ok to burn one flag because they owned slaves but uphold the other even with a long history devout to genocide. Its all relative…
The civil war was not "all" about slavery. I used to thing you would never over step yourself and would continue to deliver fact not opinion... let me down on this one.
Nonsense Chad. It's NOT "all relative."
What an idiotic thing to say.
The Confederates cause NEVER did a single good thing. Not one.
To compare the four- or five-year blood-soaked history of the Confederate War to Preserve Slavery to the over 225-year history of America is to show a shocking level of sillyness and a bankruptcy of argument. And to pull up the deluded rantings of some poor black lunatic who stands on the corner in Asheville blathering nonsense simply underscores the banktuptcy of your argument.
And YES the Civil War was all about slavery. For Lincoln it was about preserving the Union, but for the South -- the instigators -- it was all about slavery.
You clearly miss the meaning of Lincoln's quote and the context of it. The line you quote is from a a letter Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley while the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves sat on Lincoln's desk to be signed. The line you quote is from a section where he says he is engaged in this war because it is his OFFICIAL duty to preserve the nation (emphasis in original), but he closes noting that "I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free." See >> http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
You might also read Greeley's editorial (open letter) to Lincoln that sparked the exchange. It is all about slavery, and it calls on Lincoln to free the slaves as a way of weakening the Confederacy. See >> http://www.civilwarhome.com/lincolngreeley.htm
So, you see, the Civil War was 100 percent about slavery and everyone knew it at the time, as Greeley's editorial, and Lincoln's letter reponse to that editorial, make clear.
The bottom line is that that there was no "noble cause" to the confederacy other than the preservation of the southern economic system which depended on subjugation and slavery.
The south sought to preserve that system by resorting to treason.
As for the "confederate flag" it is a creation of the 20th Century and a symbol of the Ku Klux Klan. It was never the flag of the Confederacy, nor is it the "battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia" as is sometimes claimed. The TRUE Confederate Flag is not hard to find in this age of the Internet, but I doubt you have ever seen one, so steeped are you (and most Americans) in the fictional Civil War created by the apologists for segregation, discrimination, racism, hommophobia, and a newly-minted "Christian identity."
P.
I agree that the confederate flag was a largely post-war creation which has come to stand for the negative elements described above.
What I don't agree is that the civil was was all about slavery. That would be like saying that WW2 was all about the invasion of Poland or Pearl harbour.
The issue of slavery has become a prism through which the underlying problem is seen. The political and financial elite up until the 1860s had been the southern plantation owners and upper class farmers. Through the middle of the century they began to be eclipsed by the middle class industrialists of the northern stats. The shift of this balance of power from upper class southerners to middle class northerners led to a division in politics over few polarising issues - the most notable of which was slavery.
The southern states succeeded from the union in an attempt to regain their political power.
I really can't see the benefit of burning flags any more than burning books. Powerful symbols they may be, but setting out to generate hate is not beneficial for anyone. The right to free speech goes with a responsibility to use it.
Strike out at the things the confederate flag has come to stand for but burning flags is not going to result in anything positive.
S. Chapman
Sam,
Your analogy is flawed, your history weak, and your conclusion wrong.
The analogy is wrong because you have confused an act with the cause for the action.
In the case of WWW, the invasion of the Sudetenland (i.e. Poland) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor are akin to the attack on Fort Sumter.
No is saying Civil War was about the attack on Fort Sumter.
What I am saying (and historians agree on this) is that the Civil War was caused by white hegemony (i.e. the embrace of an economic system based on the slavery of black people) the same way that WWII was fueled by German and Japanese hegemony.
Your history is weak, in that you seem to think the issue of slavery cropped up in the 1860s because of changing industrialization.
Not true.
Read the U.S. Consitution.
Article One, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution (written in 1787), sets in motion the ban on the imporation of slaves which began in 1807.
From Day One, our Founding Fathers knew slavery had to end, and the wheels were set in motion to end it. This was not a fire lit in the 1860, but more than 90 years earlier long before there was industrialization anywhere.
The problem, of course, was that the South was addicted to unfree labor as its economic engine, much as America is now addicted to oil. Neither is sustainable, but damn if we are not willing to go to war and kill scores of thousands in order to keep the unsustainable going a few more years!
As for your conclusion, it is nonsense.
The Civil War was about slavery, and neither you nor anyone else cannot find anything else it was about.
It was not about religious freedom.
It was not about language differences.
It was not about an ancient simmering feud going back to the Bible.
It was not about water rights or burdensome taxation.
It was about slavery.
YES, for NORTHENERS, the cause was often preserving the nation.
Northern boys were often fighting and dying to preserve the Union, not necessarily in any belief that the freedom of black men was worth dying for.
Agreed to that.
But the North did not start the Civil War -- the South did (at Fort Sumter).
Southern secesssion, and the "southern cause" was about slavery and a belief in the racial superiority of white people; a belief that was necessary to justify the subjugation of people that was the core economic engine of the South.
A decent summary history of the the Civil War has been produced by the "Idiot's Guide folks and is available in most decent book stores and online. And yes, it's called "The Idiot's Guide to the Civil War." Some of it is available online (link follows), but you really want to read Chapter I.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vOfXZ1-U-XMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=idiot's+guide+to+the+civil+war&hl=en&ei=_COKTKaiPIL-8Aad8onLCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
P.
OK, I just had a bowl of cereal to clear my head (mmmmmm.. processed foods!) and I realize NO ONE will read a book. If you haven't yet, you won't in the future.
So how about the original 1861 Mississippi Declaration of Secession?
Yep, it's on the Internet, and this is how it starts:
"Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union
"In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."
Read the rest here >> http://www.civil-war.net/pages/mississippi_declaration.asp
Slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery.
Oh, and the economic system BASED ON SLAVERY.
Patrick
Thank you Mr. Burns, for barbing your words in such a way that they will have no effect on anyone who does not already agree with you. I have always though you had a way of clearly and cleanly getting your point across in an educational environment and you have truly shone another side.
I will say no I have not read all the quoted papers you posted above... some but not all… although I probably will once I’ve calm down. But you posed your argument in such a way that to agree with you at this point (which I don't) would be a dishonor to myself. It seems you are trying to halt the discussion by antagonizing me. I believe you may be the type that wants to prove others wrong more than you want to educate or even be right in the first place. Keep it up and up may loose readers… or at least the ones that interact you.
Lastly when will you have your stars and strips flag burning? Native American Genocide ok in your book I guess. We have done great things since then but its all stacked on Genocide. The southern cause (your example slavery) was good for the southerners and a lot of good did come from the south. Same as the expansion through force and the murder of children was good for the settlers from east all the way to the west. Heck even all the major religions and their day one procedure on non-believers… let’s all burn holy books. I still think it’s as you put it “idiotically” relative… But I’m sure you will insult me for voicing my opinion on that one too…
Chad, it may surprise you to find out I did not wake up this morning thinking: "How can I spend time educating a person who is so lazy that they did not even read the context of the stuff they are spewing about the Civil War."
Nor do I worry too much about someone who has trolled through Google to find some black lunatic in some obscure newspaper to rationale their own nonsense. You told me too much with that one, I am afraid.
I have given you links to source material: peer-reviewed books, original Civil War documents, and even the full text of what you did not bother to read (and still, do not understand).
But do I care whether you continue to embrace your deluded, willfully ignorant, and entirely contrived version of the Civil War?
Nope. Not a bit.
You have spent your entire life not reading about the Civil War. Why would you educate yourself now?
You will go out as you came in, I am sure.
P.
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