The Flag of the Confederacy

I’ve heard of people speak of the flag as their “heritage,” because they had a confederate General as an ancestor. It’s not so simple.

The thing about the Confederate flag is that has a much more checkered history than simply being the flag of an insurrection or separatist rebellion. The Confederate States of America existed from 1860 to 1865. The stars and bars flew over most of its member states for five years, and it was the battle flag of the Confederate army during those same years.

However, that same flag became a symbol of something else, as soon as the South was defeated. It wasn’t just the symbol of a defeated insurrection; it was the symbol of a stubborn resistance that began as soon as so-called Reconstruction, and has continued to this very day.

It was and is a symbol of White Supremacy. As such, it was a symbol to rally troops like the Ku Klux Klan, but it was not an innocent symbol, only used to make people feel good about their heritage.

The Confederate battle flag was also a symbol of White Terror, waged against black people, the former slaves. The flag-wavers hoped their flag, and what it symbolized, would intimidate blacks, in the South, and latterly, elsewhere, as well. When a group of white-robed, white-hooded white people gathered under the Confederate standard, it was intended to terrorize blacks, so that they wouldn’t ever try to do what Union sympathizers had attempted to encourage in the beginning of Reconstruction: to become fully functional citizens of a new South, and latterly of the rest of the country.

Put simply: the Confederate flag as symbol, is a symbol of White Terror.

Think about the history. When the South was defeated and the 14th and 15th Amendments were ratified, ensuring that slavery would never again be legal in the United States, the Confederate flag gained a new meaning.

The flag became symbol of segregation, Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation laws, the poll taxes, and all the rest, a panoply of laws and practices that insured that black people would always be ignorant, oppressed, powerless, and helpless against the power of the White-dominated states.

After the enactment of Civil Rights laws and the dismantling of legal segregation, the Federal Government’s incursion into enforcement of equal treatment and the abolition of legal difference based upon race, the Confederate flag became, again, a symbol of resistance—against an overweening Government—but along the way, it had also become, as Dylann Roof demonstrated, a symbol of racial hatred.

An example comes from, of all places, Hyde Park, NY.

West of the village of Hyde Park proper, home to FDR’s homestead, there is a campground owned and maintained by Seventh Day Adventists. Every summer, they hold large meetings there; people stay in the dorms, and come from all over the region and beyond. They are black Seventh Day Adventists. Apparently, the church is (or was) still racially divided.

One summer, perhaps three or four years ago, I noticed the house next to the campground: a small house, but with a large upstairs deck: a very large Confederate flag was draped across the upstairs space—for the whole time the campground hosted guests that summer. It must have been more important to flaunt the flag than to use the deck, since it shrouded the porch behind it. That Fall, the flag disappeared. What else could it mean than that the house’s inhabitants hated and despised the campers next door?

I have no idea whether the flag wavers in Hyde Park originally came from the South, or not. Regardless, the Confederate flag was a convenient symbol of their anger and resistance to the gathering of black people who had descended on the grounds of the land right next door.

For Dylann Roof it was a symbol of what he hoped would be the beginning of a race war, in which black people would be re-subjugated, perhaps enslaved, or even eliminated.

The Confederate flag should be consigned to museums, but it should be labeled not only as the battle flag of the Confederacy, but as a racist symbol of the failed strain of White Supremacy that still animates many warped and twisted Americans.

I hope that with the flag’s interment in museums, that the sickness of racial thinking will shrivel and die. Races never really did exist, except in peoples’ minds: they are social constructions, as the absurd “one-drop rule” demonstrates. Even Hitler’s “Aryans” weren’t “racially pure.” Germans evolved as a product of thousands of years of intermixture on the steppes of Eurasia, after all.

Hitler wasn’t even blond.

Government For the Few

There was a brief period in European and American politics, when the governors believed, at least, that they were working for the good of all. In the US, this spanned from the Progressive era to the Great Society.

The end, and the ultimate failure, of the Great Society was the result of imperial hubris: the quagmire of Vietnam. It made the trend toward social democracy unaffordable, while enriching and empowering a few. Many of the new rich financed the counterrevolution against "welfare as we know it," and highly progressive income taxes, and, well, the whole Progressive to Liberal to social democratic tendencies in governance, i.e. government that aids the many who need help, not the few who are privileged enough already.

There were similar movements of reform and social democracy in most of Europe in this same period: some earlier, some later.

But that era is past; it was a short interlude between the thousands of years when governments naturally existed to benefit the very few at the expense, or misery, of the many. The Roman Empire was no egalitarian paradise, certainly. From start to finish, it depended on the labor of slaves, who probably made up well over half the population. Slaves had to be continually replaced. Bad ones sent to galleys and mines only lasted a few years. Even good slaves would have to be replaced after 40 years of service.

Even the vaunted Athenian Democracy, of course, depended on slaves.

Where do slaves come from? Conquest. This was even true of African slavery in the Americas. Europeans conquered Africa first by taking advantage of the absence of effective states (ones that controlled their territories), and the multiplicity of potential allies, as well as enemies. Europeans did, ultimately take over, i.e. conquer most of Africa, no longer to sell slaves, but because they had penetrated the continent in order to buy them, in the first place.

When Rome began to lose territory, instead of conquering new lands, the supply of slaves became more erratic. There were floods of them when an invading barbarian army was defeated, but many more were carried off by successful barbarian raids and wars, and then sold back to the slave-hungry Romans. Attila did that after all his successful campaigns of pillage, rape and slaughter. Slaves were the most valuable spoil of all.

What does this have to do with today? Today's Roman Senators are the billionaires who finance and inspire all the attempts to roll back or abolish all the reforms and programs benefiting the many. Even though they, the one-percent, the .001 percent, have prospered beyond even the imaginings of Hollywood sycophants, they want more, much more. Where can the predators turn now, since government has already given them so many favorable contracts, and breaks in taxes like the hedge funders' "carried interest" clause?

Let's raid Social Security and Medicare! they chorus.

They are more like Attila than they know!

Comments? Click on 'continue;' scroll down.