Over the years much has been written in defense of waving and displaying the “Confederate Flag.” We’ll forego the silly pedantic arguments about what the “Stars and Bars” really flew over, and all that nonsense – it’s diversionary argumentation without relevant meaning to the core questions we’ll address here.
Back in 2019, the city of Wake Forest, NC, had to cancel their annual Christmas parade because they intended to allow a float from a group called the Sons and Daughters Of The Confederacy. In response, several people indicated plans to protest and potentially even incite violence, so the city decided to cancel the parade.
This generated all the hand-wringing outrage you might expect, and of course brought to the forefront this old, tired argument about southern pride and so forth.
In the intervening period, we’ve had the violent coup attempt in Washington where multiple violent traitors paraded through the halls of Congress…carrying the Confederate flag. States have passed resolutions to stop flying it on government grounds, along with significant effort to remove statues of Confederate “heroes,” rename public facilities named in honor of traitors, and so forth.
Naturally all of this has the “Southern Pride” and “Heritage Not Hate” contingent – who, let’s be clear, have never been anything but bad-faith goobers making arguments the know have no merit – to raising all manner of hew and cry declaiming these actions
These arguments tend to break down into three key points: My family was involved and I have a right to be proud of my family; the soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their cause and deserve to be honored and respected for that; you’re trying to “erase history” by interfering with my celebration of the Confederacy.
So let’s go ahead and address these one by one, shall we?
Family Pride
I understand the idea of family pride and heritage. Often these things are very positive; I’m quite proud of my family history on my dad’s side working against the Nazi’s in the Netherlands during WWII, for example
In this case, the agrument simply doesn’t hold up, and I reject it.
The Confederacy was a collective act of treason against the United States, an attempt at creating a breakaway republic predicated on the idea that owning other people was a negotiable and acceptable proposition, and they prosecuted a war to defend that position with all the costs that entails.
Fortunately for conscience and decency in the world, they lost and the “state’s right” to decide that some human beings weren’t human was denied in this ostensibly free country once and for all, as it should have been from the outset.
However, as we’re seeing play out once again perhaps as a direct result of our reluctance to address this issue head-on in the first place, the simple fact of the matter is you don’t celebrate traitors. There are no flags of the third reich flying in German. The people of Romania don’t celebrate the heritage of Ceaușescu. Lithuania does not celebrate the “heritage” of the Polish government who tried to overthrow them. Germans do not honor the “heritage” of the Beer Hall Putsch. The city of Milwaukee doesn’t have a “Jeffrey Dahmer Culinary Appreciation Day.” The state of Illinois has not named its high school mentoring program for boys after John Wayne Gacy.
In my family there is a tragic incident in which a woman and her boyfriend murdered their four year old daughter in the early 1980s. If I were to apply the “family pride” argument, rather than taking punitive measures against her because she did a horrible, unforgivable thing that cause an innocent life to be lost…I would say let’s have a Christmas parade float for all the infanticide perpetrators! I mean, I know it’s not really cool and all, of course it used to happen more often but we’re a better people now, but she’s family so I have an emotional attachment and my ego’s involved. Not only that, although it’s less common than it used to be people say things like “If those kids don’t stop raising cain I’ll kill ’em” all the time, so it’s pretty clear some people – quite a few of them – are perfectly okay with the idea of murdering children. I bet if you’ve got kids you’ve said it yourself! “If they don’t stop that racket I’ll kill ’em!”
So you’ll just be okay with that, right? Even though some of you may have lost children to violence yourselves and even the suggestion is so outrageous as to deserve nothing more than a punch in the mouth…I mean, let’s be civil. Don’t be rude. Don’t be impolite. Can’t we have some unity here? It’s the Christmas season, where’s your holiday spirit? Where’s that forgiveness and all-encompassing Christian love we like to talk about so much this time of year? Let the baby murderers in. Heck, Susan Smith gets out right before Thanksgiving in a couple years, maybe we can get her to be Marshall!
Right. That’s how every single person who defends confederate flag worship sounds to anyone who was not born and raised in the south. The only people I’ve ever met outside the “Old South” who parrot the point of view on the confederacy I hear as the mainstream there (at least outside the major cities) are open white supremacists.
Nobody else, outside of that region of the country where it’s taught as gospel, buys in to the romanticism and whitewashing that’s been brought to the history of the Confederacy since its fall. And yes, I’ve seen a fair part of it and talked to a whole lot of people in my time, including time spent in community non-profit work right there in Wake Forest, North Carolina not that many moons ago.
So that addresses this whole “my daddy fought hard for the south and that was honorable” thing. The cause wasn’t honorable, nor was fighting for it. AT BEST many uneducated people motivated by a firm conviction that some human beings should rightly be considered property *believed* they were fighting for an honorable cause, and so one must allow a sort of grudging subjective “honor” to attach in the sense of following and fighting for your beliefs, but c’mon. The most honorable position in the Confederate military was serving as a patsy to oligarchs; at least in that role you could disingenuously plead ignorance, and that’s the best argument to be made. There’s no honor or glory in stupidity.
That brings us to…
The Valiant And Honorable Sacrifice
Pol Pot’s soldiers fought valiantly for a cause. So did Stalin’s, and Hitler’s, and Tojo’s, and Minh’s, and Mao’s, and Mussolini’s, and bin Laden’s. Back in 2001 19 men from the middle east made a “valiantly and honorably” sacriviced their lives for the cause they believed was just and righteous.
Sure, YOU might not think so, because they’re the Bad Guys, but THEY sure thought so. They died to prove it, didn’t they? Just like your great-grandpappy at Second Bull Run.
Fighting valiantly for a cause means less than nothing until you know what the cause is. If I die fighting valiantly for the cause of my asserted right to have sexual congress with ducks, I sure hope you don’t use that as a reason to give me a parade float and I would reasonably expect the ducks to be pretty angry if you did.
I want to stress again that none of this is personal. There’s not some individual or group whose feelings I’m trying to hurt here. We’ve evolved now, that’s all. We don’t sacrifice virgins anymore either, and we don’t really have parade floats honoring The Great Virgin Sacrificers (sic) of History either.
And history brings us to that last Great Pillar Of Confederate Apologia
Erasing History
This is frankly nothing but cheap gaslighting. Maniplative bad-faith argumentation constructed of the highest-quality bovine excreta.
Erasing history is talking about “states’ rights” and leaving out what specific right was at issue – the right to own human beings based on the color of their skin.
“Erasing history” is bandying about phrases like the “War of Northern Aggression,” which I was still hearing unironically when my daughter was attending a rural North Carolina high school, just about fifteen miles up the road from Wake Forest, in the oughts…and I was hearing it from her teachers.
Erasing history what happens when you STILL get dirty looks in Granville County, NC if you ask an old-timer (or most of their descendants) about why Bob Teel and his boys never did time for killing Dickie Marrow.
(Sidebar for those who don’t understand this reference: Dickie Marrow was a black veteran who was beaten and shot in Oxford, North Carolina (where my parents lived for the last twenty years or so of their lives) by two white bigots who claimed he said something untoward to a white woman. The white attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury at trial.
In 1970.
This event catalyzed the activist career of Benjamin Chavis, who eventually led a fifty-mile march from Oxford to Raleigh in protest. Chavis eventually became head of the NAACP, I believe.
To this day, you’ll get the kind of look that will encourage you to be out of town by sunset if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions about this event. The book about the event, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (disclosure: affiliate link) is routinely stolen or vandalized at the Oxford, NC Public Library to this day.)
THAT is “erasing history,” Orwell style.
In the end, I’ve had and seen this basic conversation a million times. I’m not particularly passionate about it because honestly I think it’s a settled issue and anyone who continues to act as though there’s really anything to debate about it is likely kind of dull-witted, usually motivated by emotion and ego, and often motivated by uglier things – no accusation against you personally intended, of course, dear reader.
I’ve no deep interest in hating on people or whatever, this isn’t some “you dumb hicks” rant. I lived in NC for 15 years, met and continue to maintain deep friendship with and great respect for many fine people there. Some of them even maintain this confederate pride attitude, and I don’t fault them for it. I get it, my dad was a marine, I understand that pride.
But it’s time to accept reality.
Continuing to celebrate the Confederacy as though it were a noble cause, as though the “sacrifices” made in the name of keeping human beings enslaved were “valiant,” or as though there’s any reasonable basis for exalting and celebrating those who served the failed and unethical cause of slavery with their lives as though they’re heroes for doing it, just doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny anymore.
Those people weren’t heroes for fighting on the side of the losing team.
I’m sorry, they’re not.
The cause of the confederacy was not noble, the fight was not valiant, and the fighters were not heroes. They were at best useful idiots, and at worst seething, treasonous, bigots willing to die for the “right” to treat other human beings as property.
I was born in 1970 and grew up in a world where the Confederate flag was still honored and adored as a symbol of rebellion, of raging against the machine, of refusing to back down in the face of authoritarianism. Over time we’ve come to understand these arguments simply have no merit. The idea that “fighting for my country is noble and good even if what my country is doing is horrific and unconscionable” was much more prevalent then and you can see how this perspective took hold in the south after their defeat, but now?
No.
That’s the 19th century, man. This is the 21st.
Blind fealty to a geography because your g’g’granpappy originally cleared the land, I can even understand.
But loyalty to or pride in the cause and prosecution of the Confederate States and their open act of treason against the United States, just because you had family fighting on that side, and many of those fighting for “the lost cause” lost their lives?
No.
We think more clearly than that now, at least those of us who can separate our ethics from our egos. If I suggested you should allow a Nazi parade float because there may be post-WWII German immigrants whose ancestors “fought valiantly for their cause,” you’d likely never stop smacking me in the mouth, and rightly so.
And that’s how pretty much everyone outside the south who isn’t part of some alt right movement feels about confederate parade floats.
It’s time to burn those stars and bars and throw ’em in the trash like we should’ve in 1865, and have done with this ridiculous argument.