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Any time I hear another impassioned plea about some southerner's pride in displaying the Confederate flag as a mark of their "cultural heritage", I roll my eyes

Any time I hear another impassioned plea about some southerner's pride in displaying the Confederate flag as a mark of their "cultural heritage", I roll my eyes. Sure, I'll recognize your freedom of speech as to the display, but you'll never convince me that the display is anything but bald racism. The closest thing I've ever heard to a rationale from a defender is basically "because reasons". Even "states' rights" requires a clear motivation when you're talking about one small part of a federation, and still boils down to racism if you take it to its logical conclusion. As a rebuttal, you need only look at quotes from prominent Confederates to know the truth; that you're going out of your way to defend the acts of some very evil men. Reading these stories made my stomach churn. I'm done with [your] moral equivalencies.

pluma 7y ago
The questionability of national pride aside, if Confederate flag brandishing Southerners truly only cared about national pride they'd do what Germans do: not fly the damn flag. It's okay to have a problematic history. You don't have to be proud of everything your ancestors or their peers did. The Confederacy was a lose coalition of states that were defending their right to own slaves. If you were born in the South that doesn't mean you have to make up excuses for this or be sorry about it -- those things happened before you were born. But if you celebrate it, you celebrate slavery. There are a lot of nuances you could argue about (e.g. how much slave owners should have been subsidised to cushion the economic impact of abolishment or whether the US should have allowed states to secede peacefully) but abolishment was the right thing to do and the states that took up arms to stop it were on the wrong side of history. You don't see Germans find it socially acceptable to celebrate the accomplishments of 1930s Germany much. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to celebrate the Confederacy either. Especially if they have ancestors who fought for Germany in WW2. Oh and the most absurd part of that excuse is that the flag in question was only in use for a very short time and specifically in the context of the war. This is like saying the flag of the Nazi Germany Kriegsmarine isn't about anything the Nazis did.

pluma 7y ago

The questionability of national pride aside, if Confederate flag brandishing Southerners truly only cared about national pride they'd do what Germans do: not fly the damn flag. It's okay to have a problematic history. You don't have to be proud of everything your ancestors or their peers did. The Confederacy was a lose coalition of states that were defending their right to own slaves. If you were born in the South that doesn't mean you have to make up excuses for this or be sorry about it -- those things happened before you were born. But if you celebrate it, you celebrate slavery. There are a lot of nuances you could argue about (e.g. how much slave owners should have been subsidised to cushion the economic impact of abolishment or whether the US should have allowed states to secede peacefully) but abolishment was the right thing to do and the states that took up arms to stop it were on the wrong side of history. You don't see Germans find it socially acceptable to celebrate the accomplishments of 1930s Germany much. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to celebrate the Confederacy either. Especially if they have ancestors who fought for Germany in WW2. Oh and the most absurd part of that excuse is that the flag in question was only in use for a very short time and specifically in the context of the war. This is like saying the flag of the Nazi Germany Kriegsmarine isn't about anything the Nazis did.