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The Nazi flag is inarguably racist propaganda. The Confederate flag, however, has for decades been a symbol of southern pride for many people. I read somewhere

The Nazi flag is inarguably racist propaganda. The Confederate flag, however, has for decades been a symbol of southern pride for many people. I read somewhere recently that over 40% see it as a symbol of heritage more than racism.

user982 6y ago
Pride in what? Heritage of what? The South has hundreds of years of history. Why are the 4 years of the Confederacy so celebrated?
- caymanjim 6y ago
  It's also not the flag of the Confederacy (as in the nation). No one uses that. What everyone uses is the Confederate Battle Flag, which is specifically the flag of the army of secessionists. There's no rational argument that it represents Southern culture.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Interesting, I didn't know that there were multiple flags for the CSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State.... It seems that the second and third did incorporate the battle flag as part of the design. Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban.
    - user982 6y ago
      > Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban. That's exactly what Georgia did. In 1956 they added the Confederate Battle Flag to their state flag in support of white supremacy and segregation, and in 2003 switched it for the Confederate Stars and Bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
    - spaced-out 6y ago
      Here's a fun quote from the article about the design of the second flag >On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as "The White Man's Flag."[6] In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
- Spivak 6y ago
  I see lots of people on the internet making the 4 year argument, and I have to admit it's a snappy quip, but I don't think the point is made entirely in good faith. I really do see it being flown as a symbol of rural and/or southern pride that is informed by, but largely disconnected from, the civil war other than as a historical symbol that broadly represents an opposition between rural folk and urbanites. I mean it's definitely being flown by racists and edgy teenagers and I think there's a strong case to be made that a different design is warranted since the heritage people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle. But I think it's important to meet the heritage people where they are and start from there.
  - user982 6y ago
    The Nazi flag was in much longer actual use than the Confederate flags. If anything, the Nazi flag has a more legitimate "heritage" defense than the Confederate one.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      But are you counting the years the Confederate flag has spent after being adopted? I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride. What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and being drowned out by racists. And the public discussion on the matter is an absolute shitshow because those people see the desire to ban the Confederate flag as a racist symbol as an attack on Southern culture/pride. Worse! We have people in this fight who actually are doing that because there is a very real anti-rural anti-Southern sentiment that exists in the US. And on the other side we have racists who are hiding behind Southern pride in an attempt to keep their symbol. Ugh. So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
      - user982 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
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rsynnott 6y ago
I'm sure if you did a poll in Germany you'd find a non-zero percentage of people who'd answer something similar RE the Nazi flag, with the right wording. Nothing like 40%; that particular variety of lost-cause-ism isn't as common as the confederate stuff in the US, but, there are certainly people who would claim that it was something more benign than it is generally perceived. That's why it's illegal in Germany in the first place; if there was universal acceptance that it was an obscenity there wouldn't be much purpose in banning it. Another issue, of course, is that teaching about the US civil war, and general cultural treatment of it, has been, and in some cases still is, far more dishonest than teaching about World War 2 in Germany. Note that in this thread there are people questioning whether it was about slavery. The initiators on the confederate side would not have questioned that, they could hardly have been more clear that it was. There's a huge amount of mainstream cultural baggage glorifying the confederacy and important confederate figures in a way that there isn't about the Nazis (with the possible exception of some rather creepy Rommel apologia that shows up sometime).
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  My point is that what is considered "racist propaganda" is extremely context sensitive. Germany banned the Nazi flag to avoid the exact ambiguity that has occurred in our country, but we need to accept that this ambiguity has occurred here in the States. Most people who use the flag don't use it to be racist. That changes the situation when compared to Germany.
oldmanhorton 6y ago
And I'm sure some Germans felt (and perhaps even still feel) that the nazi flag is a symbol of German pride? The pride that they feel for that part of their heritage is still unmistakably antisemitic and hate-filled. I would argue that the number of Germans who feel that way is so much less than the number of southerners who feel that way only because of just how strong and universally nazism was rolled back. In the south after the Civil War, things stayed far more similar to how they had been pre- and mid-war
filleduchaos 6y ago
Reminder that the Confederate battle flag was in use for less than five years and solely as an icon of a conflict that was very much about the (rather racist) keeping of chattel slaves. Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Have you never been to a southern state? It's been flown ever since the war and has been detached from the war and attached to southern identity. It's part of the culture here.
  - abrowne 6y ago
    And now there's increased interest in wanting to change that culture.
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      I understand the desire, but know that there are real-world reprocussions to such hamfisted attempts to leverage power, particularly before an election. Cultural issues and conflicts were a big part of why the 2016 presidential elections turned out the way they did.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    That begs the question. Why did southerners pick the battle flag of the war they fought to preserve slavery as the symbol for "southern identity?"
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      You could spend some time researching what those people actually think and why they think it. Don't let others speak for them, find out for yourself.
angry_octet 6y ago
This is the Lost Cause revisionist history fallacy at work. It is an early analogue of the recent technique used by Pepes, the white power sign, Neo-Nazi '88' and '14' iconography, etc: giving an in-group meaning to an innocent number, phrase or image to give a superficial plausible deniability. The Confederate flag is even more powerful because people have been convinced it has something to do with Southern (white) culture and Yankee oppression. Maybe they need a new symbol, that isn't intimitely tied to slavery. https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-words https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-wor...
- angry_octet 6y ago
  It's interesting to watch the votes oscillate. For a little while it plunged into grey obscurity as rascists and Confederate battle flag lovers each savaged with the little down triangle, but alas, not leaving a comment to explain which they were. Then back up, up, to dizzying heights of black text again, and now back down, down to the mediocre 1 point which doesn't do justice to its story.
gamblor956 6y ago
Southern pride is another way of saying "treason against the U.S." that resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands so that a few people could treat other people as property. The winner gets to make the rules. The South has had 150+ years to celebrate their treason. It's more than enough time that the winners put that symbol to rest.
- anjc 6y ago
  How can seceded states commit treason against a union that they aren't part of? > resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands In other words, a war
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    They seceded from the union, which is an act of treason.
jacobolus 6y ago
“Heritage” in this context is a white supremacist codeword for “the southern states should never have been forced to give up on slavery”. Statues of confederate leaders, incorporation of confederate flags into later state flags, etc. were (and still are) part of a large-scale campaign to promote and defend segregation and racial inequality and injustice, explicitly intended to intimidate and disempower southern blacks. You can easily find (racist white) people displaying the confederate flag in northern states, but you will be hard pressed to find any black people in the south who feel regional pride toward confederate symbols.
triceratops 6y ago
Why not adopt a new symbol of Southern pride? Something with pickup trucks and horses, steers and cowboy hats, peaches and iced tea, guns and saxophones. You know, all the beloved and positive aspects of Southern culture and heritage. It seems very un-American to me to use the flag of a treasonous rebel army that attacked their fellow countrymen.
- losvedir 6y ago
  Ten bucks says whatever new symbol gets used will be (considered?) a de facto racist symbol within a couple years.
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    I'm just waiting for everyone to realize that the immensely popular Texas "lone star flag" was also associated with the CSA.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    Why? Will it be used in a racist context? I can't imagine the KKK flying a cornbread and grits flag at their next rally, can you?
egypturnash 6y ago
Hello. I am a white lady born and raised in the South. Flying the Confederate flag is a sign to anyone else from the South that you are probably a racist. I would bet money that there is a strong correlation between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage” and “people who display the CSA flag”, because very few people are willing to come out and say “fuck yeah I am totally a racist and proud of it!”. As a bonus, I would also bet that the overlap between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant.
- tasogare 6y ago
  > “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant. This isn’t surprising. An heritage is well, an heritage, which is coming from ancestors. Only very few people get to aquire culture heritage accross race boundaries (for example by adoption). It’s like saying the overlap of "people who celebrate Chinese new year" and "people who are not asian" is virtually non-existent to shame them; this make no sense.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    The big difference here is that part of this "heritage" is a tradition of being a white supremacist. Like, okay, sure, I guess the pointy white hood your grandfather wore when he was a Grand Wizard of the KKK is part of your heritage, but if you take it out and wear it around town, people are gonna be all "hey look at that racist jerkass", you know? And if I hung up a CSA flag outside my house in a big Southern city, all my neighbors would say the same thing no matter how much I tried to convince them it's just me celebrating my heritage.
8note 6y ago
Are they flying it while they protest racism against black people or something? Fly it for defunding the police? It's got a lot of history being flown specifically to spite black people -- if you want to reclaim that as a non-racist symbol, you'll have to do a lot of work. Otherwise the obvious response is "heritage of what, racism? Why are you proud that your parents tried to keep black people from voting?"
IncRnd 6y ago
While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol. Billions of people understand its religious significance.
- krapp 6y ago
  The Swastika is a racist symbol across an entire hemisphere of this planet. The Nazi flag, itself, isn't racist minus the Swastika - in fact, when people want to graphically portray a Nazi analogue without offending people, they usually just use the flag with the Swastika swapped out for something else. The fact that it isn't racist in, say, China doesn't mean it also isn't racist when spray painted on a synagogue.
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    That's an intentional misrepresentation of what I wrote.
    - krapp 6y ago
      I don't believe it is. This is what you wrote, verbatim: > While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol. You deliberately distinguished between the Nazi flag and the Swastika, an element incorporated into the Nazi flag, and claimed that between the two, only the flag was racist. And I'm merely pointing out that in the Western world the only part of the Nazi flag even considered racist is the Swastika.
      - IncRnd 6y ago
        My original comment was in error. I had meant to write, "While the Nazi flag may believed to be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol." The swastika symbol may exist in Chinese, but the word swastika is from another large country of people. Symbols are not racist, which is what should obviously be taken away from this.

user982 6y ago

Pride in what? Heritage of what? The South has hundreds of years of history. Why are the 4 years of the Confederacy so celebrated?

caymanjim 6y ago
It's also not the flag of the Confederacy (as in the nation). No one uses that. What everyone uses is the Confederate Battle Flag, which is specifically the flag of the army of secessionists. There's no rational argument that it represents Southern culture.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that there were multiple flags for the CSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State.... It seems that the second and third did incorporate the battle flag as part of the design. Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban.
  - user982 6y ago
    > Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban. That's exactly what Georgia did. In 1956 they added the Confederate Battle Flag to their state flag in support of white supremacy and segregation, and in 2003 switched it for the Confederate Stars and Bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
  - spaced-out 6y ago
    Here's a fun quote from the article about the design of the second flag >On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as "The White Man's Flag."[6] In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
Spivak 6y ago
I see lots of people on the internet making the 4 year argument, and I have to admit it's a snappy quip, but I don't think the point is made entirely in good faith. I really do see it being flown as a symbol of rural and/or southern pride that is informed by, but largely disconnected from, the civil war other than as a historical symbol that broadly represents an opposition between rural folk and urbanites. I mean it's definitely being flown by racists and edgy teenagers and I think there's a strong case to be made that a different design is warranted since the heritage people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle. But I think it's important to meet the heritage people where they are and start from there.
- user982 6y ago
  The Nazi flag was in much longer actual use than the Confederate flags. If anything, the Nazi flag has a more legitimate "heritage" defense than the Confederate one.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    But are you counting the years the Confederate flag has spent after being adopted? I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride. What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and being drowned out by racists. And the public discussion on the matter is an absolute shitshow because those people see the desire to ban the Confederate flag as a racist symbol as an attack on Southern culture/pride. Worse! We have people in this fight who actually are doing that because there is a very real anti-rural anti-Southern sentiment that exists in the US. And on the other side we have racists who are hiding behind Southern pride in an attempt to keep their symbol. Ugh. So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
    - user982 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rsynnott 6y ago

I'm sure if you did a poll in Germany you'd find a non-zero percentage of people who'd answer something similar RE the Nazi flag, with the right wording. Nothing like 40%; that particular variety of lost-cause-ism isn't as common as the confederate stuff in the US, but, there are certainly people who would claim that it was something more benign than it is generally perceived. That's why it's illegal in Germany in the first place; if there was universal acceptance that it was an obscenity there wouldn't be much purpose in banning it. Another issue, of course, is that teaching about the US civil war, and general cultural treatment of it, has been, and in some cases still is, far more dishonest than teaching about World War 2 in Germany. Note that in this thread there are people questioning whether it was about slavery. The initiators on the confederate side would not have questioned that, they could hardly have been more clear that it was. There's a huge amount of mainstream cultural baggage glorifying the confederacy and important confederate figures in a way that there isn't about the Nazis (with the possible exception of some rather creepy Rommel apologia that shows up sometime).

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
My point is that what is considered "racist propaganda" is extremely context sensitive. Germany banned the Nazi flag to avoid the exact ambiguity that has occurred in our country, but we need to accept that this ambiguity has occurred here in the States. Most people who use the flag don't use it to be racist. That changes the situation when compared to Germany.

oldmanhorton 6y ago

And I'm sure some Germans felt (and perhaps even still feel) that the nazi flag is a symbol of German pride? The pride that they feel for that part of their heritage is still unmistakably antisemitic and hate-filled. I would argue that the number of Germans who feel that way is so much less than the number of southerners who feel that way only because of just how strong and universally nazism was rolled back. In the south after the Civil War, things stayed far more similar to how they had been pre- and mid-war

filleduchaos 6y ago

Reminder that the Confederate battle flag was in use for less than five years and solely as an icon of a conflict that was very much about the (rather racist) keeping of chattel slaves. Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Have you never been to a southern state? It's been flown ever since the war and has been detached from the war and attached to southern identity. It's part of the culture here.
- abrowne 6y ago
  And now there's increased interest in wanting to change that culture.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    I understand the desire, but know that there are real-world reprocussions to such hamfisted attempts to leverage power, particularly before an election. Cultural issues and conflicts were a big part of why the 2016 presidential elections turned out the way they did.
- rayiner 6y ago
  That begs the question. Why did southerners pick the battle flag of the war they fought to preserve slavery as the symbol for "southern identity?"
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    You could spend some time researching what those people actually think and why they think it. Don't let others speak for them, find out for yourself.

angry_octet 6y ago

This is the Lost Cause revisionist history fallacy at work. It is an early analogue of the recent technique used by Pepes, the white power sign, Neo-Nazi '88' and '14' iconography, etc: giving an in-group meaning to an innocent number, phrase or image to give a superficial plausible deniability. The Confederate flag is even more powerful because people have been convinced it has something to do with Southern (white) culture and Yankee oppression. Maybe they need a new symbol, that isn't intimitely tied to slavery. https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-words https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-wor...

angry_octet 6y ago
It's interesting to watch the votes oscillate. For a little while it plunged into grey obscurity as rascists and Confederate battle flag lovers each savaged with the little down triangle, but alas, not leaving a comment to explain which they were. Then back up, up, to dizzying heights of black text again, and now back down, down to the mediocre 1 point which doesn't do justice to its story.

gamblor956 6y ago

Southern pride is another way of saying "treason against the U.S." that resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands so that a few people could treat other people as property. The winner gets to make the rules. The South has had 150+ years to celebrate their treason. It's more than enough time that the winners put that symbol to rest.

anjc 6y ago
How can seceded states commit treason against a union that they aren't part of? > resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands In other words, a war
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  They seceded from the union, which is an act of treason.

jacobolus 6y ago

“Heritage” in this context is a white supremacist codeword for “the southern states should never have been forced to give up on slavery”. Statues of confederate leaders, incorporation of confederate flags into later state flags, etc. were (and still are) part of a large-scale campaign to promote and defend segregation and racial inequality and injustice, explicitly intended to intimidate and disempower southern blacks. You can easily find (racist white) people displaying the confederate flag in northern states, but you will be hard pressed to find any black people in the south who feel regional pride toward confederate symbols.

triceratops 6y ago

Why not adopt a new symbol of Southern pride? Something with pickup trucks and horses, steers and cowboy hats, peaches and iced tea, guns and saxophones. You know, all the beloved and positive aspects of Southern culture and heritage. It seems very un-American to me to use the flag of a treasonous rebel army that attacked their fellow countrymen.

losvedir 6y ago
Ten bucks says whatever new symbol gets used will be (considered?) a de facto racist symbol within a couple years.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  I'm just waiting for everyone to realize that the immensely popular Texas "lone star flag" was also associated with the CSA.
- triceratops 6y ago
  Why? Will it be used in a racist context? I can't imagine the KKK flying a cornbread and grits flag at their next rally, can you?

egypturnash 6y ago

Hello. I am a white lady born and raised in the South. Flying the Confederate flag is a sign to anyone else from the South that you are probably a racist. I would bet money that there is a strong correlation between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage” and “people who display the CSA flag”, because very few people are willing to come out and say “fuck yeah I am totally a racist and proud of it!”. As a bonus, I would also bet that the overlap between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant.

tasogare 6y ago
> “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant. This isn’t surprising. An heritage is well, an heritage, which is coming from ancestors. Only very few people get to aquire culture heritage accross race boundaries (for example by adoption). It’s like saying the overlap of "people who celebrate Chinese new year" and "people who are not asian" is virtually non-existent to shame them; this make no sense.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  The big difference here is that part of this "heritage" is a tradition of being a white supremacist. Like, okay, sure, I guess the pointy white hood your grandfather wore when he was a Grand Wizard of the KKK is part of your heritage, but if you take it out and wear it around town, people are gonna be all "hey look at that racist jerkass", you know? And if I hung up a CSA flag outside my house in a big Southern city, all my neighbors would say the same thing no matter how much I tried to convince them it's just me celebrating my heritage.

8note 6y ago

Are they flying it while they protest racism against black people or something? Fly it for defunding the police? It's got a lot of history being flown specifically to spite black people -- if you want to reclaim that as a non-racist symbol, you'll have to do a lot of work. Otherwise the obvious response is "heritage of what, racism? Why are you proud that your parents tried to keep black people from voting?"

IncRnd 6y ago

While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol. Billions of people understand its religious significance.

krapp 6y ago
The Swastika is a racist symbol across an entire hemisphere of this planet. The Nazi flag, itself, isn't racist minus the Swastika - in fact, when people want to graphically portray a Nazi analogue without offending people, they usually just use the flag with the Swastika swapped out for something else. The fact that it isn't racist in, say, China doesn't mean it also isn't racist when spray painted on a synagogue.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  That's an intentional misrepresentation of what I wrote.
  - krapp 6y ago
    I don't believe it is. This is what you wrote, verbatim: > While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol. You deliberately distinguished between the Nazi flag and the Swastika, an element incorporated into the Nazi flag, and claimed that between the two, only the flag was racist. And I'm merely pointing out that in the Western world the only part of the Nazi flag even considered racist is the Swastika.
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      My original comment was in error. I had meant to write, "While the Nazi flag may believed to be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol." The swastika symbol may exist in Chinese, but the word swastika is from another large country of people. Symbols are not racist, which is what should obviously be taken away from this.