Why are Amurkin Southerners so uppity about their flag?

Arguably.

It's a nicer flag than Old Glory. and the CSA had a better national anthem.

I believe the flag does not symbolize hate towards African-Americans so much as hate towards Yankees (northerners). It wasn't until after WWII that the American south really started to economically reintegrate with the US as a whole. Only then did migration in/out of the South really start to pick up and end a lot of the regional isolationism that Dixie represented. So, 50 years is a relatively short time to reintegrate and drop some of the symbols of a previously isolated culture.

Lincoln: "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery."

civil war = interesting early example of the apparent necessity for a more democratic polity actually to invade and suppress a less democratic system to ensure its own survival (cf current war-making trends within established democracies, and their more idealistic justifications) (note in particular that the result of victory was NOT the general export of superior democracy to the benighted region, at least not for a century or so)

southern culture does remain, but slavery has been eradicated, thus it must not have been such an integral part of the culture as you suggest. and as tracer said, it doesn't seem like oppression is so much "at the forefront of their collective consciousness" anymore.

the issue seems to center on what the flag really symbolizes to southerners. seems that those from the south have a strong regional/cultural connection, and many feel that the flag represents that pride, rather than racism per se.

if the kkk had established their own flag, and it was proudly flown today, that would be a different story. that would be a better comparison to nazism, as that organization was centered solely on racial oppression.

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/u/us%7Dkkk2.gif

That must make for interesting get-togethers.

but anyway, the south had long recognised that the status quo was inherently unstable, hence their (with hindsight disastrous) push to turn all new-formed states into slavery-legal states => so lincoln's realisation is already negatively implicit in the full-on position of the south (states rights as an abstract issue would never have led to war if there wasn't an actual specific issue they wished above all to resolve in their favour) ("they" = the confederacy conceived as a unity, which it actually never was, kinda by definition)

so much of his career — as a lawyer and as a politician — is abt allowing his opponents to sleepwalk into the quietly waiting crocodile jaws of well-prepared trap, and this trap was the absolute crowning pinnacle of his career obviously

mark is otm. 'states rights' was an issue that was hashed out in the first 30 yrs or so of the usa. it had a new currency midcentury because of slavery. so when southern politicians spoke of 'states rights' it was--and to a great extent remained into the 20th c.--a screen for racist policy.

incidentally who has seen gangs of new york? i ask because this film offers a somewhat radical revision of the conventional teaching (at least in grammar school) of the american civil war. it focuses on a group of people for whom the war was but a distant event, and one they were hardly eager to join. the narrative of the film has echoes in the 'south shall rise again' narrative--that is, the civil war was chiefly about the imposition of federal power over a fragmented and divisive society. the film itself benefits and suffers from a serious ambivalence abt this: on the one hand the putting down of the riot is meant to seem a merciless slaughter, on the other the passing of the gang warfare and forging of a new new york cannot but be a could thing. but this last conclusion has the strange effect of effectively rendering irrelevant the drama that we just spent 3 hrs watching. a similar trick is pulled at the end of visconti's the leopard but there the ultra-cynical ending is more ably foreshadowed earlier in the movie. it feels sadly inevitable, where the ending of gangs feels a little deus ex machina.

furthermore, precisely because the south lost the civil war and underwent radical reconstruction but WON back power in the great comprimise it's not like the north oppresses the south anyway -- the economic integration was well on its way by 1900 (it was only the social integration that took longer and Jim Crow was the main obstacle to that). Culturally, most of our past recent presidents and candidates have been southerners for example.

The south crying about it's "oppression" by the north reminds me of a pampered suburban white kid crying about "reverse racism" because he's too dumb to get into Yale and needs somebody to blame.

maybe this is in the film, it isn't out in the uk yet

red white and blue = a TERRIBLE COMBO generally

(naturally the french carry it off)

I'm not sure that's true- there's definitley a big element of snobbism amongst presumably "enlightened" liberals against Southern states; I don't know enough about the country to say whether this could qualify as outright opression, though. Then again, this sort of snobbism exists in every country amongst ppl from the traditionally richer regions against the traditionally poor ones.

The balance to that is that the snobbery is definitely given back in spades. The great thing about being from the midwest is that with the big western, northeastern and southern divides, people forget you exist and don't make up reasons to hate you beyond, "Eh, your state is BORING."

And J0hn do you not get the point that Sherman's "atrocities" were not against an "already defeated" people but a still extant system of slavery? Eliminating slavery as an economic system meant uprooting the economy & maybe if he had been even more thorough then the "ghosts of the confederacy" wouldn't have been able to come back and then no KKK no Jim Crow no years of segregation! and wouldn't that have been grand?

But this is ILX in a nutshell.

Sherman was not "uprooting the economy" nor was he attacking the institution of slavery per se. He was sacking towns, etc. Hoping to have a similar effect on the C.W. as the atomic bomb did on the Pacific war 80 yrs later. "Total war." One can sympathize with the overall cause of the union w/o condoning or apologizing for the actions of Sherman's troops.

By a number of accounts many blacks were just as terrified as whites (the vast majority of whom in a city like atlanta would not have owned slaves) by the union troops.

the decisive moment wasn't just the emancipation proc. but the shift in generals from mccleland to sherman/grant.

the reason lincoln's earlier generals were chickenshit is they thought once they demonstrated they were better the south would back down. but the south knew it was all or nothing -- the slave economy couldn't co-exist with the northern economy in the same state and the end of the slave economy meant the end of the southern elites. the south would have to be entirely occupied, torn down and rebuilt if the union was to be preserved (and if slavery was to be ended).

lincoln himself only recognized this 1/2way through.

the period of greatest southern "subjugation" to the north was RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION -- i.e. the most democratic and racially egalitarian period in u.s. history.

The difference between My Lai and Sherman is that Sherman was on the right side and by Vietnam the u.s. army was on the wrong one.

The parallel holds in a way though because in both cases this wasn't just a war over territory but over the way of life of an entire people.

(oh and sherman didn't carry out massacres [which my lai was] -- he mainly just looted/burned crops and tore up rail + also he needed to commandeer supplies as he went since he cut supply lines + also he couldn't afford to leave troops all along the way so they had to remove the possibility of southern resurgance coming behind them by removing the supplies and infrastructure which could have supported one)

so raise the scarlet standard high,
beneath its folds we'll live and die.
though cowards fl--

sorry, wrong flag.

(note: scarequotes around "liberating" aren't implying that slavery isn't evil, though certainly we're in agreement that the Civil War wasn't actually fought to settle the question of slavery, right?)

uh, yeah, and _______________'s just another word.

Sterling is OTM re: the unmediated use of the flag (See Primal Scram, "Give Out . . ."). The "Kiss my Grits" t-shirt at least shirt at least allows for the possiblity of historical context.

It's interesting to see which versions of history everyone was taught at school; I was raised in the Land of Lincoln but even we were taught it was about keeping the Union together.

radical reconstruction didn't stop coz of the southern former slaveholders tho -- it stopped when the northern industrialists got sick of it and decided they could use the troops better putting down the rail strike. not coincidentally, this was directly after the paris commune when all the various feuding elites of europe and elsewhere found common cause against the insurgent rabble.

First, here's a quote from one of Sherman's 1864 dispatches:

If fired on from the forts or buildings of Atlanta no consideration must be paid to the fact that they are occupied by families, but the place must be cannonaded without the formality of a demand.

This has a fairly precise echo in U.S. military policy in Vietnam.

Additionally, Sterling is right that Sherman deliberately upset the economy by ordering his troops to destroy (or ship to the North) all cotton they could find, but this isn't the offense that we're decrying I don't think.

Report on the destruction of Atlanta: http://www.cviog.uga.edu/Projects/gainfo/atldestr.htm.

****

Finally:

the northern army was enforcising the destruction of an elite class and their attendant way of life.

I'm with John on this one (that is, in re: his cynicism about the constituion)-- no way sir. Any politicians who actually wished a real redistribution of wealth were utterly marginalized in short order. The "attendant way of life" you describe survived fairly well until the collapse of the plantation economy in the late 19th/early 20th c.

Masters or Ph.D. level? As I understand grad school, you take one tariff that might have affected one out of every 40 property-holders, and write a dissertation that elevates it to the primary cause of the Civil War.

I was pretty amazed to see the Hiram Powers statute of the Greek Slave (understood at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a protest of America's tardiness in abolishing slavery) when we had our mini-ILE outing to the Victorian Nudes exhibit at BMA last month. (Amazed because it's kind of a famous statute, I was just expecting a bunch of academic studies and stuff.)

Anyway, seeing the statue reminded me of the first time I learned (maybe high school? middle school?) that Victorian England considered the US barbaric for not abolishing slavery. In America you're taught from early childhood like, oh the US threw off the yoke of its English colonial masters, so when this kind of info comes in, it creates confusion, like wait, I thought America was better than England? Surely a mistake? So it's upsetting and memorable. Then later you learn more history and about the Empire and about weather and tobacco and opium-silk-spice-sugar-slave triangle thingamajiggies and money and power and, although you think you have better explanations, you have new sets of things to disbelieve.

where were we? oh yes, slavery, c or d?

As I understand grad school, you take one tariff that might have affected one out of every 40 property-holders, and write a dissertation that elevates it to the primary cause of the Civil War.

Transpose something similar to English lit grad school and you've got it. My experience in a nutshell -- create your own personal mythology, defend it to the death, then abandon it in the face of new trends. Repeat as needed. Like David Bowie in the seventies without the advanced timing, good music or sense of style.

in what sense did antebellum Southern culture survive? is the South still a predominantly rural plantation-based economy?

I've seen the dark-side version of that one...a bumper sticker with th stars-&-bars flying over the White House, with the phrase "I have a dream" written across the top. In quotation marks, as if to say, "yeah, I know Martin Luther King Jr. said that, whatchoo go'n do 'bout it?"

The South underwent a process somewhat akin to denazification, complete with loopholes. The first KKK was successfully quelched by legislative action and (most of all) lawsuits.

Getting back to the flag, I think it might be more difficult to identify a discrete moment in the continuum from then to now after which you can say definitively that the Confederate flag ceased being an emblem of the Civil War or post-Civl War racial violence. That's why I have trouble with it.

Felicity, your last point is OTM but.... I think some people use the Confederate flag to assert the legitimacy of southern culture in the face of northern snobbery, and are oblivious or indifferent to the historical/racial issues it raises. I remember reading about Gram Parsons unfurling a Confederate flag at his shows (to the consternation of the hippies in attendance), and thought this was an infantile provocation but not really a statement about race or the Confederacy. (See also Lynyrd Skynyrd.)

Obviously it's not "actually" being used that way in most cases, but this is exactly what makes it difficult for me to think about, particularly with regard to state flags and state capitols. If we want to be perfectly rational about what flags actually mean, the official flight of a Confederate flag has on some level to be a treasonous act, doesn't it?

In other words, the goal of those who defend the Confederate flag is actually, ironically, to make that flag completely meaningless: for it not to be an actually secessionist act to fly the flag they must claim that it represents not the actual political confederacy but some animating spirit thereof, and for it not to be a racist act to fly the flag they must claim that it doesn't necessarily align with any of the policies or agendas thereof. (This latter argument has some weight, actually: if the Confederate flag must stand for slavery then surely the proper U.S. flag must too!) All of which, in the end, leaves the Confederate flag as simply some vague fluffy symbol of something, open to interpretation on the part of the individual -- like a peace sign. It ceases to be a "flag" and simply becomes a bit of iconography. (In which case don't fly it over your state capitol, fuckers!)

I'm also fine, on the legal level, with considering it a potential tool in racial intimidation or offense, which brings me to the biggest thing about this. Southerners cannot simply say "this is what it means now to us" -- i.e., a symbol of heritage or pride, not a symbol of the political Confederacy or slavery or whatever else -- without admitting that just as they're free to reinterpret and recontextualize it so is everyone else, and plenty of people of every color would say "this is what it means now to us: racism, slavery, Jim Crow, and a host of other bad things beside." It can't simply be in the prerogative of the people who like it to decide what it means: if it's going to mean something other than what it originally meant (i.e., armed rebellion against the federal government at least partly in defense of the institution of slavery), that's for all of us to decide.

It all goes back to Plato anyhow, so feel free to dance on Foucault's grave.

So maybe they can't invoke relativism, but then they don't NEED to, they just need to maintain their own definition as publicly strong enough to maintain the inclusion in the state flag -- then they can take it to mean what they *really* want it to mean.

Which isn't oppositional anyway -- racism today is mainly coded racism, and some defenders of the flag provide coded racist defense. And anyway if we're not talking about the confederate flag on state flags but just bumper stickers, etc. they don't need any defense of what they're doing at all except if someone calls them a racist and they want to say they're not -- and hey, if trent lott could maintain that with a straight face (even if plenty of the population didn't believe them) then why can't THEY? And if someone disagrees, then they've just been brainwashed by the jew-run liberal media, eh?

What really disgusts me is when non-Southerners (eg. John Ashcroft) or Republicans (uh, the party of Lincoln) pay lip-service to the Southern Partisan crowd. And it really annoys me to see the revisionist theories on the Civil War that they may not have originated but sure as hell funded bandied about. I dread finding out what the civil rights movement will have 'actually' been about in twenty to thirty years (maybe it will be tariffs again - lord knows us Southerners can raise a ruckus over tariffs).