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."

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).