Flying The Flags Of Treason

The racist treason-in-defense-of-slavery Confederate flag flies along with a flag for Russian asset and demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump, whose #treasonsummit in Helsinki should have convinced all but the most delusional of his cult that the Kremlin has something on him, and he knows what it is. Traitors stick together.

(photo: Jessica Rinaldi, Boston Globe/Getty Images. Flags flying above an RV encampment near Bristol, TN)

Racists Gather At Gettysburg Battlefield

With more cities and states taking down memorials to the treason-in-defense-of-slavery Confederacy, and with the Confederate battle rag being consigned to the lawns of mouthbreathing bigots, we should expect the kind of threatening reaction by hate groups that was exhibited this past weekend on the Gettysburg battlefield. A motley collection of KKK members, right-wing militia types, and freelance racists, including many Trump supporters, gathered at the Gettysburg battlefield, many armed and wearing camo and bulletproof vests. The gathering was ostensibly to "protect" Confederate monuments from "desecration" by the anti-fascist group Antifa, but turned out to to have been largely an excuse to swill beer, shout racist slogans and vent their rage against "libruls." (Antifa says that no such action was ever planned.) Fittingly, one of the nitwits even managed to shoot himself in the leg, because... nitwit.

After the murder of nine African-American parishioners in a Charleston, SC church by Confederate rag-waving racist Dylann Roof in June 2015, an increasing number of jurisdictions have taken action to remove symbols of the racist Confederacy. Those actions have provoked a reaction from racist groups often using the cover of protecting their "heritage," but who want to revive it in a reactionary political sense through undermining voting rights and laws discriminating against minorities. With an ally in the White (Supremacist) House, not to mention much of Congress, these twisted cretins feel emboldened, and they won't be easily or quickly defeated.

(photo: Idiot with Trump t-shirt leads march of bigots. Andy Campbell, Huffington Post)

White Supremacy And The Myth Of The Confederacy

Prof. James Loewen writes today about how history has been turned upside down "with the pen (and noose)" by Southern apologists, then and now, and how its chickens have come home to roost:

With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently. We can see the impact of Confederate symbols and thinking on Dylann Roof, accused of killing nine in a Charleston, S.C., church, but other examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a neo-Confederate T-shirt showing Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic semper tyrannis.” When white students in Appleton, Wis. — a recovering “sundown town” that for decades had been all white on purpose — had issues with Mexican American students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags, which they already had at home, at the ready.

Across the country, removing slavery from its central role in prompting the Civil War marginalizes African Americans and makes us all stupid. De-Confederatizing the United States won’t end white supremacy, but it will be a momentous step in that direction.

As long as we fear telling the sometimes ugly truth about our history,  there will remain a large, ignorant population in this country that, 150 years on, will use the false myths of the Confederacy to justify flaunting its symbols of bigotry and treason.  It's long, long past time Americans stop indulging those noxious lies.

If Republicans Abandon Tentherism, Then That Would Be Progress

Charles P. Pierce would like for the Republicans who are suddenly aware of the moral implications of flying the flag of slavery and treason to be held accountable for their antebellum views on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution (i.e., the misconception that the slavery flag also represented -- nullification!):

Tentherism is the basis of almost all the retrograde ideas filtering around the conservative moonscape -- from creationism in the public schools, to armed freeloaders on federal lands, to the mindless resistance to health-care reform, to the awful Citizens United and Shelby County decisions at the Supreme Court. Let these suddenly enlightened citizens abandon what the flag represents as quickly as they abandoned the flag itself, and then we can have ourselves a Day of Jubilee.

To imagine that the fight for a modern, pluralistic, egalitarian society is over now that the American swastika may be coming down in some of the yahoo precincts of the South is naive.  In the wake of the Charleston massacre, the flag issue just became too indefensible even for the moral cowards of the Republican Party.  But we'll bet they'll be sticking to their position on nullifying Federal laws as long as there's a Democrat in the White House.

BONUS:  To get a sense of the States rights dystopia Republican tenthers would like to return to (via the Republican Supreme Court's Shelby County decision gutting voting rights, for example), blog pal P.E.C. sends us this reminder of what a "literacy test" designed to keep blacks from voting looked like in Louisiana in the 1960's.

Today's Cartoon - Identity Crisis?

(click on image to enlarge)

(Clay Jones, claytoonz.com)

Race And Cowardice

Here's sportswriter (!) Sally Jenkins this morning in the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle:

If you went to Germany and saw a war memorial with a Nazi flag flying over it, what would you think of those people? You might think they were unrepentant. You might think they were in a lingering state of denial about their national atrocities. The Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic. The Confederacy was treason in defense of a still deeper crime against humanity: slavery. If weaklings find racial hatred to be a romantic expression of American strength and purity, make no mistake that it begins by unwinding a red thread from that flag.

Yet the governor of South Carolina found it easier to call for the execution of this milkweed boy than it was for her to finally call for the lowering of that banner. Why?

Jenkins, who happens to have co-authored a book on Unionists in Mississippi during the Civil War, writes a particularly powerful essay on how this "American swastika" was allowed back into public life, most notably during the civil rights struggles of the last half of the 20th century, and the truth about what it really stands for.  Why she's not a regular contributor to the editorial page (instead of a Bush administration re-tread) is symptomatic of the decay of this once-great newspaper.

Another recommended read this morning is on the subject of how the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party, and specifically it's presidential hopefuls, reacted to the Charleston killing and displaying the flag of slavery and treason:

The massacre last week at a church in Charleston, S.C., opened a leadership opportunity for the nearly two dozen politicians running to be the next president.

But few stepped forward to seize it.

The Republican hopefuls mostly stammered and stumbled in response to the shootings. At first, some resisted calling the massacre racially motivated, only to reverse course when it became obvious it was.

Most stopped short of calling for South Carolina leaders to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia. Some, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, declined to comment at all. Only after South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, emotionally declared Monday that the flag should come down did most GOP candidates join the chorus.

We eagerly await the insights of Ron "Leadership!" Fournier (but we won't be holding our breath).

Want To Honor the Charleston 9? Start With This

In the aftermath of the racist massacre of 9 black churchgoers this week in Charleston, SC, there have been renewed calls for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the State Capitol to acknowledge the reality of the racial divide and to make a small step toward closing it.  Indeed, while both the U.S. and state flags were lowered over the capitol building in Columbia out of respect for the victims, the symbol of slavery remained at full mast. The usual suspects are resisting the removal of the flag, bringing up their time-worn excuse of "tradition" and "honoring the fallen."  Keep in mind that this flag -- this flag of treason against the U.S. -- was flown in a fight to maintain the vicious system of slavery in the South, and is carried in demonstrations today by the KKK, neo-Nazi groups, and assorted white supremacists. There's no honor associated with that flag, and that needs to be said over and over.

A column by the late Steve Gilliard from 10 years ago, reproduced by Driftglass, drives home the point that this flag has become the American equivalent of the Nazi swastika, which was co-opted from ancient Sanskrit as a symbol of hope and good will.  One hundred and sixty five years after the end of the Civil War, the symbol of racism still holds a place of honor among many Southern whites, and a continuing stab in the heart of black Americans who know exactly what "tradition" that flag represents.

BONUS:  Read Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in The Atlantic, calling for the banishment of this symbol, and  screw the apologists and the rabid white supremacists.