I don't agree that the Confederate battle flag is irrelevant because hate and racism are matters of the heart and mind. It is the symbol not only of the Confederacy, but specifically of the Confederacy's battle against the North for the right to keep some people as property. If the symbol of the Confederacy killing other Americans for the right to keep some people as property is acceptable, then the Confederacy itself must be acceptable, and if the Confederacy itself is acceptable then slavery must be acceptable. Symbols mean things - that's why they exist, as shorthand for what they represent.
I have no problem with Confederate war memorials, but I think the flag flown should be the current state flag or the US flag. I do not believe the state should fly any Confederate flag above a memorial any more than Germany should fly any Nazi flag above a WWII war memorial. If you wish to honor someone, honor what was good and admirable about them, not what was evil. The Confederacy was evil, and the best we can say about any Confederate soldiers would be that they served honorably in a dishonorable cause.
exactly, all of this
EDIT: And while I'm being disagreeable - I don't agree that either black slave owners or white slaves are strawmen, but I also don't agree that either were significant in nineteenth century politics.
xBiffx explicitly jumped over the primary discussion: the flag itself has been long adopted through the Civil war and especially after as far more than a symbol of the confederacy, but as the direct face of the anti-Civil Rights movement in Southern strongholds of Jim Crow, and as the battle flag for white supremacists anywhere in the US, and said, "Hey, look: there were black slave owners and white slaves too!"
That has absolutely nothing to do with the current and decades-long meaning of the flag. Very few have addressed this fact: I think if the Southern Dixiecrats and their ilk did not expressly adopt the confederate flag and reintroduce it in the 50s and 60s as a social and political motivator to rally the racists within their tent to come out against Civil Rights, the perception of the flag would be quite different.
It has expressly and near-exclusively been the rallying flag for this cause for near 70 years now. We all know that symbols change, and they even exclusively adopt one aspect of their earlier meaning, which is what has long happened here.
Personally,
I don't have anything against the flag--I grew up with it, long after Civil Rights. It was just there, everywhere I was, as a "quaint" feature of what I consider my homeland. I also spent much of that time young, dumb and full of, well, you know. I understood the implications a bit later and also appreciated that nearly everyone I knew that had some version of the flag anywhere was certainly not inherently racist, and never took it for anything more than a somewhat vague marker of their homeland. It is something you put on your Truck or Ford Focus while tailgating, drinking, and eating way too much meat.
This broo-ha-ha
is expressly about state-sanctioned adoption and display of the flag; nothing more. Any attempts to remove the flag from history, literature, museums, etc--is inherently absurd and smacks of Orwellian censorship. No one of any stripe should support that. Or, rather...this is what it should be about. Obviously the internet brigade has gone nuts about this...but in the end, what the rednecks are bitching about regarding "PC Police!" is simply private companies making a profit-based decision. Hate capitalism and our market economy and the freedom for private companies to look out for their own interests, but that's what it is.
Yeah, I think it's stupid, but who gives a shit?
Should "the ebil gub'mint!" come after Bubba and the flag at his house or on his Big Johnson t-shirt at Myrtle Beach? Of course not. Thing is Bubba's peer group, and those outside of his peer group have long ago made their own judgments about Bubba, positive or negative depending on your perspective, and that's pretty much as it should be.
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