The Confederate Flag

It's the flag of the Confederacy now.

It's the flag of the noble cause, the fight against tyranny's threat to abolish slavery (not a joke - these guys do not have an irony recognition module), the flag of the not-at-all-racist heirs of the Klan and the not-at-all-racist defenders of racially disproportionate police thuggery and the not-at-all-racist chanters of "Jews will not replace us" and the not-at-all-racist celebrators of treasonous Robert E Lee's oath-breaking murder of black POWs and capturing of black people for sale as slaves while killing white American soldiers by the tens of thousands and the not-at-all-racist guys who panic-bought the entire US retail supply of firearms ammunition when a black man took the Presidency by a clean vote margin so large not even the Republican Supreme Court could take it back.

"Rebel" my ass. They call themselves "Americans". The only thing they are "rebelling" against is their fantasy that someone is about to force them to treat other people as if they were fully American citizens.

The "rebel mindset" is racist.

It's a racist thing. It's flagrantly and obviously and overtly and 100% a racist thing. There's nothing behind it except racism. The only people waving that flag are racial bigots, and everyone who has ever lived among them knows that.

The only "rebel" in it is the Confederate rebel - the same "rebel" that took up arms against their fellow Americans, went to war against their own country, killed their fellow citizens by the thousands with hatred on their minds, on the mere threat of having full American citizenship granted to the black people who were their neighbors.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

But wait, I thought (unless I was mistaken) that you previously said polls were just a liberal trick used to make Donald Trump look bad. So you're saying we should take all polls seriously then? BTW where are the Confederate flag wavers protesting for black rights or anything whatsoever that improves black people's lives, can you not find at least one example? Show me an example of open Confederacy supporters confronting the KKK and other white supremacists, show me just one.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

well
no
now, there is no confederacy
nor, has there been one for over 155 years

it is just
a symbol for a yearning of a dream of something long lost
a symptom and a sign of a feeling of alienation
...............................
would you rewrite history to suit your prejudices?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

They sure would!
They're yearning for a dream of potency and superiority that is lost forever; a symptom of profound self-delusion.
It would be pathetic, were it less evil.

 

Why is it so hard for them to find another symbol that represents this supposed cause rather than offending people like a penis on a shirt would?

Like I mean the world will just never be right until we can walk around everywhere with penises on our shirts.

 

Yep.
They lost it because their fellow Americans and victims acquired superior force, and took it from them at gunpoint. They lost it because decent people finally realized the only way to get them to stop, to rid the common nation of their dream way of life, was to wreck enough of their way of life and blow enough of them to pieces with cannons that the rest would submit out of the realization that they had no other choice for survival.

And they miss it - they yearn for the days of Jim Crow and the Klan, when they had all the guns and black people knew their place. Their submission lasted only as long as their fear lasted - they never actually changed, never willingly abandoned their ways, never took the opportunity to free themselves of the grip of the evil that had conquered them.

They never stepped back, took a look around, and came to understand that their dreams were nightmares.

As you and your media feeders insist on doing and inflicting? Nope.

By luck - and I well know it's not by my own virtue - I was never burdened with the need to justify possession by an evil so huge and flagrant that the only way to avoid public condemnation and exile for it - other than the confession, alteration, atonement, and forgiveness, by which evildoers rejoin their tribes and communities of fellow men - was to invent a fictional past for a present in which it never happened.

You have my sympathies, and whatever personal help I can provide, but I can't even turn my back on people with so little self awareness - let alone entrust them with power over those I care about. Politically, my country is in a dogfight with fascism - and the price of losing that fight is very high.

 

Here's a flag that's been used by rebels for hundreds of years, and by people from many different races. Yar har!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

​

 

Which is a good thing!

Nope.

But I bet you'd get annoyed if someone put up a statue of Osama bin Laden in your town's center.

 

Oh, you're grossly mistaken, and I heartily invite you to go looking if you don't think so. "All polls"? Sure. According to some, Trump is going to lose readily, so you can just sit out election day. Just take it easy, in the full confidence of those polls. Why is it leftists are so fond of absolutes, like taking "all polls seriously"?

Are you joking? With 41% of all blacks and 75% of Southern blacks having a negative reaction to the Confederate flag and the violence that has come along with the recent "protesting for black rights", anyone taking a Confederate flag would very likely be assaulted, if not killed.

How's a black member and a black chapter president of the NAACP, for ya?

Arlene Barnum came and announced that she was quitting her job with the NAACP over their Confederate flag position. Barnum delighted the crowd by burning her NAACP lifetime membership card. Barnum said, “They are the real racists.”

Hk Edgerton, NAACP Chapter President turned pro-Confederate flag activist also spoke to the crowd about his life experience and about being Black and pro-Confederate flag.
https://www.alreporter.com/2015/07/21/author-activist-dies-after-addressing-southern-heritage-rally/​

And another member of the NAACP:

​

Or do you think the NAACP, much less black people themselves, don't want to improve black people's lives? There's three examples, easily found in a google search.
But you were probably afraid of that, which is why you added confronting the KKK. As if any black person wouldn't.

But for Karen Cooper, a black woman who was born in New York but later settled in Virginia, the flag embodies something else entirely.

“I actually think that it represents freedom,” the ardent tea party supporter says in a video interview that’s been making the rounds online. “It represents a people who stood up to tyranny.”
...
If the flag was a racist symbol, Cooper argues in the video, she wouldn’t be an accepted member of a group composed primarily of white Southerners.

“I’m not advocating slavery or think that, you know, it was right,” she says. “It wasn’t, and none of my friends think it was. It was just something that happened. It didn’t just happen in the South, it happened worldwide.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...onfederate-flag-believe-slavery-was-a-choice/

Black Rebel also realizes that there are people who fly the flag to signify racism. He implores his fellow southern heritage supporters to denounce these people. Specifically, he called out a white supremacy march at Stone Mountain. Stone Mountain is the largest Confederate monument in the country.
https://blackleaderanalysis.com/2017/09/30/black-rebel-philosophy-and-analysis/

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

​

There's some people out on the street with Confederate flags, protesting for their rights. Like the right to life, safe from violent crime, and the dignity to be treated as anyone else, not placated by white allies and welfare.

 

The rich fantasy life of the white racial bigot is full of such scenes. The racially bigoted American fascist, much like the religious fundie (and with considerable overlap), rests their political identity on these lurid fantasies of being picked on, abused, threatened. The most coddled, pandered to, catered to, kid glove handled demographic faction in the country thinks they are some kind of target of abuse - and by black people, no less. The looming threat of dangerous and violent and uncivilized blacks, given "rights" they don't deserve by foolish liberals and then assaulting innocent and not-at-all-racist whites, has been a staple of American racist agitprop since the country was founded.

One can make a decent case that it is the most important single motivator of the Civil War, a piece of violence launched by these shitheaded bigots that actually did kill hundreds of thousands of them - a case of self-fulfilling propaganda bs that should have learned them (as they say) for a thousand years.

The reality of racially disparate police violence and oppression of bigotry-ghettoed black people is not a work of ignorant and propaganda-addled self-justifying imagination. It is not an invention of shit-for-brains bigots. It is recorded, statistically verified, well-documented physical fact. It has blighted the lives of black people in America for generations, and it needs to stop now.

Meanwhile: It doesn't matter how many ignorant black people you guys manage to post photographs of - the Confederate flag is waved and displayed and honored by racial bigots and nobody else. It is the flag of the racist American, the bumper sticker of the hardcore racial bigot, the swastika of the Confederacy, and has no other popular usage or symbolism.

Everybody knows that, btw. All this "alienation" and "rebel mindset" nonsense is just for Sunday school, a species of Politically Correct rhetoric that disappears immediately when a muffler-deficient pickup truck full of white guys flying that flag cruises slowly past the front yard of the black family that just moved into a white neighborhood, the Latino girl walking home from school, and so forth. Everybody knows.

And like the flat-earthers, they are not all photoshopped lies (although many are, because American racial bigotry rests on a foundation of dishonesty and dishonor) - some are photos of ignorant people sincere in their unsupported delusions. So?

Why do racists trying to justify their garbage post these irrelevant photographs? What argument do they think they are making?

 

​

amen

 

I posted:

Your reply to that:

My reply was to give ''The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States'' which showed slavery was a reason for them states.


So, what ''individual'' do you mean?

 

Nice try, I'm asking to see WHITE people waving the Confederate flag around and doing something for black civil rights and other injustices. Not just a few people either, I want to see groups. I can easily use Google to find videos of hordes and hordes of people, probably millions in total, marching around with Confederate flags and spewing Nazi propaganda, I want to see comparable numbers of white Confederates confronting racists and doing the opposite.

 

So first it was protesting for black rights and then confronting the KKK, and now it's white people protesting, in groups. Moving your own goalposts is intellectually dishonest. And before you whine about "that's what I meant all along", just stop. No one believes you. You've trashed any credibility you ever had. If I were as dishonest as you, I'd just post this, without context:

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

​

But that's not what it looks like, so I admit it doesn't count. But there's a problem with your premise. While people exercise their freedom of expression in flying whatever flag they like, people are cognizant that a plurality would not take kindly to people waving battle flags in a BLM protest. That's like asking for pictures of the black panthers, or symbols of black pride, in protests about injustice to a white man. It's just incongruous, even if the symbol itself is not intended to be antithetical to cause. See, there's a difference between freedom of expression and expressing something known to be deemed antipathetic by a cause or its advocates. Like someone here said, Hindu swastikas are fine as an expression of that religion, but inappropriate at a memorial to the Holocaust. And like the battle flag, I doubt you could find hordes waving the swastika like Nazi's did, because that's what extremists do. If extremists define the meaning of things, then Islam is all about terrorism, BLM is about violence, murder, and ambushing cops. Don't be a simpleton.

And that completely ignores that there are even black people who do not believe BLM has a legit reason to protest.

 

James Lowen (via Jetty↱), 2006:

My first teaching assignment was at Tougaloo College, a historically black institution in Tougaloo, Mississippi. In my first year, I taught a course developed by the history department that was titled "The Freshman Social Science Seminar." In it we introduced students to sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and psychology in the context of African American history. This made sense because 99% of our students were African American.

The second semester of the course began with events immediately following the Civil War. I had a new group of students in the second semester, and I didn't want to do all the talking on the first day of class, so I asked them, "We're starting with Reconstruction. What is that period?"

What followed was an "Aha!" experience for me. Or it might be better called an "Oh no!" experience. Sixteen out of 17 students said, "Reconstruction was that period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the Southern states. But they were too soon out of slavery, so they screwed up, and white folks had to take control again."

Now, there are at least three complete misstatements—lies I would call them—in that sentence, and I was just floored by it. Blacks never took over the government of the Southern states; the Reconstruction governments did not, on the whole, screw up; and whites didn't resume control at the end of Reconstruction. However, a certain group of "whites" did take control, using terrorist tactics. It was, in fact, the original Ku Klux Klan.

So I thought, "What must your teachers have done to you to make you believe that the one time your group was center stage in American history, they screwed up, and whites had to take control back again?"

If it were true, that would be fine. But it is not true. What these students had learned we might call BS—that would be Bad Sociology—in the black public schools. What they had learned was being taught by black teachers in all-black schools. But it was white supremacist history because their teachers were just blindly teaching what was in the textbooks. Seeing the outcome made me aware that history can be a weapon and that it can be used against you, just as it had been against my black students.​

This part stands out, over and over again, as my socmed lights up with recycled knockoff racist wetending. As with a lot of revivalist imitation-oldschool evangelism in these United States, it just doesn't read as effectively in a room where playing along, knowing better even than to nod and wink, is no longer the empowered presupposition. If you go back in Sciforums history, you can find some of the old, two-bit Christian evangelization failing because the speed and magnitude, the repetition in realtime, was bewildering compared to the comfort of a bully pulpit blindly presupposed and enjoyed only a handful of years before; for some of those evangelists, it was only the day before. The transformation was probably shocking, an extraordinarily rapid social change contributing to a growing crisis consciousness°.

Apparently, neither of our leading advocates demanding judgment of black discourse know how to find, or perceive, or however that works, seem to understand how their own tropes work; they're recycling spooned presuppository stimulant, and apparently mainlining it.

I've actually been thinking about another post of yours↗, because I wouldn't dispute it even though I was thinking of something else; where I get hung up, in that case, is reconciling the two aspects, which ought to be easy enough, but still. To the other, given my focus on the idea of what an individual decides, as such, in that question, it really is easy to get distracted by the glint of significance about a white woman in Branson trying to justify her KKK advocacy with Confederate flag in hand.

Part of it is the bit about blacking out, essentially a competency defense, which really does haunt the whiff of a notion I'm chasing in that other discussion. Sorry, I just don't know quite what to do with this one, and it halfway fits, here:

From an undisclosed location, Kathy Jenkins called the KOLR10 newsroom. Her mission: To make a public apology for the "ugly" things she said in a now-viral video.

The video, which surfaced on Monday, isn't long. It only runs about 35 seconds. In it, Jenkins sits and later stands on the bed of a pickup truck while holding and dancing with a Confederate flag.

"I will teach my grandkids to hate you all," she says to someone off camera. She later raises her fist and declares "KKK belief" ....

.... When she called KOLR10 and Ozarks First, she wouldn't even say where she was calling from; only specifying that she has left Branson, her home of six years.

All of this, a response to what she describes as a misunderstood portion of her day caught on video.

(Lingo↱)​

It's a painful video to watch. The excerpt in circulation:

Jenkins: It was not—it had nothing to do with the people there for the Black Lives Matter, because I was also chanting, "Black Lives Matter", which they do. And I was yelling—I was saying that to the girls that were screaming in my face. Because I didn't—you know, and it just, it came out wrong, is what it did; it came out so wrong.

Q: So, if you say that you were representing Black Lives Matter, why did you have the Confederate flag.

Jenkins: It was given to me. It was given to me on the property, and I just, I just got so angry it just, it just happened. And obviously I don't understand the whole Confederate flag thing, and that's something that I've been learning for the last couple of days, the meaning of the Confederate flag. I always thought that it was about, you know, uniting people together, not dividing people. I didn't understand that the Confederate flag meant hate; I just thought people didn't understand the history of the Confederate flag, like I don't understand the whole history of the Confederate flag, but I'm learning. And I would never, ever, ever hold up another Confederate flag in my life.​

The article notes more of Jenkins' discussion with a local news station, claiming: "I was chanting black Lives matter … and that's not even on video," she told KOLR 10. "It's like I blacked out. I don't even remember."

To the one, apparently she just wanted to see what the rally was like. "I've never been to one," she said. And, apparently, she watched from across the street, and that is when someone gave her a flag. The Ozarks First report notes, "She told KOLR10 she assumed it was a symbol of unity. She says she then sat in the bed of a truck belonging to someone she didn't know."

Later, when she was approached by people from the other side of the street, she says she lost her temper.

"I hadn't said anything until they came into my face…It's like I blacked out. I don't even remember saying half the stuff that I said."

As for the part about holding the same beliefs as the Ku Klux Klan, she says she was mocking the people who approached her.

"I wasn't saying I'm KKK or for the KKK. I was mocking them because I don't like being called a racist," she said ....

.... “I mean, if it would help for me to stand with Black Lives Matter, I absolutely would do that.”​

A protest organizer, Faith Pittser, did respond to the apology, disputing Jenkins' account, and arguing, "Her apology does not make sense as she's trying to state she didn't realize she was on the opposing side. How do you not realize that if you're on Dixie Outfitter's property holding a confederate flag along with the other counter-protesters that are facing us?"

In the other thread I had difficulty moving past the contrast between the larger consideration of the banality of evil and the point of noncompetency justifying individual decisions; if I haven't answered you directly on that, it's because I still don't have a useful one fully assembled.

More toward the present discussion, there are reasons why people behave in certain ways. Amid attitudes and behaviors that can convince even people of color to accept racist make-believe°°, something about the desperate appeal to righteousness in the Jenkins apologia really stands out, reminding just how thoroughly such myths and beliefs permeate large sections of the American population.
____________________

Notes:

° See Riesebrodt (1993), p. 17:

Spoiler

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

​

°° The Jetty interview with Loewen is titled in reference to a chapter on "Red Eyes" that, as I recall, you are well familiar with.​

Jetty, Mike. "History Through Red Eyes: A Conversation With James Loewen". Phi Delta Kappan, v. 88, n. 3. November, 2006. Web.Archive.org. 7 July 2020. https://bit.ly/2BNCfYP

Lingo, Collin. "'I don't represent hate', Branson woman apologizes after viral video". Ozarks First. 24 June 2020. OzarksFirst.com. 7 July 2020. https://bit.ly/2NydMZQ

Riesebrodt, Martin. Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran. Oakland: University of California Press, 1993.

 

So, today I held up two objects - at eye level. One, a credit card, the other, my cell phone. I dropped them at the same time and they both landed in my lap, at the same time. I chose several items of varying weights, to compare, and the same thing happened. Gravity.

That’s my intelligence on display today!

For real though, it’s fun. Try it.

 

And those sorts of all-black schools taught by black teachers are also run by black or Democrat administrators and school boards, in cities run by Democrats for decades, and resolutely oppose school choice and vouchers. IOW, racist Democrats have urban blacks where they want them, racially segregated and trapped in bad neighborhoods with bad education, and their policies are obviously designed to "keep them in their place". This obviously isn't Republicans doing this. This is the same Democrats who fought for slavery, founded the KKK, instituted Jim Crow, fought all three civil rights acts and filibustered two, advocate aborting 200,000 black babies every year, making excuses for criminality, etc.. Very consistent.

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

paddo
Pronunciation /ˈpadəʊ/
noun
dialect Scottish, British, Irish
A frog or toad.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/paddo

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

​

 

So you're telling me you can't give me one single example from the last 70 years of a large-scale march of white people waving Confederate flags and chanting for black civil rights? Not even when there's no black people around and they're just going up to white KKK members and demanding that they stop misappropriating Confederate heritage?

I can find you hundreds of relatively recent videos featuring masses of white-skinned neanderthals with Confederate flags chanting against racial equality and not fearing any government, Antifa or Black Panthers retaliation in the slightest, but you can't find me even a single example from the last 70 years of a large group of white people waving Confederate flags and doing the opposite. You know why? Because the Confederate flag is a racist symbol mainly used by racists like yourself to proclaim their racism.

BTW when people say they have "no reaction" to seeing a Confederate flag, that does not in any way imply that they approve of it. Most people have no reaction when they see a homeless person passed out on the street corner either, doesn't mean they're happy to have him there or see him suffering.