By adamg on Mon., 6/1/2015 - 4:08 pm
This is a confederate flag right? pic.twitter.com/D29Nd2YzEf
— Sarah J. Jackson (@sjjphd) June 1, 2015
Somebody carries a confederate battle flag every year in the parade. Anybody know why?
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"Tradition"
By MattCDux
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:14pm
Ask for logical reasons, you are sure to get illogical reasons ... "Tradition"
is the one they will trot out I am sure.
Maybe a captured battle flag.
By anon
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:16pm
It's a custom dating back to the Roman conquest of Germany, at least. A legion's standard would be a trophy for the other side.
They probably don't use the original one due to its age.
Right, like all the Nazi
By anon
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:37pm
Right, like all the Nazi flags you see at WW2 parades.
That's more popular in Russia.
By anon
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:35pm
Here we have Berlin in the spring of 45.
https://toritto.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/victor...
Hopefully a trophy?
By ScipioA
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:19pm
Seized in battle by some victorious club member fighting against the Confederates? I can't really think of any other non-awful, non-racist reasons to carry that flag around in this city.
Too Good Looking
By John Costello
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:27pm
The Hall of Flags at the State House is great. There are the regimental colors of many Massachusetts Units and Some Captured Flags.
This one looks like it came mail order from China or some pick up truck in New Hampshire just in time for the Jefferson Davis Birthday Celebrations.
Yesterday brought out a
By Dot net
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:27pm
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/boston/downtown/art...
Seems like other honorary/fraternal military organizations came to honor the Ancients and brought their own flag with them. The article's from 2011, but it makes sense it could happen again.
Definitely some SC folk there
By Stevil
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:32pm
I didn't see the stars and bars - but here was definitely a flag with palmetto tree and crescent moon.
Listen to the music on their website.
By anon
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 8:45pm
http://www.washingtonlightinfantry.org/
Wouldn't it have been more historically accurate
By Michael
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:41pm
...to bring this flag, the last one the Confederacy flew?
It's the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia
By necturus
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:50pm
...adopted by General P.G.T. Bauregard in 1861, as the Confederate stars and bars flag was too easily mistaken for the Union stars and stripes.
The Ancient and Honorable
By whyaduck
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 4:56pm
just might want to rethink this.
You ain't kidding
By chaosjake
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:08pm
From their website:
[img]http://www.washingtonlightinfantry.org/wp-content/...
The Ancient and Honorables should invite them to come without the stars and bars or just stay home next time. Massachusetts spilled untold blood and treasure to stamp out the scourge of Southern secessionism, and flying this flag on the streets of Boston spits in the eye of those hallowed dead.
*"War Between the States" is an alternate name for the War to Preserve the Union used by Confederate apologists.
I believe that
By roadman
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:37pm
"War Between The States" is actually the official term used by the League of Confederate Correctors, who apparently can't stand the word Civil.
"War of Northern Aggression"....
By Michael Kerpan
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:44pm
... is an even more favored term by our Souternbrethren.
War of Northern Aggression is
By chaosjake
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:53pm
War of Northern Aggression is so, well, in-your-face. War Between the States is much more pleasing to the ear. It has the sonorous tones of a dog whistle. (Seriously, though, it's a term promulgated mostly by the Daughters of the Confederacy during Reconstruction to lend a more noble air to their precious Lost Cause.)
Remember in 2011 when South
By anon
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 7:43pm
Remember in 2011 when South Sudan voted to secede from Sudan, and was cheered on by the world press? It's kinda the same thing.
I'm pretty sure I qualify....
By Michael Kerpan
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 10:18pm
... for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans (but I never got around to applying).
"The war of southern
By anon
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 9:57am
"The war of southern rebellion"
That was the original name for the bloodiest war in American history before the Lost Cause revisionists mounted a sustained, century long propaganda effort to re-write history.
I never tire of pointing out that Robert E. Lee killed more American soldiers than Hitler and Osama Bin Laden combined.
A friend of mine pointed out
By Lee is a traitor
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 10:50am
A friend of mine pointed out that Benedict Arnold gets all the traitor baggage when, really, it ought to be heaped on Lee.
Lee was no traitor
By necturus
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 7:32pm
Robert E. Lee was a colonel in the United States Army, a career military officer. He resigned his commission when it became clear the Army was going to be ordered to invade Virginia, his home state.
Virginia then hired Colonel Lee to help defend the state against the expected invasion. How does defending one's homeland make one a traitor? The patriots who fought at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (actually, Breed's Hill) fought much as Lee and his men did in defense of their homes and loved ones.
If Lee was a traitor than so was George Washington.
Lee was a traitor
By adamg
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 8:11pm
He led an army against the United States. That's traitorous. And please with the "just defending his homeland" stuff. His army traveled well outside of Virginia's borders.
If you don't believe in the concept of the United States, just say so.
And, yes, Washington was a traitor - to the British.
Well...
By Cuzidotrumpet
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 7:58pm
Using that logic, you could argue that anyone would be a traitor.
It's all about perspective...
The War of Treason to Preserve Human Slavery
By Anonyme
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 11:15am
That's my preferred term.
to Preserve...
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 8:56pm
... and Expand (sort of like manifest destiny, but with even more expanded borders).
You can't just
By Anne Weatherbee
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 11:39am
erase history! This flag is such a part of American history, yes, a war where a lot of blood was shed but to just ignore that it ever existed and people (American people) also died for this flag as well as the Union flag we were Americans fighting Americans. So if we forbid this flag then we may as well say slavery never existed either.
Um, no
By Scratchie
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 11:44am
Try again.
(American people) also died
By chaosjake
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 12:02pm
Nope. Traitors who started an armed insurrection against America died for this flag. Their political leadership renounced the values of America. Their senior officers renounced the oaths they had taken to uphold and defend the Constitution and deserted from the US armed forces.
Southern foot soldiers enlisted for many reasons, from belief in the cause to solidarity with others in their town to fear of being shunned. Many of them fought and died with valor. Many of them share my last name. But they fought and died for an unjust cause, and that can't be swept under the rug.
Postwar Germany has been forced to find ways to honor the memory and sacrifice of their wartime dead without glorifying the cause they died for. This is a project that has never been undertaken in the post-Reconstruction South.
True
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 12:19pm
> This is a project that has never been undertaken
> in the post-Reconstruction South.
And NEVER will be, alas.
By that logic, the Colonists
By anon
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 1:05pm
By that logic, the Colonists who fought against the crown in Lexington and Concord in 1775 were also traitors who we should compare to Nazis.
It's not that the South (or the Colonies) were looking for armed rebellion. They wanted independence from an authority that didn't want to let go.
I get the point you're trying
By chaosjake
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 2:51pm
I get the point you're trying to make here, anon But the argument only works if you assign moral equivalency to all governments at all times. Was the US government in 1861 as repressive as the British ministry was in 1775?
As an aside, a lot of the colonists that early in the war would have said that they were fighting for their rights as Englishmen under British law against a tyrannical ministry that had usurped the power of the king. But that's kinda beside the point.
Not looking for armed rebellion?
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 3:39pm
Nonsense.
Jefferson Davis ordered the attack on Fort Sumter, even though he knew the garrison there planned to surrender once it ran out of food in a few weeks. And even before this, force was used to seize federal facilities and ships were fired upon by Confederate forces.
Well, it was the Jefferson
By Hardy Har Har
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:07pm
Well, it was the Jefferson Davis Day state holiday in Alabama today.
This stone placed outside
By chaosjake
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 12:10pm
This stone placed outside Jeff Davis' home in New Orleans identifies him as "A Truly Great American."
[img]http://i.imgur.com/cdN8g3Z.jpg[/img]
This hypocrisy knows no bounds.
outrageous
By zetag
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 5:13pm
Sarah had a perfectly good Monday morning massage ruined by an inanimate object, which right or wrong, many people in this country still associate with. Someone please help me find my pitchfork; I haven't actually been able to locate it since we hunted down Kony back in 2012.
Here's a clue
By alkali
Mon, 06/01/2015 - 9:58pm
It's completely wrong, as wrong as a Nazi flag or worse. People who want to fly it should stay the fuck out of Boston.
Ignorant anti-free speech
By anon
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 6:15am
Ignorant anti-free speech fascists like you should stay the hell out of America, but even nitwits like you are allowed a voice.
The civil war was always more complicated than slavery, but even if it weren't, I can't see why reenactors shouldn't use the same flags as the units they portray.
Kinda bullshit
By adamg
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 7:31am
Let them whoop and holler and fly their stars-and-bars all they want south of the Mason-Dixon line (and they do, even on July 4).
In Boston, which was the home of the anti-slavery movement, a state represented in the Senate by a man nearly beaten to death by a Southern goon, it's an offensive symbol of a brutal regime responsible for the enslavement of millions of people and more American battle deaths than any other - a regime that "Southern heritage" fans seem to keep forgetting lost.
I'm sure American soldiers picked up plenty of Nazi flags in the march to Berlin, but you don't see any veterans groups flying them in parades. This is really no different.
And it doesn't really matter how the stars and bars didn't start as a symbol of that regime. It ended up as it, and it's used as a symbol of it today - again, rather like the swastika, which existed for thousands of years before the Nazis, but for which there are very good reasons not to fly anymore.
Also, you might want to look up some definitions of "free speech." Nobody's ripping flags out of people's hands; people who are offended have as much a right to complain as people who look wistfully back at the antebellum South.
Confederate Flag
By JohnPaulJohnPaul
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 9:41am
Adam,
I am a Filipino, I sought out a "Rising Sun" flag when I lived in Japan. Dozens in my family were Massacred by them; but you know what? Dozens more were massacred by Americans 50 years earlier. I fly an American flag proudly (I was born and raised here), I cherished my Japanese flag as a reminder of what my people overcame to allow my comfortable life now, and I fly my Filipino flag too. The horrors of History have no way of judiciously designating which monster future generations must revile the most - we Americans are fixed on Hitler and it is with great fear and hatred that we trot out the "if this were a Nazi symbol" argument so quickly that really, no discussion can escape it. While the Confederate Flag offends you and your memory of Boston as the home of anti-slavery, it is not the only flag flown at that parade that symbolizes murder and oppression to some of us.
I attended college in Kentucky and travel extensively through the South. They understandably present their Confederate ancestors not as a "brutal regime" but as wealthy, slave owners trying to protect the wealth and independence of their region, a feeling that remains today. I took offense to the idea of a Confederate Flag and watched it disappear post 9-11 then pop up more and more post-Obama. I am not going to downplay the origins of the flag, but cannot compare it by a long mile to Neo-Nazis parading in Boston. It is simply not fair. If we are to reduce our brothers and sisters by the flag that flew over the bed they were born in, then we have adopted the eyes by which your nightmares of Nazi Germany are governed. Those Southerners are your countrymen, and their rejection of a moral superiority that a city like Boston should not hold over S. Carolina rings true, esp. when we know that this home of anti-slavery has also been the home of mind boggling racism from the founding of the City on the Hill to No Irish to present day.
And now, soap box in hand, I will ride off into the sunset like Shane....
Hmm ...
By adamg
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 10:03am
I'm not arguing that Boston is without sin. Winthrop's "City on a Hill" was a call for religious exclusion, Quakers were executed for being Quakers, and the reason we had a Great Molasses Flood goes back to the days when Boston played such a prominent role in the Triangular Trade that brought so many slaves to North America (and let's not forget what led to 1974).
That having been said, I am surprised that somebody who did grow up in a country that has known its own share of colonization and misery at the hands of foreign countries can look at what the South was and say we're just dealing with "their rejection of a moral superiority that a city like Boston should not hold over S. Carolina." Really? Have you really read up on what American slavery was like?
And that having been said, I don't think white Southerners flying confederate flags is simply harkening back to a kinder, gentler time, a mourning for a grand life that was simply lost, a way of life that was simply different from that in the North . It is a giant FU to the idea of a United States in general, of a United States of equal opportunity for all in particular. And yes, I said white Southerners. Black southerners do not fly the stars and bars. You might ask them why.
Re: Flags
By JohnPaulJohnPaul
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 11:45am
Adam,
I invoked my heritage to point out that if we were to see the world as remainders of all our past failures and abuses, not many blacks, Irish, Jews, Vietnamese, or others would want to fly the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, or pretty much any flag. The Confederate flag bugged me when I first got to college, and I was puzzled why so many vestiges of it were allowed on cars, stickers, buttons etc worn by people of all ages. I wondered what my black (Southern) classmates thought about this, and I realized they judged people by their actions, their words, and their family- not from afar with an iPhone.
Preach all you'd like about slavery and I will never disagree, but don't fool yourself into thinking we are better off censoring a flag. We are better off debating about the issues underneath our knee jerk reactions. I strongly doubt you really think the members of the S. Carolina group are honoring slavery.Up north we like to believe Southerners don't take ownership of their past. But, they feel the stain of slavery, too; they do not hide it behind a flag and condemn the flag. They live with it and the sins of recent memory like the Jim Crow era and separate but equal. In their eyes, this makes them resent the portrayal Northerners have established in the National memory. That isn't my opinion, but it an opinion nonetheless.
Don't censor flags. Slavery = still bad. The end
The flag (and the war)
By anon
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 6:12pm
The flag (and the war) symboloizes different things to different people. I think Ira Glass explained it well: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/epi...
In the north the confederate flag generally sends a message of some type of crypto-neo-Naziism. In the South it's often shown as a symbol of sticking-it-to-the-man.
If you see a black person flying it, you can assume they're hipsters.
"Home of the Anti-Slavery Movement"
By Cuzidotrumpet
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 8:01pm
Seems like, according to history, that we were pretty anti-slavery.
BUT according to a certain court case, the judge didn't agree with us...right in Boston.
Um, war, in general, is almost more complicated than
By whyaduck
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 9:01am
most believe it to be.
However, I always chuckle when folks, like yourself, say the civil war was more complicated than slavery. Actually, slavery was a big portion of what was in play as the stupid southerners did not want to readily give up their, ahem "institution" of keeping fellow human beings enslaved (beaten, tortured, maimed, et. al.)
Thus the confederate flag and all it connotes is a symbol of that lovely period in our US history and its aftermath (I think it was also popular with fun groups like the KKK). Like a Nazi flag, it is a symbol that should be not be flown or carried unless you are participating as a WWII German or southern soldier in historic reenactments.
It was not "slavery" that was at issue....
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 9:38am
... but the North's ability to block any further _expansion_ of slavery into the territories that would soon become states -- and the South's need to expamd its market for slave selling (as the South's poor agricultural practices were leading to soil exhaustion in many parts of the South, while they continued to produce lots of brand new baby slaves).
Given the way the Constitution was written, the free states probably could not have managed to abolish slavery in the existing slave states for at least a century, But the South wanted more slave states (and territories) and had a grand plan for taking overmost of the Carribean , Central America and (at least) the northern tier of countries in South America. They also expected that their (planned) total control of the Mississippi would cause most of the midwestern states to ultimately abandon the Union and join the Confederacy -- leaving only New York and New England as the last vestige of "the North".
Hm, it sounds like from your post
By whyaduck
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 10:45am
that slavery, in regards to its expansion, was indeed an issue, no?
There was tension between the North and the South in regards to whether prospective new states in the Union would be slave holding or not. I can't comment on how long it would of taken to make human bondage in this country disappear without the Civil War but the south pushed the issue by starting the war and we all know the result.
Okie
By Sock_Puppet
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 10:48am
You can take the boy out of Oklahoma, but you can't take Oklahoma out of the boy. The perspective a person gets growing up in a place once in the crosshairs of slaver expansion is naturally different from the perspective gained from growing up in the area where abolitionism came about.
I can well understand that this is a perspective they might teach there - Indian Territory was also slave territory, and it suffered greatly during the war. It's true that expansion was a very sticky matter, hence the Missouri Compromise that gave us (or took away from us?) Maine. The compromise line was a temporary kludge, seen as untenable by the Founding Fathers themselves, and the only final solution was the unification of the country and the country's law through universal abolition of slavery.
The foreign expansionist goals of the slavers don't get a lot of airtime up here. William Walker notwithstanding, it's not clear they were anything but lunacy, and neither is it clear they played a role in accelerating the war for America.
Indian Territory
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 11:10am
There was a lot of internecine warfare within what is now Oklahoma. Every major tribe split on the ssue of slavery (and secession), typically with the most conservative members opposing slavery and the most "modern" ones favoring slavery (and owning slaves).
Of course the war was about slavery -- my point was just that it was not about the abolition of slavery (something most Northerners wouldn't have spent a drop of blood -- or a penny -- to accomplish -- prior to the Confederacy's beginning of hostilities). Rather, it was about the South's belief that a weak new Northern leader like Lincoln (so they thought) gave them the perfect opportunity to begin their quest to obtain more territory, with only ineffective opposition. They were getting very annoyed that the majority of inhabitants in the various Western territories were voting against allowing slavery. So much for the South's current battle cry for "states rights". No, the war was not about the ending of slavery, but about the South's forcible attempt to ensure that slavery would expand, even though it meant treasonous demolition of the country they belonged to.
And no, this perspective on the Civil War was NOT taught in Oklahoma -- even back n the 50s and 60s, before it became a de facto part of the new (old) South. (It was a mix of Midwest, West and South in my day).
Not quite. The problem was
By anon
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 4:36pm
Not quite. The problem was not that slave states wanted an expansion of slavery. Slavers in North Carolina didn't care if anyone in Kansas owned slaves or not. They just didn't want an expansion of non-slave states that would change the balance in Congress. US history in the 1850s is full of weird compromises that kept the republic 50-50 slave and free states.
Since the northern states were growing in population, the solution for the South was to secede and form their own country. Then the northern states could expand all they want without dominating the southern states.
Not really true...
By Michael Kerpan
Tue, 06/02/2015 - 9:06pm
... raising and selling slaves was potentially more profitable than selling cotton (especially when one's soil was near-exhausted due to bad agricultural methods -- most true in Alabama and Mississippi). And conquering a good chunk of the Caribbean and Latin America would have opened up lots of new markets. While the Western US may not have been as promising in terms of slave-powered plantation potential, it still had _some_ potential as a market for slaves.
The US Constitution was set up to protect the interests of slave holders -- slavery was not going to go away anytime soon -- no matter what happened to Kansas (in terms of slave vs. free state). The biggest need was to expand the territory into which slaves could be used.
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