Confederate Flag: Symbol of ?

[emilynghiem]

Actually the British did enslave hundreds of thousands of Irish.

Dear Dissent: I don't think any other race or tribe of people were kept as cattle and even BRED (by systematically raping the women) to create more slaves!

Not even the Native Americans, who were forced to go through sterilizations but never forced to breed to "create more property".

This level of subjugation is painful enough, and is carried spiritually to future generations still working out those pains until these are more fully healed.

It adds a whole other level of pain and anger to add racial division to this, real or perceived.
Not only do the acts of oppression and economic injustice need to be resolved,
but also the "perceptions" of race and control as another layer on top of it all.

I don't think you can compare that pain to either the British/Irish or to the Native Americans who have their own deep rooted pain from genocide also beyond comparison.

I learned the best way to facilitate the healing is to respect people's perspectives and process, and especially not try to compete or compare which isn't fair or helpful to anyone.

 

[rightwinger]

Hahaha, the only people that think that way are the KKK, who no one in the right mind has respect for. I dont think that anyone in america has forgotten the civil war or what it stood for. I can guarantee country music isn't sending subliminal messages to its listeners, saying we need to enslave blacks again, and split the country in half. Your trying to squeeze out meaning that only a very few retards follow. Mickey is a prejudice term towards the Irish, I dont hear anyone claiming that mickey mouse is a prejudice symbol towards the Irish and should not be shown anymore. Get with it, its a little ridiculous.

Nobody broke into homes of the Irish in the middle of the night to drag off and lynch a family member wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. If they did, that hat would be offensive to the Irish.

What? Im sorry this statement does not make sense to me.

Not surprised

 

[emilynghiem]

What most people fail to Understand about the Confederate Flag, is the fact that during the Civil War the Vast Majority of people who lived in the South did not own Slaves. For them the war was about an Abusive Federal Government that they felt was no better than the King of England had.

So the Flag for Most of them was a symbol of Independence for DC.

I agree with this part.

However most since that war, Racist assholes have flown the Flag as a symbol of their Hate for Blacks. So it has gotten a worse image than it really deserves.

I am tempted to make a terrible inside joke, and say that if this were the case, the Flag should be flown by the Democrat Party for completely destroying Freedmen's Town and letting national historic Black churches burn down. But no one would get this comment.

I personally have very Mixed Feeling about the Civil war, I was I have studied in Great length. While the very though of People owning other people is Deplorable and unthinkable to me. I do have Sympathies for the Idea of states standing up against an Abusive Central Government. After all this Country was Born for that very Reason, and it seems silly that we keep ceding State's rights and powers to an Increasingly Powerful Federal Government.

Ironically, If the Southern States who left the Union back then could see how bad things have gotten today as far as Abuse of Federal Power, they would realize they had it Damn Fucking good back then, and their stupid fucking war cost the States in the Fight for their rights and Power, All of them, not just the southern ones.

I agree we are going through some similar cycles again.
Hope we can learn from our history instead of destroying and losing it!

 

[emilynghiem]

Hahaha, the only people that think that way are the KKK, who no one in the right mind has respect for. I dont think that anyone in america has forgotten the civil war or what it stood for. I can guarantee country music isn't sending subliminal messages to its listeners, saying we need to enslave blacks again, and split the country in half. Your trying to squeeze out meaning that only a very few retards follow. Mickey is a prejudice term towards the Irish, I dont hear anyone claiming that mickey mouse is a prejudice symbol towards the Irish and should not be shown anymore. Get with it, its a little ridiculous.

Nobody broke into homes of the Irish in the middle of the night to drag off and lynch a family member wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. If they did, that hat would be offensive to the Irish.

What? Im sorry this statement does not make sense to me.

I think what he is saying, is there were as many cases of "Mickey Mouse" hats associated with targeting and lynching Irish people as there were cases of abusing the Confederate Flag to symbolize hating, targeting and lynching Blacks, then you would have the same phenomena of people rejecting that symbol as racially offensive. That is my guess, sound right or close enough?

 

[Charles_Main]

Have any of you guys ever gone to the White House?

Yep, Twice. Me and the wife took the tour once, and once when I was Much Younger me and some friends of mine drove to DC and parked thinking we would walk to see the WH. Only once you are the ground in DC you realize it's not as Wide Open as the WH looks from the Front on TV. We ended up coming around a corner of some office type Building, and walking toward what we first thought was a park with an Brick and Iron Fence, but as we got closer we realized it was the back entrance basically to the WH, Or one of them anyways. The Marine with the M16 made that clear.

lol

 

[Gadawg73]

Actually the British did enslave hundreds of thousands of Irish.

No, they did not enslave hundreds of thousands of Irish. Cromwell did round up thousands, possibly 20,000, and sent them to many Caribean areas including Jamaica where I just returned from last night. In fact, many of the streets in Discovery and Runaway Bay have Irish names and some of the dialect there came from the Irish.

Barbary Pirates captured many others, as many as 1.5 million and many of those were Irish but it was not the British that enslaved an entire race of Irish as we did for 99% of Africans here in America.
And my Irish heritage goes back to a long time here and none of them were slaves of the British.
Apples and oranges is all the argument you have?

 

[Gadawg73]

Hahaha, the only people that think that way are the KKK, who no one in the right mind has respect for. I dont think that anyone in america has forgotten the civil war or what it stood for. I can guarantee country music isn't sending subliminal messages to its listeners, saying we need to enslave blacks again, and split the country in half. Your trying to squeeze out meaning that only a very few retards follow. Mickey is a prejudice term towards the Irish, I dont hear anyone claiming that mickey mouse is a prejudice symbol towards the Irish and should not be shown anymore. Get with it, its a little ridiculous.

I am part Irish.
Do not remember any of my relatives castrated, having their children and wives sold away, in slavery for 300 years here, their churches fire bombed and men lynched and killed.
Your Mickey Mouse analogy is in fact a Mickey Mouse argument.

A majority of the Irish history for the past millennium has been one big story of being oppressed. And people back then were very, very unfriendly to the Irish immigrants. So do some research in Irish history, cause they didn't have it easy either. Either way, how many people who have a confederate flag symbol outside of the KKK actually believe that blacks should be enslaved again? I am also trying to think of a society that wasn't enslaved at one point, or that did not enslave others...Im really having a hard time.

And If you do your research in civil war history, you will find that a lot of the men who fought for the south, did so because back then your values went from most importance to least importance like this: god, family, state, and then country. I.E. Robert E. Lee actually opposed slavery, but his values lied more strongly with his state of virginia, than it did the country of the united states. Not many people in the south actually owned slaves, or strongly agreed with it, It was the richer plantation owners that owned slaves and influenced the south to secede from the union. These were the bad people back then. Key functional word there is back then. No one in this nation right now is guilty of enslaving a race, nor should anyone feel animosity towards anybody because they were enslaved (b/c no one living has been enslaved). If somebody out there today believes that we should enslave blacks, then they should be dismissed as racist idiots, just like you would dismiss someone who believes that the government is controlled by aliens. You dont talk to people like that and give them what they want, you let them wallow in their own feces of thoughts.

The christian cross was the main symbol of the crusades, but most of the people who wear a cross around their neck are not in support of putting on their armor, grabbing their swords, and killing/converting all the muslims. Same goes for most of the people that have a confederate symbol on their truck, clothes, accessories, etc. It doesn't mean what you claim it means for them.

So we see no one being "unfriendly" to immigrants of all other ethnic groups in the history of this nation?
Take a good look NOW.
Dude, I was born and raised in the deep south. I am 59 years old. Played on the first integrated team in high school here and saw almost everything integrated here in the mid 60s. Saw mobs of red necks that were fathers of my team mates and friends use violence against black women and children. Southern senators of that era objected to mixed race jazz bands playing at the damn White House.
Do you have ANY CLUE why the Confederate battle flag WAS PUT on the Georgia state flag in 1956? From 1866 until 1956 the Georgia flag WAS NOT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG.
They changed it in 1956 as a stand against the Supreme Court's ruling Brown v. Board of Education banning segregation.

For the majority of those here that flash that flag around it is all about hate. Those of us that have respect for our heritage DO NOT have to flash it around.
We are Americans first. That is our flag.
In 1956 southern women in The United Daughters of the Confederacy OPPOSED the Confederate stars and bars in the Georgia flag.
Respectfully, please quit showing your total lack of knowledge on this subject. I lived it. All I post is historical fact.
You do not live in the real world and definitely not in the south.

 

[tinydancer]

Before I moved to the States, I viewed it as a flag of oppression and racism. After living in the South, I have come to realize it is also a symbol of pride. My black friends think it's the former. I now think its both.

Oh thank you so much.



Both are true. You have skin heads who use this particular flag as a symbol of racism but on the other hand you have the true use of the flag and many don't know this as a true representation of one of the most agonizing periods of American History.

But here is the most important part.

How America rose above so many other countries healing past conflicts.

But people can not, shall not, must not wipe it out. It is history. And history is a subtle weaving of facts and legends.

 

[oldfart]

What most people fail to Understand about the Confederate Flag, is the fact that during the Civil War the Vast Majority of people who lived in the South did not own Slaves. For them the war was about an Abusive Federal Government that they felt was no better than the King of England had been.

OK, historian, how was the South abused between 1820 and 1860? I defy you to come up with any issue other than the slave power's voracious appetite to extend into every territory and state. They controlled the federal government, dictated tariff and industrial and banking policy (the major issues of the day), censored the mails, and demanded the odious Fugitive Slave Act. In 1861 they would not accept the Cittenden Amendment nor Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation in 1861 through 1863. On February 3, 1865 they chose to prolong the war when it was obviously nearing its end by rejecting Lincoln's generous terms at the Hampton Roads conference. These were not an oppressed people, these were an evil and arrogant people who never took responsibility for their actions and killed hundreds of thousands as result.

Now impress me with your knowledge of the Civil War; how many Southern states contributed white regiments (not regiments of the United States Colored Forces) to fight in the Union Army? And ow many troops of the Confederacy were not available to General Lee because they were tied down trying to suppress Unionist uprisings in large parts of the South? How much do Southerners today honor and memorialize their ancestors who fought on the RIGHT SIDE of the war for the Union? Is not that a part of Southern heritage too?

 

[squeeze berry]

how many people still alive in the kkk actually participate in a lynching?

Actually a pretty good question. In the 50's, 60's, and early 70's white resistance in the South was led by White Citizen's Councils where "respectable" segregationists in public office and the business community tried to slow or reverse desegregation. The local muscle to rough up Freedom Riders and shoot into occupied houses and burn churches was delegated to the Klan. In a typical Southern county the White Citizens Council normally included the Sheriff, Chief of Police, Mayor, President of the Bank, County Superintendent of Schools and so forth. The Chief Deputy was often the Klan head, supported by all the good ol' boys he went to school with.

The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched between 1882 and 1968. The last full public lynching in the South was probably Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. After that, people were killed (Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in 1964 for example) in racially motivated slayings, but these more nearly resembled assassinations or mob hits rather than traditional lynchings. In the decade from 2000 to 2009 a number of high profile cases which had ended in hung juries were retried and convictions obtained.

So to answer, there are probably two or three dozen inmates in prison today serving long sentences for racially motivated murder, attempted murder, arson, and similar violent
crimes. I believe six of them are there for trying to kill Morris Dees. To the best of my knowledge, all of them were members of the KKK or a successor white supremacy organization such as Aryan Nation, or had close ties to such organizations. The traditional meeting place is the Stormfront.org website.

a drop in the bucket compared to the contemporary black on white crime rate

 

[squeeze berry]

Most whites perceive the flag as a symbol of treason.

Speaking as a lifelong Californian, I see a great dichotomy in the perception of the Confederate Flag between White and Black Americans. For my Black friends, it seems to be a symbol of slavery, segregation, discrimination and racism. For my White friends, it is a symbol of Civil War military battles, moonshine and backwoods shenanigans a la the Dukes of Hazard.

I wonder if these divergent views will ever be reconciled.

Even in its best connotation the Confederate Flag symbolizes a revolution to preserve the right to own other people

you can always look the other way if you don't like it.

Your rights end where someone else's begins.

 

[rightwinger]

Most whites perceive the flag as a symbol of treason.

Even in its best connotation the Confederate Flag symbolizes a revolution to preserve the right to own other people

you can always look the other way if you don't like it.

Your rights end where someone else's begins.

Nobody has questioned your individual right to declare your racism

It is when you insist that schools and government agencies support your racism that it becomes an issue

 

[jillian]

Speaking as a lifelong Californian, I see a great dichotomy in the perception of the Confederate Flag between White and Black Americans. For my Black friends, it seems to be a symbol of slavery, segregation, discrimination and racism. For my White friends, it is a symbol of Civil War military battles, moonshine and backwoods shenanigans a la the Dukes of Hazard.

I wonder if these divergent views will ever be reconciled.

people who aren't black and aren't southern KNOW that it's a symbol of racism, slavery and jim crow laws.

and if your friend glorifies the civil war, he's glorifying treason.

personally, i'm not sure lincoln did us a favor keeping the union.

 

[midcan5]

Related piece.

Religious Symbol or Cultural Symbol? - NYTimes.com

"What bothers me is the spectacle of a court declaring with a straight face that the state-mandated display of crucifixes has nothing to do with religion or indoctrination, and supporting its conclusion with arguments that don’t pass the laugh-test for half a second." SF

 

[usmcstinger]

The confederate flag is a symbol of the most casualties ( 750,000 ) the US has ever sustained in a War.

“But wars have profound economic, demographic and social costs,” he went on. “We’re seeing at least 37,000 more widows here, and 90,000 more orphans. That’s a profound social impact, and it’s our duty to get it right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/s...cent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From February 1864 until the end of the American Civil War (1861-65) in April 1865, Andersonville, Georgia, served as the site of a notorious Confederate military prison. The prison at Andersonville, officially called Camp Sumter, was the South's largest prison for captured Union soldiers and known for its unhealthy conditions and high death rate. In all, approximately 13,000 Union prisoners perished at Andersonville, and following the war its commander, Captain Henry Wirz (1823-65), was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes.
Andersonville — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts

There Confederate Flag is the symbol of the worst period of our history.
Nothing to ever be proud about.

 

[squeeze berry]

Even in its best connotation the Confederate Flag symbolizes a revolution to preserve the right to own other people

you can always look the other way if you don't like it.

Your rights end where someone else's begins.

Nobody has questioned your individual right to declare your racism

It is when you insist that schools and government agencies support your racism that it becomes an issue

and no one is questioning your right to declare your racism either

 

[squeeze berry]

The confederate flag is a symbol of the most casualties ( 750,000 ) the US has ever sustained in a War.

“But wars have profound economic, demographic and social costs,” he went on. “We’re seeing at least 37,000 more widows here, and 90,000 more orphans. That’s a profound social impact, and it’s our duty to get it right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/s...cent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From February 1864 until the end of the American Civil War (1861-65) in April 1865, Andersonville, Georgia, served as the site of a notorious Confederate military prison. The prison at Andersonville, officially called Camp Sumter, was the South's largest prison for captured Union soldiers and known for its unhealthy conditions and high death rate. In all, approximately 13,000 Union prisoners perished at Andersonville, and following the war its commander, Captain Henry Wirz (1823-65), was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes.
Andersonville — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts

There Confederate Flag is the symbol of the worst period of our history.
Nothing to ever be proud about.

the war was not necessary.

Lincoln could have let them go.

 

[Gadawg73]

The confederate flag is a symbol of the most casualties ( 750,000 ) the US has ever sustained in a War.

“But wars have profound economic, demographic and social costs,” he went on. “We’re seeing at least 37,000 more widows here, and 90,000 more orphans. That’s a profound social impact, and it’s our duty to get it right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/s...cent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From February 1864 until the end of the American Civil War (1861-65) in April 1865, Andersonville, Georgia, served as the site of a notorious Confederate military prison. The prison at Andersonville, officially called Camp Sumter, was the South's largest prison for captured Union soldiers and known for its unhealthy conditions and high death rate. In all, approximately 13,000 Union prisoners perished at Andersonville, and following the war its commander, Captain Henry Wirz (1823-65), was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes.
Andersonville — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts

There Confederate Flag is the symbol of the worst period of our history.
Nothing to ever be proud about.

the war was not necessary.

Lincoln could have let them go.

And all the southern states would have obeyed his command.

 

[Dissent]

Actually the British did enslave hundreds of thousands of Irish.

No, they did not enslave hundreds of thousands of Irish. Cromwell did round up thousands, possibly 20,000, and sent them to many Caribean areas including Jamaica where I just returned from last night. In fact, many of the streets in Discovery and Runaway Bay have Irish names and some of the dialect there came from the Irish.

Barbary Pirates captured many others, as many as 1.5 million and many of those were Irish but it was not the British that enslaved an entire race of Irish as we did for 99% of Africans here in America.
And my Irish heritage goes back to a long time here and none of them were slaves of the British.
Apples and oranges is all the argument you have?

Oh and did you know that no confederate flag EVER flew over a slave ship but a US flag did...so I see the US flag as more racist than the Confederate flag

The confederate flag is a symbol of the most casualties ( 750,000 ) the US has ever sustained in a War.

“But wars have profound economic, demographic and social costs,” he went on. “We’re seeing at least 37,000 more widows here, and 90,000 more orphans. That’s a profound social impact, and it’s our duty to get it right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/s...cent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From February 1864 until the end of the American Civil War (1861-65) in April 1865, Andersonville, Georgia, served as the site of a notorious Confederate military prison. The prison at Andersonville, officially called Camp Sumter, was the South's largest prison for captured Union soldiers and known for its unhealthy conditions and high death rate. In all, approximately 13,000 Union prisoners perished at Andersonville, and following the war its commander, Captain Henry Wirz (1823-65), was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes.
Andersonville — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts

There Confederate Flag is the symbol of the worst period of our history.
Nothing to ever be proud about.

the war was not necessary.

Lincoln could have let them go.

And all the southern states would have obeyed his command.

Why should they have listened to him? He was a tyrant and a dictator who imprisoned a US congressman for being against the war and tried to crush the first amendment when newspapers were against the war. The states VOLUNTARILY joined the union they have every right to this day to leave it. Statism ideas so good they have to be enforced at the barrel of a gun...thank goodness my kids will learn the truth about ole lincoln the tyrant.

 

[jillian]

you can always look the other way if you don't like it.

Your rights end where someone else's begins.

Nobody has questioned your individual right to declare your racism

It is when you insist that schools and government agencies support your racism that it becomes an issue

and no one is questioning your right to declare your racism either

it isn't racism to point out others' racism.

it's impressive how racists like trying that little scam, though.