About that flag...you know, that one

[Stavros]

It is the Fourth of July, so I expect most of our Americans friends are out on the deck with family and friends, tucking into something delicious...best wishes to the USA, and bon appetit!

Now, about that flag, you know which one I am talking about.
Go on, America tell us what you think, because you know you want to!

And no, I don't mean this one:

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/u/us-csa1v.gif

[Ben in LA]

When "they" started associating themselves with it, things like the so-called true intent of the flag "changed" a bit. Say what you want, put your spin on things...but this cannot be denied.

[Ben in LA]

Then again, we DO have folks like this...smdh...

[broncofan]

My opinion probably won't surprise anyone. We have a reasonably unique heritage in this country of having treated a race of people as chattel. When the ostensible owners of people were threatened with the liberation of their chattel, they attempted to secede and waged the bloodiest war in our nation's history. For me, the confederate flag represents that secessionist movement, namely because that is the flag they flew in support of their treason. Treason, based on a desire to deny human rights to a race of people, with hundreds of thousands dead as a result. I understand there are other proposed causes of the Civil War, but I believe preservation of slavery was the primary one.

But what special meaning does it have to those who claim it represents their tradition? To me, it is a very poorly disguised celebration of racism.

[Stavros]

I was aware that there was something called the 'Stars and Bars' but when I briefly looked into this, what struck me was that one flag is identified as the flag of the Confederacy, whereas the other one -yes, that one- is described as Robert E. Lee's battle flag. To me this suggests that the symbol of the latter is that it is used when waging war on a battlefield, that it is associated with violence rather than, say, politics. For that reason I can understand why so many people object to it and its associations, as they were during the Civil War, and the way in which the flag has since been used in films and in political movements.

One odd side effect of this, I have read, is that tv stations have decided not to re-run old episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard. I recall watching this rubbish programme with the sound off, but only because of Daisy, and believe it or not, because there were two transexual hookers I saw in a cafe on the corner of the Boulevard de Clichy and the Rue Houdon in Paris in 1973 and she looked exactly like them. I was in a group of six at the time and when I returned alone a few weeks later they had gone, as they do. Hot pants were all the rage in the 1970s.
The rest is a car crash.

[trish]

Flags are just symbols. Flying them or burning them hurts no one any more than does speech. So what does is South Carolina trying to say when flies the flag of the Confederacy? The first time that flag flew over the South Carolina State Capitol since the Civil War was in 1964. Before 1964 the South voted solidly democratic. But 1964 saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed. This flag when up in protest. Not until this millennium was it removed from the State Capitol. But it was placed on State land and legislation was passed that required a 2/3 majority vote to take it down. The flag doesn’t just symbolize racism; it is speech. It is a clear and continuing statement of opposition to Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Speech is protected. As far as I’m concerned...as far as the First Amendment is concerned...citizens of the U.S. can under reasonable circumstances say whatever they please. They may assemble, rally, fly flags or burn them. Of course if you participate in racist speech, then others are also free to judge and call you on it. Nevertheless I do think the State Government of South Carolina would do itself a favor if it retired that flag to the dustbin of history. Its people can continue to do as they please.

[buttslinger]

In Gone with the Wind, Ashley talks about the beautiful dream that was the old south, but reality broke it to pieces. If you hate the stars and bars that flew for four short years, what about the stars and stripes that applauded slavery and racism for 200 years???!!!!

For the South the Civil War was the GLORY years, for the hippies it was the summer of love, for the Chicago Bears it was the '85 season. Married couples have that first year of marriage to remember, Trannies have that year when strange guys came up to them and PAY them to suck their dick!!!!
Then reality sets in.

When it comes to ORGANIZATION, the ONE PERCENT is heads and shoulders above the new niggers, the middle class. In a sense we GIVE them half our paycheck every week!! They are truly color blind when it comes to Americans.
Speaking as someone who has LEE blood on my Mother's side, it's not Jesse Owens, or Art Monk, or even Beyoncé we have a problem with. It's the black kids that robbed me, broke into my house, vandalized my property, and blame the white man for making them do it because of slavery.
Of course I'm being cartoonish and simple, maybe a better point is that blacks would be better off trying to send all the Mexicans back to Mexico instead of protesting against a bunch of cracker cops and rednecks, the rednecks are a dying breed, but Hispanics are up and coming. Lots of employers these days are skipping right over the John and Jerome resumes to hire Jose.
You guys in England have nothing to compare this to. All your multi-millionaires have moved to the States for the lower tax rates.

It's easy to boo the confederate flag, I say put it in the museum. That leaves us with the American flag. Look out rest of the world. We've been fighting each other as long as we've been here.

[martin48]

You mean she'll have to take this off? Shame

[dreamon]

When "they" started associating themselves with it, things like the so-called true intent of the flag "changed" a bit. Say what you want, put your spin on things...but this cannot be denied.

860158

[trish]

It's true, some people rally under the U.S. flag using it as symbol of racial purity. Those people want to build walls, severely limit immigration and deny minorities the right to vote. Some flag wavers don't even believe Obama is a citizen or the rightful president of the U.S. (although they make no noise about Cruz's birth certificate). Indeed, the U.S. flag flew over Southern States while they endorsed the slavery of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.

The difference today is that the Union, flying the U.S. flag, put a stop to the horror and fought against slavery. The Confederacy, flying the treasonous battle flag, fought for slavery. S.C. flew the Confederate Flag as a protest against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Flying the flag is speech, and the what the State Government of S.C. said when it flew that flag is, "We disapprove of civil rights for minorities." Dreamon can thumb down as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that it a racist flag; it is the flag of treason. The First Amendment gives one the right to fly it and it gives others the right to judge one for flying it.

The S.C. legislature wisely voted not to fly it anymore. Will this decision end racism? When a State discontinues a daily ritual endorsing racism, will that put an end to racism? In the long run it can't hurt. Some people maintain, S.C. is only treating a symptom. Perhaps, but also the fact that S.C. discontinued this one racist ritual is symptomatic of a glacially slow but ongoing change that can be traced to the initial disagreements in this nation over the morality of slavery.

[EirikSmith]

I'm just glad there will be less traffic cone orange being used needlessly.

The bikini is nice.

Ratio.

[fred41]

The S.C. legislature wisely voted not to fly it anymore. Will this decision end racism? When a State discontinues a daily ritual endorsing racism, will that put an end to racism? In the long run it can't hurt. Some people maintain, S.C. is only treating a symptom. Perhaps, but also the fact that S.C. discontinued this one racist ritual is symptomatic of a glacially slow but ongoing change that can be traced to the initial disagreements in this nation over the morality of slavery.

Racism/Prejudice, in all its forms, will go on til the end of humankind - It's used as a shield to cover so-o-o-o many insecurities,... but S.C not flying the flag is huge. I was thinking about this just now (granted, I had just finished a bottle of relatively cheap wine...and some old weed) and... I know it doesn't feel huge...but that's because so many other socio-political things happened in the last five years or so -- let's face it : those State gay marriage laws; more LGBT military rights; loosening some drug laws (especially Colorado); etc. are gigantic,
and that's kind of my point...
I don't really think the tide of change is political, in the more aggressive form...
I think it's just common sense in a generational form.
A lot of politics in forums are battled by the extreme fringes...but I've always believed that the majority of people live in an ocean of gray. It's more of an : 'I can live with this', or 'this helps me, my family or friends,' or 'but..we need some control/laws', or ' This really hurts some people that don't deserve it', or 'Are you kidding me??!!', Etc....

People are just changing by generation. In S.C. the majority of folks sitting on the side...or on top of...the fence, on past and present, political issues regarding the 'Stars and Bars'...are probably just saying - "What rational argument can you use, at this time in history, to support a flag - that doesn't represent the U.S.A, and is so strongly associated with pro-slavery rights and secession / treason?"...
answer: "NONE"...let's just get rid of it.
common sense.

and (since it was mentioned) ..shout out to the first amendment...love it...but getting rid of this flag does nothing to undermine one's support of it.

[fred41]

The bikini is nice.

Ratio.

The bikini, or more important - what's wearing it, is nice.
...But what's wearing it is always gonna look hot.
Hell, she'd look good in a Swastika bikini...but ....same thing never-the-less.

[Ben in LA]

860158

The thing is, if folks start stomping on that flag because of what it represents in this particular image, people will collectively lose their minds and be filled with anger. It's a Catch-22.

[Stavros]

I read this account of an interview with White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly and wonder how he can so distort the history of the USA and its Civil War. This is what it is reported he said:

White House chief of staff John Kelly has waded into the debate over Confederate statues, stating that the Civil War was prompted by an inability to compromise while suggesting both sides acted in “good faith”.
Speaking with Fox News in a rare interview, Kelly described Confederate general Robert E Lee as “an honorable man” while discussing the recent push to remove monuments and symbols memorializing the pro-slavery Confederacy.
...
Kelly then went on to say Lee, the general of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, “was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state”.
“It was always loyalty to state first back in those days,” said Kelly, while adding: “But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/31/john-kelly-says-us-civil-war-was-prompted-by-inability-to-compromise

It is true that Lee was initially approached by Lincoln to support the Union, and that Lee refused because he would not fight against his own state -but what was Lee fighting for, and in view of the position he achieved, as military leader of the Confederate Army, what was he fighting against? Even if one sets aside the issue of the changing US economy, the growth of industry in the north against the plantation economy of the south, the opportunities for independent farmsteads in the west -Slavery was fundamental to the cause of the war because it had become the pivot which swung the balance of power in Congress. The Southern States were afraid that democracy would upset the balance of power in Congress in favour of free states, and rather than accept the process of democracy and change with the times with regard to slavery they sought to defend both slavery and their representation in Congress -and if they lost out then to hell with it, they would take the ball, leave the field and play their game somewhere else where they would always win.

Kelly must surely have heard of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which traded a slave state for a free state (Missouri and Maine) in order to satisfy the claim by southern states that they were being 'outnumbered' by free states in the north -at a time when they were allowed to boost their electoral college votes by counting slaves as citizens even though slaves were not allowed to vote- and the Compromise of 1850 with free and slave states -California, New Mexico and Utah, with the purchase of slaves (but not slave ownership) outlawed in DC; the violence that erupted over the 'Kansas-Nebraska Act' in 1856 and the apparent end of compromise with Lincoln's election in 1860 -but what do all of these events amount to, if not a determination of the southern slave states to make their membership of the Union dependent on their definition of who an American with the right to vote must be? And that this American is not, and cannot be black?

You could argue the South was protecting the plantation economy, but this entire economic and social order was based on slavery, and slavery was always based on the claim that Black people are not humans in the same way that White people are, that 'race' was (is) a defining feature of division shaped by superiority in one and inferiority in the other.

Crucially, the South seceded from the Union because it no longer believed in America, the intention was to secede from the USA and to form a separate grouping of states. By definition, the Confederacy was anti--American, its flags were, and remain, anti-American flags, and when John Kelly says of Robert E. Lee that he was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state he is right -so why is the White House Chief of Staff defending a man who was anti-American?A man who defined his politics in terms of slavery, in terms of a theory of race that described Black people as 'human chattle', whose flag is a living and blistering reminder of prejudice and hate, and is so thoroughly anti-American?

Makes you wonder -whose side is he on?

[natina]

Evil chattel slavery, evil done by evil men

Example

http://images.betterworldbooks.com/038/Celia-a-Slave-McLaurin-Melton-A-9780380719358.jpg






For nineteen-year-old Celia, a slave on a Missouri farm, five years of being repeatedly raped by her middle-aged owner was enough. On the night of June 23, 1855, she would later tell a reporter, "the Devil got into me" and Celia fatally clubbed her master as he approached her in her cabin. The murder trial of the slave Celia, coming at a time when the controversy over the issue of slavery reached new heights, raised fundamental questions about the rights of slaves to fight back against the worst of slavery's abuses.


Robert Newsom and his family left Virginia , finally settling land along the Middle River in southern Callaway County, Missouri.(according to the census), Newsom owned eight-hundred acres of land & livestock.Newsom also owned slaves--five male slaves as of 1850.

During the summer of 1850, Newsom purchased from a slave owner in neighboring Audrain County a sixth slave, a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia. Shortly after returning with Celia to his farm, Newsom raped her. For female slaves, rape was an "ever present threat" and, far too often, a reality. Over the next five years, Newsom would make countless treks to Celia's slave cabin, located in a grove of fruit trees some distance from his main house, and demand sex from the teenager he considered his concubine. Celia gave birth to two children , the second being the son of Robert Newsom.

a real lover, another one of Newsom's slaves named George, entered Celia's life. On several occasions, George "stayed" at Celia's cabin, although whether for a few hours or an entire night is unknown. In late winter, either February or early March, of 1855, Celia again became pregnant. The pregnancy affected George, and caused him to insist that Celia put an end to the pattern of sexual exploitation by Newsom that continued to that time. George informed Celia that "he would have nothing more to do with her if she did not quit the old man" [trial].

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiahome.html

[natina]

1036483