The Confederate Flag: Symbol of Our American Heritage
The Sons of Confederate Veterans have flown a 30-foot by 50-foot Confederate flag on the site of a memorial park in Eureka Springs, Florida. (Conveniently located just off the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard exit.) Its presence has sparked headlines around the country and fostered a charged debate about what the symbol really means: Southern pride, property rights, free speech, outright racism, or merely the soothing pop culture influence of FOX News.
Critics of the giant Confederate flag point out that in the past the flag has been a symbol of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist hate groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, more than 500 extremist groups use the Southern Cross as one of their symbols.
Marion Lambert of Tampa is quick to defend the giant Confederate flag, however:
They can either accept [the flag] as a hate-filled symbol or a heritage symbol. [...] This can be — if they want to be — a tourist attraction for Hillsborough County and being part of Dixie.
I don't care if everybody here is from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania, from places north. They write things like, well, I've been living here for 25 years, like a blog comment I read the other day, I've been living here for 25 years, the lady said, and I always thought the South started at the Georgia line. Well, low and behold, guess what, we're here.
The indigenous southern people are here and have not been recognized for 20 years and now we're dab-burn gonna be recognized and we're going to be embraced or there's gonna be the dickens to pay for it.
[...] The flag is going to be flown. As long as I have breath in my body and am able to function and articulate. And even if I’m gone, it doesn’t make a difference, the flag is going up. The Southern community is just enamored with this project.
I don't care if everybody here is from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania, from places north. They write things like, well, I've been living here for 25 years, like a blog comment I read the other day, I've been living here for 25 years, the lady said, and I always thought the South started at the Georgia line. Well, low and behold, guess what, we're here.
The indigenous southern people are here and have not been recognized for 20 years and now we're dab-burn gonna be recognized and we're going to be embraced or there's gonna be the dickens to pay for it.
[...] The flag is going to be flown. As long as I have breath in my body and am able to function and articulate. And even if I’m gone, it doesn’t make a difference, the flag is going up. The Southern community is just enamored with this project.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, A largely white organization, denies any racist bent in their organization. Though the soldiers that fought for the confederates were almost exclusively white, the organization has vowed that if they can find any descendents of African American soldiers that fought for the confederates in the Civil War that wish to join the Sons of Confederate Veterans, then the organization will be more than glad to let them serve drinks and clean up after party meetings.
27 Comments:
Well, the size of that "pudendum" seems to lend credence to the speculation about Ann's gender, but it's clear she squats to pee.
So there's that.
Oh, and I see my fellow Floridians have not abandoned their attempts to keep the "duh" in Floriduh. Good one that.
I'm embarrassed for having been born in the South. All my mother's family were cracker's, racist to their core. If they weren't all dead, they be so very fucking proud.
The Confederate flag was created in rebellion and it is the symbol of rebellion againt the lawful government of the United States. It glorifies that rebellion and its display could easily be considered treasonous.
Calling the Stars and Bars the symbol of Southern heritage is quite apt. The history of this vaunted "Southern heritage" is the history of slavery in America.
There would be no "Southern heritage" without slavery and and celebrating that heritage cannot be separated from celebrating slavery.
It's way past time to join the
20th century. Either stop pretending you're not racists or stop flying the Stars and Bars.
My eyes! My eyes!
Ann says, rightly, that the stars and bars was not the flag of the confederate states. It was actually a battle flag, and there were many of them.
In the clip you linked to [2], Ann says that the reason that the south is so proud of their heritage is that the benevolent north allowed them to retain their symbols.
According to wikipedia: For some time during the Reconstruction period, public display of any of the Confederate flags was forbidden and treated as contraband in the states occupied by Federal troops. It was also illegal to wear Confederate uniforms or military insignia. On January 25, 1867, federal troops in Rome, Georgia arrested four former Confederate soldiers for participating in a "tableau depicting an officer's funeral", and briefly wearing Confederate uniforms and draping a Confederate battle flag over a casket. The men were imprisoned for three weeks.
Just another error. oopsie.
Why does she still have a job?
I don't want to be rude to my fellow Americans to the south, but why is it "pride" to keep remembering how you lost a war? Or that you enslaved people? People that have proved over and over and over again that they are not your inferiors in any way?
Ann needs to study the fine art of "tucking" more intensely.
As a citizen of a southern state (Virginia) I often wonder when the four or so miserable years of the Confederacy became the center and glory of southern experience and culture. We lost for Christ's sake. It was a humiliating defeat.
When they talk in my state of a Confederate History month, I remind them that the Confederacy has no substantive history, and that four year of bloody war are hardly worth celebrating. Now if they want to celebrate true southern history, the 400 years that have gone by since the settlement of Jamestown, that would be all well and good, but the goddamned Confederacy would only rate half of a hot Saturday Afternoon worth of remembrance.
Thanks Dr Z, I won't be sleeping for the next few nights because of that picture of An...gulp...spit...belch....Coul...blech........spew!
Darling, I hear that they have reconstructive surgery now where one can have the ugly part of one's body sucked out and put back in a more desirable location.
It seems Ann had her adam's apple removed, split in two and placed where the sad craisins that once were her boobies used to be.
Much plumper, but I'd need a four-day tequila bender head start to even want to see that skanky chil' in a bikini.
In other words, my dear, eeeeuuuuggghhh
ahhh... ever so proud to be a floridian...
hey, who's that guy in the bikini?
1. I own (and use to fly) a Confederate flag, I am not a racist, just proud of where I am from. I took it down when the neighbors next door to me said it made them uncomfortable.
2. I see junk.
dab-burn?
next thing you know she'll go all out with teh "jolly gee willikers" and the flag will never come down
It seems that the same folks that see a paisley scarf and think "Terrorist" is pretty much the same gang that don't see a connection between the Confederate flag and the KKK.
Spirula: Ha! "Oh, and I see my fellow Floridians have not abandoned their attempts to keep the "duh" in Floriduh." That's a great line! I'm so gonna steal it.
Utah Savage: Oh, well. At least they aren't latte swilling elitists!
zak822: That's very well put. I'm not sure what I can add to what you wrote. :o)
Unconventional Conventionist: Ah! You hate to see the Confederate flag glorified as well! ;o)
Jess Wundrun: I see that you have been wiki-ing! Very good find on your part! I have no idea why she still has job. It's a freakin' miracle.
Übermilf: It doesn't make sense to me as well, and Marion Lambert rambling defense of the Confederate flag makes no sense either.
FranIAm: Ha! This sounds like a job for 'Tucker' Carlson!
Darwin's Dagger: That's very well put. Just like zak822's response, I'm not sure what I can add to what you wrote. "...Half of a hot Saturday Afternoon worth of remembrance" seems about right.
Bradda: Ah, the sight of the Confederate flag seems to have a detrimental effect on you as well!
Germaine Gregarious: After this post, a four-day tequila bender sounds pretty good to me too! **eeeeuuuuggghhh**
Kreplech: Why that is the RNC Party Chairman, of course!
Angry Ballerina: 1. It might not have been the best way to show your pride in light the flag modern symbolism.
2. Don't look at me. I just report the facts!
Pidomon: The flag may be useful as a way to mark the whereabouts of the less enlightened, though. There is always that. ;o)
ThoughtCriminal: It's amazing how the human mind is often able to find connections where there is none and unable to see connections where ther are.
No, I know now, at the time, I didn't take the negative aspect of it into consideration, and when they told me it made them feel uncomfortable, I felt like shit about it. (The father was black, and like, the nicest fucking dude ever, I felt like such a shitheel)
I think Angry Ballerina might be a good example for many Southerners who fly this flag. Ignorance of the symbolism of that flag has turned regional pride into something offensive. Ballerina learned about the symbolism of this flag and stopped displaying it - hopefully this can be said for all the others who display it as well.
Don't photoshop Coulter like that! It makes my big brain and my little brain fight. And it gets all confusing...
Yea, and what an embarrassing lesson it was.
My god. I think I'm blind.
Watch this. You'll love it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm0e1y5l028
You do know that pic is photoshopped it's so bloody obvious except to those that so badly want it to be true.
To dr. z and your ape-ish minions:
Well here Kool-Aid drinkers, here's the original Battle Flag bikini photo: hxxp://i2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/342/622/36/rebel-flag-bikini_copy.jpg
(In the URL above, change the 'xx' to 'tt'.)
For those of you who thought that was actually Miss Coulter posted above, I pity your poor eyesight, your gullability, and your acute lack of cognitive talents.
Let me remind all the not-knowing, the War of Northern Aggression was not about slavery until, already late in the game, Lincoln made it so. The North was losing badly, Union morale was desperately flagging and the much more skillful military leadership of the Southern armies was extremely close to capturing the White House and ending that war in a much different way.
Had the South won, slavery would have ended very soon thereafter. The wide-spread mechanization of agriculture already underway would have made slavery economically unviable.
Another thoroughly overlooked point, for all of you politically-sanitized apologists, is that on a per capita basis more blacks were owned as slave properties by other blacks than whites and all others. Meaning that many, many slaves in America were held in bondage by other African(American) owners.
Yet another thorougly overlooked item of historical significance is that there were slaves of every color in America. It is not solely a black experience. Thousands of caucasions entered this country indebted in captive servitude to others. Many of them suffered every humiliation, cruelty, sexual abuse and violent deaths at the hands of their "owners". But you wouldn't know that because Hollywood and the media leftistas (from which most of you probably get your very shallow knowledge of American history) never are interested in historical fact-finding when it doesn't suit their communist agenda.
I'm not making excuses for the South and it's use of slavery. Slavery is an abomination. But then it is also known that many African slaves thought their lot in life had become remarkably better as a "property" in America than it would have been back in Africa at the hands of their slave-trading African "brothers" and Muslim overlords. And uh, who, by the way, still ply the slave trade to this very day.
Where's the public outcry on this issue? There is none. It is "Dead" silence. Reverends Sharpton and Jackson are nowhere to be heard.... Hmmmm. Much like they are nowhere to be heard on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Which again is all about enslavement. The result looks every bit like genocide. And it is. But it's all about African and Arab Muslim factions "converting" the "infidels" (who just happen to be Christians or pagan animists.) dr.z where's you vocal dissent against theocracy on this one?
pwebster - Growing up in Alabama in the 60's I heard a lot of that neo-Confederate apologetic crap promoted by people who thought "Birth of a Nation" was a documentary. The Confederate south started the war to preserve it's "peculiar institution" of slavery and would have probably kept it into at least the early 20th century.
History is writtin by the victor. that been said the confederate flag is a symbol of the little man. how many fat slave owning assholes were "in the trenches" so to say. most soldiers faught for there homes and family. in fact some of us would say that it was our 2nd war of independence.... exept we lost. that flag meaans a lot to me, it tells me that when the government controlls to much of our lives we fight back the way our forefathers did. most of you are just as blind as the racist basterds who give the flag a bad name. p.s. pwebster good post p.s.s its my gosh darn right a a american to fly that flag and i will till i die but my stars and stripes will always be flown higher.
.....WITH LYBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR MOST
@crazy - The Confederate Constitution and the various Articles of Succession were written by and for those "Fat Slave Owning Assholes". To answer your question, about 33% of Southern families owned slaves and 50% of Confederate soldiers were from slave holding families. As for the rest, most believed their leaders who told them that freed slaves would take their jobs, murder, rob, and rape their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. Considerable effort was put into that propaganda and it was widely accepted by white southerners. There are many symbols for the fight for liberty, the Confederate flag is a poor choice.
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