The Sneaking Regarders of Dixie

A culture that believes that it is somehow acceptable to fly the Confederate Battle Flag outside the state capitol, having been forced to take it down from atop it only a few years ago in the face of national outrage, and which only put it up there as a "fuck you" to the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 or thereabouts, is at its core a racist one. Now, that may manifest itself in the sort of "we are only remembering our war dead and the Southern way of life, not slavery" sort of cognitive dissonance you got in that sort of nonsense David French wrote in National Review Online, but that's what it is. French also completely ignores history when he gives significance to the fact that it is the Battle Flag of the Confederacy that is still flown, rather than the 'national' flag of the Confederacy. The Battle Flag was always more popular, even during the Civil War. The Confederacy had three different 'national' flags during its short existence; the first change came "on account of [the flag's] resemblance to that of the abolition despotism against which we are fighting." The replacement was the Battle Flag on a white background.

Third Flag of the Confederacy

First Flag of the Confederacy

Second Flag of the Confederacy

Flag of Georgia until 2001

Current flag of Georgia. Spot the difference.

Of course whites in the South were able to have a gentlemanly and mannerly lifestyle, because it was paid for by the enslavement of African-Americans. John C. Calhoun made it clear in his writings that slavery was not just a necessary evil, it was a positive good that reduced class distinctions among white people, as they could all unite in white supremacism and superiority over the black untermensch. It was not just the Southern economy that depended on the enslavement of blacks, so too did the entire system of "genteel" social normss. And the idea that "my ancestors didn't have slaves - they were too poor to own them" is not a convincing one either. Just because your ancestors didn't own slaves because they were too poor to buy one doesn't mean the didn't aspire to being rich enough to own slaves, and supported the continuance social and economic system that would make that possible, even to the point of committing treason against the United States.

A failure to recognize that the "Southern way of life" was built on the backs, blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved human beings, is a failure to come to terms with the history of the South. Almost everything that David French wrote about why Southerners fought and why their descendants might want to honor them could also have been said about Germans post-1945, with the exception that Nazi emblems are illegal in Germany. A closer parallel is Japan.

A Japanese Consul General in Atlanta in the 1960s once remarked that he felt quite at home there, because people in the South, like the Japanese, carried the hurt at having been defeated at war. The Japanese attitude towards World War II is often ambiguous, and there is a strong right-wing element in Japanese society that sees Japan as a victim in WWII, just like many in the South see the "War of Northern Aggression". Unlike Germany, Japan in the 1930s and 1940s did not have a different flag, but if it did, and the Japanese government flew it from the Yasukuni Shrine, American ex-servicemen, their families and politicians from Louisiana to North Carolina would be lining up to condemn it as an insult to America's war dead. But it's ok to have variants of the Confederate flag in the state flags Mississippi and Georgia, to fly the Confederate Battle Flag outside the statehouses in Charleston and Tallahassee, to remember Confederate war dead? I don't think so.

They can dress it up all they want, but the continued embrace of the Confederacy and its emblems and symbols, sends a wink-wink nudge-nudge to those who hold more extreme views that there are plenty who have, what we used to call in Ireland in reference to terrorism, a "sneaking regard" for what it represents. You could never say it in public, but you wouldn't rush to the phone to call the Police either, if you saw something suspicious. "Whatever you say, say nothing", as they say in Belfast.

But more importantly, there is a need to recognize the fact that "the Southern way of life" was a racist way of life that was paid for and facilitated by the enslavement of African-Americans. When you celebrate and commemorate it, that is what you are celebrating and commemorating.