Commentary: The Stars and Bars and Southern Heritage

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed-out in Slaughterhouse Five, wars are fought by children, generally male, who are usually too young to understand the discrepancy of politics. Adolescent boys are seldom motivated by any clear cut ideology other than patriotism. For example, our fathers and grandfathers didn’t go off to invade Normandy or the Philippines because of any particular support of FDR’s New Deal, but to protect their country by fighting evil. They wanted to be like the heroes that our country had before produced. They wanted to make their fathers proud and to protect their mothers and siblings.

What if they had been on the other side? What if they had been Germans? It’s my understanding that in the German army, many of the young recruits were good people who didn’t particularly identify with the Nazi party. Many had no grievance or score to settle with the Jews, Gypsies or gays. They only wanted to make their fathers proud and to protect their mothers and siblings. Many who fought in that war are still respected in Germany for their service to their country. It was possible to be extremely heroic, even while fighting in Hitler’s army.

Why then don’t the Germans fly the Swastika over their capital to celebrate their heritage? The question seems just plain dumb, but it’s evidently relative because it speaks to today’s news and the answer seems much too obvious to be missed. Could it be that the Nazi flag is not a part of their past of which to be proud? Would flying the Nazi flag seem to mean that they support all of the atrocities of Hitler’s rule?

We have just such a situation here in Dixie, where there are those who claim that the Confederate battle flag doesn’t represent slavery, but that the flag is a symbol of our heritage that’s meant as a reminder that there was a lot of good things about the Old South. That’s undoubtedly true, just as there was a lot of good things in Nazi occupied Europe, or in South Africa before apartheid was dismantled.

The comparison with the Nazis may seem extreme, but there’s probably not as much difference between them and the Confederacy as us Southerners would like to believe. If the Swastika can’t be separated from the holocaust, the Confederate flag cannot be separated from slavery, which was at the heart of the Confederacy. The Civil War was fought by white Southerners to insure that black people remain unfree. That’s the truth, and no matter how much we may wish to absolve our ancestors by dismissing slavery as “not a big thing,” in our hearts we know that it is one of the vilest crimes against humanity.

In other words, the CSA was no noble action like the Boston Tea Party or the Revolutionary War. It was not about “taxation without representation,” nor was it a matter of state’s rights.

I was raised to believe like my mother and father, that the Civil War had not been fought over slavery but over the right to secede from a union that had been joined voluntarily. At a very early age, I learned that this argument is like a lawyer’s trick, a confusion of the issue, a truth designed to hide another truth. The indisputable fact is that the southern states wished to secede because they feared that the federal government was about to abolish slavery. The Confederates, and the flag they flew in battle, were about that, and nothing more.

In the year 2000, state governments are duty bound to represent all of their citizens. This includes the rights of the minority of citizens who are the descendants of slaves, as well as a majority whose ancestors might have been slave owners. To fly the Confederate flag over a government building is, in effect, an open admission that there is still not equal representation under the law. Nobody with good sense wants that to be true.

Yes, there were a great many good southern boys who went off to fight the good fight in the Civil War. They were valiant and heroic. Undoubtedly, they made their fathers proud in their attempt to protect their mothers and siblings from the invading Yankee horde. They didn’t necessarily understand that they were fighting for slavery more than they were fighting for anything else.

While we can be proud of our misguided ancestor boys, we must recognize that the Confederate flag is a part of our past that cannot be a part of our present. It’s time to take it down and fold it for the last time, because whenever it’s flown in public it’s an assault on all who believe in the dignity of humankind. Retiring it would be the best way to honor those good men who fought on the wrong side of the wrong war.

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