Friar Bijou wrote:
SEE POST #52
No; seriously. You, gabji, have shown consistently you have NO grasp of American history, so just stop already.
And your evidence for this is?
Here's a page discussing the historical reasons for confederate soldiers enlisting and fighting. Supporting slavery isn't one of them.
Here's a paper written on the subject, referencing sources. Note that, once again, defense of slavery isn't mentioned as a motivation.
Here's yet another (with similar sources btw). This one directly points out that the perception of what the war was about changed during the civil rights era. Prior to that point, no one thought it was about slavery or racial equality. The idea that it was centrally about those issues is an invention after the fact. A re-writing of history.
But I'm the one who has no grasp of history? While today we tend to define the conflict as being for or against slavery, and demonize symbols from the era within the context of racism, those things were absolutely not on the minds of those doing the fighting. There was as much racism in the North as in the South. Slavery was far more about economics than anything else. If the North had large tracks of land good for growing crops that required massive amounts of labor to work in quantities high enough to be profitable, it would have had slavery as well. It's a modern myth that the people living in the north were somehow magically more socially evolved on the issue of race than those living in the south. And yes, this means that equating symbols of those who fought in the confederate army as "racist", is just plain absurd.
Those who actually have a strong grasp of American history know better. Sadly, we're increasingly outnumbered by masses of poorly educated people taught to react emotionally to whatever trigger is put in front of them instead of taking the time to understand something prior to making a decision about it. As I said at the outset, I don't care one way or the other about the flag in question. It holds no particular meaning to me. But, for me, that doesn't mean that I should automatically denigrate those for whom it does, or pretend that there must be some kind of moral superiority in opposing said flag. To me, that's just a different and even more ugly form of flag waving.
When you fly the Nazi flag, you're really celebrating economic liquidity and the blessed honor of those men willing to die for it. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just projecting their own twisted ideas onto it. Probably because they're a liberal. 