Just two days after Barack Obama won the election, a man in Midland, MI dressed in his KKK robes and stood at a busy intersection to protest Obama's election - well, to be fair, he claimed that the problems he was protesting go much deeper than Obama.
Now via Digby I see that on election night the owners of the Faubus Hotel in Huntsville, Alabama decided to take the American flag down and raise instead the Confederate battle flag. But it's not a protest about Obama being black; that's preposterous.
The Vandivers said they didn’t raise the Rebel flag to protest a black man moving into the White House, as many of their neighbors assume. Instead, they did it because they believe the country has abandoned the principles of its founders by electing Obama. Linda Vandiver said the Democrat is a Marxist who wants to turn America into a socialist country.
I suspect that the Vandivers have much more support for their claim that replacing the American flag with the Confederate abomination than Randy Gray ever will for donning KKK robes. That's an unfortunate result of a fairly good PR campaign on the part of those who want to retain, display and honor the main symbol of not only the very great evil that was the Confederate treason against the USA, but also the even greater evil which was the enslavement of millions of men, women and children for hundreds of years.
Even if the "heritage" argument is ever offered in good faith instead of its more obvious use as a public denial of private beliefs, Americans need to learn to let go. The swastika, for example, is illegal to display in Germany, in spite of having a history going back several thousand years and appearing in societies all over the world. It is still a common symbol in Buddhism and Hinduism. But even though the Nazis appropriated it for less than 20 years, when a folk-dancing troupe from Japan visited Germany a few years back, they created special uniforms without that symbol simply because they didn't want to have any potential for problems.
Under American southerners' logic, the Germans have a far greater case to make for continuing to use the swastika as a way of honoring their heritage. Most German soldiers weren't involved in any atrocities against anyone; they were drafted and went to fight because that's what they were supposed to do. They were the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of those Germans living today, and surely Germany's citizens have struggled with having such a great evil in their recent past. But they realize that anyone who seeks to display the Nazi swastika isn't attempting to make a comment about national pride, patriotism or honoring dear old Granddad in the nursing home. They're publicly affiliating themselves with all the evil the Nazis did and for which they stood. And it's no surprise that the Japanese, who have also struggled with national symbols that predate their involvement in WWII, would understand.
But here in America we're supposed to respect the Confederate flag, that odious symbol of treason. We're supposed to believe the ridiculous claims of those who always find cause to fly the Confederate flag whenever an African-American gains prominence. We're supposed to believe nonsense about "states' rights" and the idea that the majority of southerners took up weapons against their fellow citizens over differing interpretations of the US Constitution. If the Confederate Army's battle cry consisted of "The Federal government is not supposed to exercise any power or authority not explicitly given to it by the US Constitution, and any area of governance not so given is reserved solely for the states!" I've certainly never heard about it.
The legacy of US slavery is at least as evil as that of Naziism. At least. Millions enslaved. Countless numbers killed before even being loaded into ships on Africa's coasts. Countless more dead on the voyage to the United States. Families ripped apart, men and women literally worked to death and then tossed aside. Rape, assault, untold abuse, all of this happening for generations. And all this sordid, evil history is summed up in the despicable Stars and Bars. The particulars of its history are irrelevant, because this is what it means now. This is what it stands for now. When people like the Vandivers raise it outside their hotel, when so-called "Democrats" like Mudcat Saunders sleep under it, when that creepy guy down the street puts it up in his garage, it is calling up every atrocity committed against African-Americans no matter the location, no matter the era. It's the symbol for all of America's racists, and it's far past time that anyone who dares show it loses all respectability and place in our society.
