Peak Bill O'Reilly: “Confederate flag represents bravery,” not racist hate

History honors those who win, and those who lost but fought nobly. The Confederates did neither.

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As the holy ones say, Amen.

Or as a certain someone else said:

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O’Reilly really is spectacularly on the wrong side of history, isn’t he.

We’re gonna need a bigger moon.

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I’m beginning to suspect there is something terribly, terribly wrong with my brain.

Very good point.

Guess there’s always the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.

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So much for unity – I was certain you meant pulled pork. :smile:

EDIT: Actually, having grown up with brisket in Texas, I swing both ways

I’d recently read a suggestion that the South may have lost the war, but won Reconstruction (no 40 acres and a mule; Jim Crow written as law…). Not that that’s something to celebrate, of course.

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Let’s just say that Iraq was not the first location where our attempts at nation building were badly derailed by a combination of questionable decision making, lack of political will; and atrociously brutal insurgencies dedicated to enacting barbaric archaisms and a dislike of us that almost approaches their loathing of the local out-group.

Heck, we arguably had much better luck Marshal-planning the nazis back into being our freedom buddies and conveniently-whitewashed-rocket-scientists than we did reconstructing the southerners.

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“Nation building” is such a bitterly laughable term when it comes to U.S. foreign policy resource extraction. Any dislike and distrust of the U.S. in places that have something we want seems totally warranted.

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Oh, I’m not saying that the natives are incorrect in opposing our…selfless global benevolence…merely that we’ve had somewhat disconcertingly better results with a variety of hostile foreign powers than with the CSA; despite many of the others being more recent; and the fact that our postwar treatment of the confederacy was downright warm and fuzzy by our usual standards…

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NASA is working on that.

That’s different - the swastika represented something before the Nazis borrowed it to do something different with. (It’s still strange seeing Buddha statues with swastikas on their chests, and separately, Native American whirlwind designs woven into baskets and blankets.)
The Confederate battle flag was designed to represent a group that were defending the South’s rights to slave-ownership and expansion of slavery into newer US territories.

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The Confederate states seceded from the Union very specifically because the US was threatening their states rights to have slavery and (for some of the states) to be able to expand slavery into new US territories, and the governments of those states issued public proclamations saying those were their reasons.

Lincoln’s reasons for reconquering the Confederate states are more complex - nationalism and “manifest destiny” and other issues besides just slavery - but that doesn’t change the fact that the Confederacy and specifically its battle flag were all about slavery.

And yes, there were brave soldiers from the South, most of whom didn’t even own slaves, who fought to protect their states from the Union, but they were defending evil, not good. And when Bill Maher pointed out that the 9/11 airplane hijackers who killed themselves crashing airplanes into buildings were brave men even though they were on the side of evil, he got thrown off the air for a few years. Maybe Bill O’Reilly’s defense of Southern bravery should be treated the same way.

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Because we can get rid of the flags.

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You’re replying to a racist who got his account banned. You aren’t going to be able to converse with him when he can’t reply…

I’d point out that the Confederates just appropriated the St. Andrew’s Cross from either the Russians or Scotland and added some stars to it. I mean, this is the Russian Navy Jack (they still fly this today):

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I’ll throw in a story. Where I grew up in New York had 2 high schools, North and South. The South high school was newer (opened in 1960 I think) and adopted the name Rebels for all sports team, flew the confederate flag, had a Confederate rebel mascot. The students never made a connection between using the Confederate flag as their symbol with racism. In the early 80s leader of the sports team made the connection (probably not the first) and put together a strategy to get his fellow students to abandon the entire confederate rebel theme. He made the connection during school between he flag and racism. He realized that he had to provide an alternative to the current symbols so came up with Revolutionary Rebels and everything was related to the Revolutionary War. It worked, the students decided on the change, they overcame over 20 years of tradition. So no, not everyone who adopts the Confederate Flag is a racist, but some of those people accept the connection and move on to a new symbol rather than argue that a flag created by the KKK isn’t racist. Unfortunately the post describing the story above is in a private group on FB so I can’t provide a link to it.

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