TOM THE DANCING BUG - The True History of the Confederate Flag

boing
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Yeah, everything about this cartoon is deliberately wrong to prove a point:

The actual Flag of the Confederacy (sometimes called the “stars and bars”) looked too much like the Union “stars and stripes” that they had to come up with the Confederate Battle Flag, what we commonly refer to as “The Confederate Flag.” From a design point of view it’s not bad, but it was made so that the CSA could distinguish their ranks in battle.

So no, it wasn’t made with the idea of promoting southern culture, it was made so Confederate soldiers wouldn’t accidentally fire into their own lines.

BTW: I am not familiar with Vikings ever using the swastika, from what I’ve seen it came from the middle and far east, (including ironically, by Jews), it’s still used today by Buddhists.

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It’s a crescent moon and palmetto tree…and yes, it’s everywhere.

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By the slavery thing.

That people fought for under said flag.

For which said flag was created.

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I believed it was a local military school thing.

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Also used by the 45th Infantry Division in the US. Replaced by the now familiar Thunderbird in 1939 because Nazis.

579px-45th_Infantry_insignia_%28swastika%29.svg.png579×579 7.02 KB

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That whole “southern pride” thing is result of a long standing inferiority complex. They lost the war, and they have to listen to endless jokes about inbreeding.

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Plus, it got brought back out as a sign of resistance to Brown V. Board of education, don’t forget that…

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Text from Gawker:

And just when you’re wondering how long this line of assholes in lifted trucks can possibly be, and wishing something would make them stop… well, something does.

I’m in ur images, stealin’ ur gifs @Mindysan33

…and stay for the diabetes!

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No worries… steal all the gifs you’d like.

Also, that’s diabeetus…

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As an interesting note, one of my friends is very active in the movement to allow gay scout leaders. He marched in the Gay Pride parade in NYC this weekend, and volunteered to carry Mississippi, which has the stars and bars in the corner. He fixed it by adding a sign “Black Lives Matter.” He said he volunteered to carry it because no one else wanted to carry that flag in that parade.

Also, this guy would be the most awesomesauce Scout troop leader of all time and it just sucks he got the boot because he’s gay.

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It’s the SC state flag.

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Wasn’t the war actually triggered by an attempt to enforce the ransom, aka import customs tariffs, on the South by the North? From what I heard, the slavery thing was a rather distant secondary concern.

The earlier war against England started for pretty much the same reasons - England first made unreasonable customs tariffs, then nobody complied, then they started to enforce them, then everybody got pissed.

One of the sources: Peter Andreas - Smuggler Nation - How Illicit Trade Made America.

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To whom was this a distant and secondary concern exactly? The entire Southern economy was based on slave labor, so even if it was a war fought for “economic” reasons it was still basically about slavery.

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To the ones who actually started the war, I’d reckon.

Note that this was the era of booming industrialization, when the labor-intensive business of cotton manufacture was still labor-intensive but the automation started happening, with bigger than small impact of smuggled industrial equipment and engineers from England. (England banned travel to their engineers. They had to smuggle themselves.) So the role of labor was decreasing, while the role of tariffs was increasing with their more effective enforcement.

If it was primarily about slavery, I see a more likely course of the history by the South flouting the North until the North attacked.

But the history is written by the winners, so inaccuracies naturally creep in.

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OK, let’s take a look at what those losers thought they were fighting for, in their own words:

Henry L. Benning, politician and future Confederate general, 1849: “First then, it is apparent, horribly apparent, that the slavery question rides insolently over every other everywhere – in fact that is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections.” […] “I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union.”

Stephan Dodson Ramseur, future Confederate general, 1856: “…Slavery, the very source of our existence, the greatest blessing both for Master & Slave that could have been bestowed upon us.”

Atlanta Confederacy, 1860: “We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South, who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing.”

Henry M. Rector (Governor of Arkansas), 1861: “The area of slavery must be extended correlative with its antagonism, or it will be put speedily in the ‘course of ultimate extinction.’ […] The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South […] They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.”

Lawrence Keitt (Congressman from South Carolina), 1860: “African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism.” […] “The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.”

From the Confederate Constitution:
Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”
Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3: “The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government.”

And let’s not forget that in his 1881 autobiography Confederate President Jefferson Davis placed the blame for the civil war at the feet of all those abolitionist troublemakers: “A few zealots in the North afterwards created much agitation by demands for the abolition of slavery within the states by federal intervention, and by their activity and perseverance finally became a recognized party which, holding the balance of power between the two contending organizations in that section, gradually obtained the control of one, and to no small degree corrupted the other.”

Fuck slavery, fuck the Confederacy, fuck its flag and fuck its apologists.

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That’s just plain wrong.

[quote]As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, “while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war.” States’ rights was entirely a matter in regards to the protection of slavery. The issue of tariffs was so unimportant that the groups looking for some sort of compromise did not even consider it.
{emphasis added}
[/quote]

You seem to adhere to the “Progressive school” which is basically discredited in the US since about 1940…

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It’s usually more complex.

Get three historians together and you get four opinions. Or, if you add the need to toe the current local official truth to get the funding or the tenures, one.

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You can’t explain all the complexities of any war in one word, but if one was to summarize then that word would definitely be “slavery,” not “tariffs.”

From the second paragraph of your own link:

States’ rights was the justification for nullification and later secession. The most controversial right claimed by Southern states was the alleged right of Southerners to spread slavery into territories owned by the United States.

From the third paragraph of your own link:

Historians generally agree that economic conflicts were not a major cause of the war.

From the sixth paragraph of your own link:

Calhoun [who led South Carolina’s attempt to nullify a tariff] said that slavery was the cause of the Nullification Crisis.

It goes on like this for some time but you get the idea.

Edit to add:

This part is probably the best takedown of the “State’s Rights” bullshit explanation:

The historian William C. Davis also mentioned inconsistencies in Southern states’ rights arguments. He explained the Confederate Constitution’s protection of slavery at the national level as follows:

To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.[17]

If the movement was about “state’s rights” and not slavery then the states which joined the Confederacy would have been had the right to choose whether or not they wanted to have slavery.

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Agreed.

But your primary assertion was

Which is widely refuted, including by the very article you linked to support your baffling position.

Yes, that’s true, but this…

Sounds like you’re pretty sure they’re [historians in general] all lying through their teeth to protect their federal grants, which makes you sound like a full on apologist.

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