Today is Memorial Day, a day where we remember America's fallen heroes who fought in wars dating back to the American Revolution and through the war in Iraq. These soldiers were true American heroes who fought for the principles which have held this union together all throughout history, making the United States a beacon of freedom and democracy looked up to by millions around the world. They deserve to be remembered and honored as some of the greatest Americans who ever lived.
But something that bothers me is the recognition of Confederate soldiers who fought during the Civil War, a tradition that has unfortunately existed since the ever-so-racist Woodrow Wilson laid a wreath at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Quite truthfully, the Confederacy was un-American-- it consisted of states which had seceded from the Union, and fought to dismantle democracy in its own right. The reason being, of course, was because the selfish racists who lived below the Mason-Dixon line feared that they would no longer be able to treat African Americans as property, to be traded and sold and commanded to do back-breaking manual labor at their pleasure. So they launched the Civil War, because the democratically-elected President Lincoln appeared to be an abolitionist, and the man they wanted to be President wasn't elected, and they wouldn't be able to demonize black people any longer... or, as confederate sympathizers say today, they went to war because of "economics."
And strangely, that rationale, that the Civil War was a war based on "economic principle," has stood in the revisionist histories perpetuated by politicians in former confederate states. That is why the Confederate Flag, perhaps the second-most racist symbol behind the Swastika, is allowed to fly over numerous state capitols. That is the reason why the confederate flag's "stars and bars" are a part of several state flags, from Mississippi to Arkansas to Georgia. Yes, the conservatives, not wanting to admit fault, continue to claim that the Civil War was an "economic" war, and have even gone as far as to laughingly declare that, had the Confederacy won, African Americans would achieve freedom far faster than they had under the Union.
This is preposterous. The whole reason why Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and separate-but-equal institutions existed was because the South didn't want to treat African Americans as equals. Once former slaves became free, they searched long and hard for ways to treat blacks as lesser human beings than whites. The Confederate States seceded because they were the home of racist scumbags who didn't truly believe that the line "all men are created equal" applied to those with a different skin tone than them. The Civil War was fought on "economics" just as much as the American Revolution was fought on "tea taxes."
The Confederacy does not need to be remembered on a day when we remember America's fallen heroes. Someone who went to war to fight against our Constitutional liberties, who was an enemy of the state, and who helped contribute to one of the most unnecessary wars in American history, does not deserve to be remembered as a hero. They deserve to have their graves spit on by passers by. They deserve to have the flag they fought under taken down from every statehouse and burned. And they deserve to be forgotten.
So for Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Mark Sanford, Haley Barbour, and all the other conservatives out there who still wave the confederate flag as a symbol of "heritage" and "economics" and use secession as a way to deal with the election of a liberal black man to the presidency: When are you going to start loving the United States? When are you going to start loving the Constitution and what it stands for, and the democracy which has allowed us to heal the wounds caused directly by the South's horrific treatment of blacks ever since this country was founded? Or are you more willing to live in the past, the good old days where shouting "nigger" to black schoolchildren was the norm and lynching a black teenager was considered a grand ole hootenanny, celebrating the confederacy and invoking their bastardized ideals as the way to guide the Republican Party into the future? Hopefully I'm not the only one who sees the connection here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It's unfair to say that the South only seceded because they wanted to perpetuate slavery. The Civil War wasn't started out of racism - it was a class issue, more than anything.
ReplyDeleteThe antebellum South was, essentially, a feudal aristocracy: only land-owning whites could vote, and the majority of people - black or white - were either literal or de facto slaves to the elite few who controlled the wealth. Slavery was allowed to exist through Biblically-justified racism, but the only reason those arguments were ever made were out of economic "necessity". The aristocracy simply could not exist without a base of slave labor, and blacks were the only people they were legally allowed to keep as slaves.
What sparked the Civil War wasn't the North simply wanting to free blacks, but to destroy the undemocratic aristocracy that ruled the South by means of abolition. Racism was just as entrenched in the North, but it was only in the South that it was used as a legally viable means to counteract the democratic process.
Your argument about current conservatives and the Confederate flag isn't wrong, per se, but oversimplifying the cause of the Civil War to just plain racism ignores the even colder truth - that the antebellum South had regressed to a state of pre-Enlightenment social order reminiscent of 17th Century Britain. A society like that is technically unconstitutional, and the whole point of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was to let the rest of the world know that the North was fighting the South because they were an outdated, undemocratic, backwards aristocracy.