Posted on 04/22/2003 9:21:28 AM PDT by WhiskeyPapa
Banning banner banter The Battle Flag -- and the Stars and Bars -- are racist symbols: Dump them
BY JOHN SUGG
Monty Python couldn't have done it better. One of the British comedy troupe's fave sidesplitters depicted an incensed John Cleese trying to return a decidedly deceased parrot to a pet store owner, Michael Palin. Part of the sketch goes:
Cleese: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Palin: No, no, he's not dead, he's, he's restin'!
So it goes in the Georgia Assembly in the endless posturing over the state flag.
Forget that Georgia is broke. Forget that legislators have again unleashed rapacious bankers to prey on those least able to protect themselves. Forget the assault on your rights to recover just damages from incompetent doctors and reckless (if not criminal) corporations. Forget that schools are sardine-can overcrowded and educators don't have a prayer of keeping up with growth. Forget that in all but a few elite schools, Georgia's woefully underfunded public education ranks so low, it almost falls off the list of states and into competition with countries like Uganda. Forget that ethical standards among public officials are so non-existent that even patchwork, impotent proposals are hailed as courageous. Forget about the environment. Forget about poor people railroaded off to jail without competent counsel, an affront to the most basic constitutional principles.
Forget everything because Georgia is on the brink of reinstitutionalizing raw, rancid racism. Whether we opt for a slightly retooled Confederate Stars and Bars or the Rebel Battle Flag, we still end up hanging the banner of a diseased and defeated excuse for a social system above our public buildings.
That the Legislature's Ultimate Wacko, Rep. Bobby Franklin, wants to scrawl "In God We Trust" on a flag whose 19th-century cause was anathema to any teaching of Christ I can find in the Bible is delicious irony. (And, there's nothing patriotic in Franklin's ploy. Rather, it's a blatant -- and thoroughly anti-American -- attempt to impose his view of religion on the state. As Rep. Doug Teper, who is Jewish, quipped, what Franklin is really stamping on the flag is: "In Jesus We Trust.")
In short, it's all very Republican.
Here's how the jolly chaps at Monty Python might act it:
Cleese (playing The Rest of the World): Look, matey, I know a racist emblem when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Palin (playing Gov. Sonny Perdue, the GOP and no-scruples white Democrats): No, no, it's not racist. It's just HERITAGE!
The Civil War ended with the surrender of the last Confederate army, in Texas, on May 26, 1865. But y'all know that. Let's think about another war for a moment. Almost 80 years later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered.
All other issues aside, Germans and Southerners have something in common -- how to address a collective, culture-wide crime of murderous racism. We're talking guilt, writ large.
The South embraced the enslavement of one race as a romanticized economic system. Nazi Germany wasn't defined by slavery, but it employed the practice -- hideously so -- justifying its crimes through a twisted mythology of racial supremacy. One could argue that the Confederacy was slightly more egalitarian than the Nazis -- Southerners generally regarded all white folks as superior, while the Germans excluded from their club all but those they considered the purest of the race.
The crushing defeats of the South and Germany forced their citizens to abandon, at least officially, the slavery and racist underpinnings of their societies. That's only the beginning, however, of rehabilitation. Survivors who had participated in the crimes -- lesser ex-Nazis and almost all Southern ex-slave owners -- remained, and many regained success and status after the wars.
More important, their causes might have been defeated, but the mythologies (whether Wagner-whistling Teutonic knights or Margaret Mitchell's delusional depictions of "gray" chivalry) didn't die. It's hard, both as individuals and as peoples, to accept that what was patriotism one day is verboten the next. Germans and Southerners fervently believed their causes were just, and were blessed by God and/or Destiny. Then, one day, all that was sacred became profane. Whiplash on a national scale.
Those who had fomented the wars -- at least the ones who avoided Yankee and Allied nooses and cells -- often stood to gain through continued criminality. Many ex-Nazis found it convenient to morph into apparatchiks and Stasi commanders in East Germany. The Southern ruling class used terrorism and racism -- epitomized by the Ku Klux Klan and the "Citizens Councils" -- to divide and conquer poor whites and blacks.
Germans, after the war, realized the only way to heal their society was to strip away and trash the mythology. Occasionally with reluctance, and never with total success, they ripped out the vestiges of Nazism. Oh, sure, behind closed doors in beer halls, "they" gathered, clicked their heels, bellowed the "Horst Wesel" song and toasted the memory of "him." But those nasty fellows had to hide their nostalgia.
The new German government ruthlessly banned Nazi imagery. For many reasons -- including, I'd argue, the self-surgery that purged the emotional and symbolic vestiges of Nazism -- Germany's democracy flourished after the war, eventually undermining the totalitarian East German government.
Back yonder in Dixie, collective guilt was assuaged via another method: denial.
Rather than eschew the immoral system that had brought so much calamity to the South, racist demagoguery was elevated to gospel and treason was transformed into "heritage" -- all in an effort to dodge guilt.
It's poignant that while the loonies and incompetents who masquerade as Georgia legislators were fixated on the state banner, the U.S. Supreme Court this month ruled the Confederate Battle Flag's co-emblem of race hatred, the burning cross, could be outlawed by the states.
(A quick aside: I'm a free speech absolutist. I disagree with the Supreme Court, and I'd even support the right of those with sick minds to dress up like Nazis and burn crosses. That said, my heart is with those who detest such symbols.)
There is justice that the Republicans are being saddled with the flag albatross. Perdue winked when folks in rural Georgia harnessed his yard signs with "Boot Barnes" Confederate flag signs. I don't think he believed he'd have to pay the piper -- because he was probably as much surprised at his victory as Roy Barnes.
As the saying goes, if you choose to sleep with serpents, you're going to wake up with snake bites. And that's what Perdue has discovered, much to his dismay. After the November election, he tried to downplay the flag issues. But the "flaggers" or "flaggots" weren't about to let the new Republican governor off the hook.
It started on election night, when Perdue egregiously misappropriated Martin Luther King Jr.'s "free at last" speech. Perdue neglected to notice that behind him a yahoo was waving a Battle Flag. The TV cams got excellent footage, however, and it was a message to the world that the Klan's ghost was again stirring in Georgia -- right smack in the governor's mansion.
Perdue has promised that resolving the flag issue would heal the state. Had he been a leader, he would have simply cauterized old wounds, left the Barnes flag on the poles and shooed away the "heritage" flaggers (aka mostly angry white boys who, with no one else to blame for their sorry conditions, want to whup up on black folks one more time by reviving the Battle Flag).
The bizarre machinery of deciding the flag will only inflame passions more. First, next March we vote up or down on the slightly altered Stars and Bars (with its Christian proselytizing add-on). If the vote is "nay," we choose in July between the pre-1956 flag (another variation on the Stars and Bars) and the 1956-2001 Rebel Battle Flag motif. The 1956 Battle Flag state banner, as everyone knows -- but that flaggers, Perdue and the legislators feign ignorance of -- was the hateful and racist reaction of Georgia to integration.
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin puts it best: Why should anyone, especially African-Americans, be forced to pick between two symbols of slavery and oppression?
We can't do what the Germans did -- banning speech, even when clearly corrosive, is repugnant to America principles. But our leaders can -- and should -- send the message that, as official symbols for all citizens, we're not going to tolerate racist devices. Forget the crap about heritage. The swastika is a 3,000-year-old symbol that has lots of heritage in many cultures, primarily Hindu, and is generally associated with good. But it came to represent something else, and we're not likely to slap it on a state flag. Same goes for the Battle Flag, the main decoration at Klan cross-burnings and lynchings.
The only sweet part of this is that Republicans -- whose "Southern Strategy," disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida, economic policies and much else are nothing but racism incarnate -- are going to have the Confederate flag wrapped around their necks in the 2004 elections. Live with it, boys.
How much more do you need to know about Walt?
"We all declare for liberty. But in using the same word we do not mean the same thing." -- Abraham Lincoln.
It always amuses me when the sothron contingent call Lincoln a tyrant or talk about how their's was a fight for liberty and freedom. Liberty and freedom for about two-thirds of their population.
Both.
Really? Too bad there wasn't a chance to see it. It would fit in nicely with all the other blame-america-first left wing nonsense he posts here...
"All these deaths of U.S. citizens --the death of EVERY U.S. citizen killed by Arab terror in the United States, can be laid directly at the feet of George Bush I." - WhiskeyPapa, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/786927/posts?q=1&&page=401#448
"I'll say again that based on what I knew in 1992, I would vote for Bill Clinton ten times out of ten before I would vote for George Bush Sr." - WhiskeyPapa, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/786927/posts?q=1&&page=401#420
"As you doubtless know, the separation of powers in that Pact with the Devil we call our Constitution, gives only Congress the right to raise and spend money." - WhiskeyPapa, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/786927/posts?q=1&&page=401#432
"First of all, the AJC [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] is -not- an "ultra-leftist" newspaper, and you know it." - WhiskeyPapa, 11/13/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/784464/posts?page=70#70
"I feel that admiration for Reagan has rightly diminished over time, and rightly so." - WhiskeyPapa, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/786927/posts?q=1&&page=401#432
"I don't retract any of that." - WhiskeyPapa in reference to the liberal statements found above, 11/26/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/796067/posts?page=146#146
"If you non-U.S. citizens are wondering what the electoral college is and what bunch of ninnies thought it up: The US Constitution was written by rich white men like Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Randolph, and others. They wrote it for the benefit of rich white men like themselves. They didn't trust the common man --at all--, hence the college of electors, who didn't (and don't) necessarily have to vote for the candidate that carries their state. Here in Georgia, I didn't vote for Al Gore. I voted for nine Democratic Party hacks that promise to vote for Al when the college meets in December. Yeah, I know its crazy, but it works." - Walt, aka WhiskeyPapa, explaining the electoral college to Europeans, 11/12/00
SOURCE: soc.history.war.world-war-ii newsgroup
"What the Reagan adminstration did was worse than Watergate. But he was a nicer guy than Nixon, so he skated. Also, despite all the Reagan worship, I don't think he ever made a tough decision." - WhiskeyPapa, 3/10/03
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/859649/posts?page=38#38
"I think the Bushes both to incompetent clowns." - WhiskeyPapa, 3/10/03
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/859649/posts?page=38#38
"I'd vote for Gore again over Bush jr. It was a no-brainer that if Junior was elected, we'd have Senior running things, and I bet he is. Surely no one thinks that Junior has enough brains to get all this rolling. Cheney and Powell are going to run the war -- to clean up the mess they made 12 years ago." - WhiskeyPapa, 3/18/03
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/866612/posts?page=19#19
"I did say, and say again, that based on what I knew in 1992 I would vote for Clinton over Bush Sr. ten times out of ten." - WhiskeyPapa, 4/7/03
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/backroom/886354/posts?page=119#137
"I do firmly believe that Bush Jr. is nothing but a figurehead. Bush Sr. is running things; he and Cheney and Rumsfeld. I mean, really listen to the president. He sounds like an idiot." - WhiskeyPapa, 4/7/03
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/backroom/886354/posts?page=119#137
Wlat will support the flying of the Hammer and Sickle though, "State Sponsored" speech and thought are what he supports.
HEY WLAT! I have some CBF's and other memorabilia of my heritage .... you want me to surrender them up? If so ...
MOLON LABE!!!
Well now, it just proves that the man hasn't read his Bible.
Paging the keeper of the quotes, we have another one!
friday is frequently my busiest day there.
free dixie,sw
BOTH are worshipers at the foot of lincoln, the GREAT spiller of innocent blood, tyrant & war criminal.
btw, i also subscribe to the old saying:
"NOTHING WORSE can be said of any man than that he is a scalawag."
nonetheless, BOTH are serving the dixie LIBERTY CAUSE by posting off-point, STUPID, arrogantly ignorant drivel about the southland & her people. every post by either cretin recruits another adherent to the TRUE CAUSE!
free dixie,sw
that's why.
free dixie,sw
none other than POTUS John F. Kennedy, in 1961, requested that the BATTLEFLAG be flown over the SC Statehouse as "a living memorial for those who perished during the Civil War". the original letter is in the RELICS ROOM IN Columbia, SC.
there was NO DATE/TIME noted to remove the flag from the dome. i would tell you that as long as valor,honor and commitment to the dixie TRUE CAUSE exists, that the BATTLEFLAG should wave from the Statehouse. (AND NOPE, i don't want the one in front of the Statehouse taken down either. i like it just fine THERE, TOO!)
free dixie,sw
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