Posted on 06/14/2006 5:58:12 PM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
Confederate flags flown aboard the international space station — and seemingly signed by a NASA astronaut — showed up last week on the online auction site eBay.
The original eBay listing indicated that the 4-by-6-inch flags were brought aboard the space station by Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov in 2004, and an accompanying photo showed a sample flag that seemed to bear Sharipov’s signature as well as that of Leroy Chiao, his NASA colleague on the station. Yet another photo showed several of the rebel flags floating in a space station module.
The item was pulled from the auction on Monday by the seller, Alex Panchenko of USSR-Russian Air-Space Collectibles Inc. in Los Angeles — and on Tuesday, Panchenko told MSNBC.com that he removed the items from sale because he had concluded the flag and the authentication documents were forgeries.
However, Robert Pearlman, editor and founder of CollectSpace, said he believes the flags are authentic.
“The picture taken of the flags aboard the station says a lot,” he said. “It would be difficult to fake, given the style and I couldn't see the motivation to do so.” The “onboard-the-ISS” stamp, added Pearlman, is not known to have been counterfeited anywhere."
The disappearance of the flags followed a round of criticism over the weekend from former space scientist Keith Cowing, publisher of NASA Watch, an independent Web log. He cited the Confederate flags as an example of “bad judgment on the ISS.”
“You'd think that someone on the U.S. side of the ISS program would have expressed some concern about flying a symbol on the ISS that many Americans associate with slavery,” Cowing wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Let me get this straight: pointing out facts deserves a violent response, not to mention insults?
Doesn't FR have some sort of "no violnece or personal attacks" in it's posting clause?
> Like the northernors did not own slaves....
Many indeed did, and it was shameful of them to do so. However, they did not commit acts of treason and start a war of aggression to maintain their slave holdings.
It had nothing to do with slavery. The war was rooted in conflicts over tariffs that had their root in the nullification crisis of 1832. The North was jealous of the high society that the South had managed to create, especially in it's urban ports.
Just curious about something. How many slaves have you known and talked to about their slavery? I knew one and became friends with him. He used to tell me stories about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, but what I thought most interesting is that he told me he was treated much worse by black people than white people. He even told me that his "owner" treated him like family.
>> It's America, and we have a dark and unpleasant patch in our own history.
> Sorry, but you have failed to understand history.
That's the fundamental difference, I guess. Some people see slavery as a Bad Thing. Some... don't.
> What the hell are YOU doing today to help these modern day slaves?
Supporting laws that will show them to the borders and show their "employers" to the inside of a jail cell.
Grant and Sherman, who bravely inflicted arson, rape and pillage on thousands of southern civilians. True heros, there. We're all thankful the modern American army doesn't employ such criminal tactics against noncombatants. Well, all of us except you, perhaps.
> He even told me that his "owner" treated him like family.
Fine. So, with that single data point, would *you* support enslavement of a whole people?
I've known people who liked to be beaten, cut and burned. Doesn't mean I think it'd be a good public policy to do that to all, say, redheads.
"All them nice young "southern flowers" stripped, shackled, beaten and forced to work in the fields for the rest of their lives?
That's honorable, doncha know."
Except they were, to a man, pardoned and restored to citizenship. They died every bit as American as you will ever be.....what is so hard to understand about that.
Sherman shouldn't have led a pillaging mob through the South. That wasn't necessary to win. Lee never would have done that - hence Lee is remembered as a far greater American than Sherman. It's infuriating, I know......
> It is not like there was a choice.
There was no choice but to start a war of aggression to ensure the continued enslavement of the blacks???
Wow. What, were the southerners under some sort of Martian mind-control rays that *forced* them, an aggrarian nation, to launch a war against an industrial neighbor?
My mother once worked at a retirement home in Atlanta and she had a former slave living there.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to this wonderful woman when I was a child. The stories that she would tell us will never be forgotten.
I'm not a southerner, but I see nothing about the battle flag that is in 'bad taste.'
Yeah. Youv'e got a Russian cosmonaut sporting a rebel flag along with his fellow astronaut who appears to be of asian descent.....in space of all places. Almost like an SNL or David Chapelle skit.
> They died every bit as American as you will ever be....
How about the black former slaves? If it was not shameful to enslave the blacks, why woudl it have been shameful to enslave the southern white aristocracy?
> Sherman shouldn't have led a pillaging mob through the South. That wasn't necessary to win.
Argueable. Necessary to bring the South to the surrender table? Possibly not. But necessary to *beat* the south, to make them submit to wholesale cultural change? Now *that* is different. In WWII, we did that to Germany and Japan. We beat them down and then reshaped them as we saw fit. But in Afghanistan and Iraq... we worked just hard enough to topple the governments, but we left the crappy local culture in place.
In any event, it's late. Y'all have fun argueing why anyone who claims that the Confederacy was an immoral idea deserves to be beaten to a pulp.
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