I thought everyone would be interested in Greg Grandin's history of the
flag. It's more information about what the flag has meant to people and how
it's been used, than I've seen anywhere else.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2015 12:58 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Confederate Flag at War (But Not the
Civil War)
I feel about flags the same as I feel about any symbol standing for a
belief. It's sort of like Pavlov's dogs. Wave a flag, stand up a statue of
Mary, raise the old rugged cross, and folks spring to their feet, salute, or
fall on their knees in prayer. I'm told it's a show of loyalty. But to me
it is like Mother's Day. If I'm needing a special day to thank my mother,
then something is out of whack with me. I don't need some symbol to show
the world that I believe I'm a good citizen, or a good and faithful
believer. But that is what we do, and that is how we express our feelings.
So I do not normally say anything. And I rise when the flag is presented.
And I shut my mouth when the minister blesses my food or my people. For
those who need such reinforcement, I have no problem. But I know that if I
expressed my honest feelings about worshiping symbols I would be stomped on.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/7/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Confederate Flag at War (But Not the Civil War) by Greg Grandinits massive resistance to racial desegregation."
In this 1967 press photo by Toshio Sakai, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam
ride a tank displaying a Confederate flag. (Photo: manhhai/flickr/cc)
The Pentagon just cant let go. In the wake of the Charleston
Massacre, Amazon and Walmart have announced that they will no longer
sell Confederate flag merchandise. Ebay says it will stop offering
Confederate items for electronic auction. The Republican governor of
Mississippi calls his state flag, which includes the Stars and Bars in
the top left corner, a point of offense that needs to be removed.
Even Kentuckys Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the U.S.
Senate, agrees that a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis
in his state's capitol building belongs in a museum.
Yet the Department of Defense says it isnt even reviewing the
possibility of a ban on the flag, deciding instead to leave any such
move to the various service branches, while military bases named after
Confederate officers will remain so. One factor in this decision: the
South provides more than 40% of all military recruits, many of them
white; only 15% are from the Northeast.
Filling the ranks isn't, however, the only reason for the militarys
refusal to act.
Over the last few weeks, there has been near unanimous agreement among
liberal and mainstream commentators that the Confederate flag
represents hate, not heritage. The flags current presence in
American culture is ubiquitous. It adorns license plates, bumper
stickers, mugs, bodies (via tattoos), and even baby diapers. The
flags popularity is normally traced back to the post-World War II
reaction of the Dixiecrat South to the Civil Rights Movement. South
Carolina, for instance, raised the Stars and Bars over its state house
in 1961 as part, columnist Eugene Robinson said on "Meet the Press," of
All true. But like many discussions of American conservativism, thisConfederacy.
account misses the role endless war played in sustaining domestic
racism. Starting around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck
backlash, the Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an
important pennant in the expanding American empire and a symbol of
national unification, not polarization.
It was a reconciled Army that moved out into the world after the Civil
War, an unstoppable combination of Northern law (bureaucratic command
and control, industrial might, and technology) and Southern spirit (an
exaltation of military ideals and virtues, including valor, duty,
and honor). Both law and spirit had their dark sides leading to
horrors committed due either to the very nature of the American empire
-- the genocide of Native Americans, for example, or the war in
Southeast Asia -- or to the particular passions of some of its
soldiers. And both law and spirit had their own flags.
Lost Cause Found
Northerners and Southerners agreed on little in the years after the
Civil War, historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman write, except that
the Army should pacify Western tribes. Reconstruction -- Washingtons
effort to set the terms for the Souths readmission to the Union and
establish postwar political equality -- was being bitterly opposed by
defeated white separatists. According to Cothran and Kelman, however,
Many Americans found rare common ground on the subject of Manifest
Destiny.
After the surrender at Appomattox, it was too soon to fly the Stars
and Bars against Native Americans. And it was Union officers -- men
like generals George Armstrong Custer and Philip Sheridan -- who
committed most of the atrocities against indigenous peoples. But
Confederate veterans and their sons used the pacification of the West
as a readmission program into the U.S. Army. The career of Luther
Hare, a Texas son of a Confederate captain, is illustrative. He barely
survived Custers campaign against the Sioux.
Cornered in a skirmish that preceded Little Big Horn, Hare opened
fire and let out a rebel yell before escaping. He then went on to
fight Native Americans in Montana, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and
Arizona, where he put down the last of the renegade Apaches, before
being sent to the Philippines as a colonel. There, he led a
detachment of Texans against the Spanish.
With Reconstruction over and Jim Crow segregation installed in every
southern State, the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the U.S.
took Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and
Guam in the Pacific, was a key moment in the rehabilitation of the
Earlier,versus Spain.
when slavery was still a going concern, southerners had yearned to
separate Cuba from Spain and turn it into a slave state. Now,
conquering the island served a different purpose: a chance to prove
their patriotism and reconcile with the North.
Southern ports like New Orleans, Charleston, and Tampa were used as
staging areas for the invasions of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Northern
soldiers passing through New Orleans were glad to see that grizzled
old Confederates were cheering them on, saluting the Union flag, and
happy to send their sons to fight and die under it. Newspapers
throughout the South, along with Dixie's largest veterans association,
the United Confederate Veterans, saw war with Spain as a vindication
of the Old Cause and reveled in the exploits of former Confederate
generals, including Robert E. Lees nephew, Fitzhugh Lee.
In June 1898, just weeks after U.S. troops landed in Cuba, two
train-car loads of Confederate flags arrived in Atlanta for a coming
reunion of southern veterans of the war. The Stars and Bars would soon
festoon the city Union General William T. Sherman had burned to the
ground. At the very center of the celebrations main venue stood a
30-foot Confederate flag, flanked by a Cuban and a U.S. flag. Speech
after speech extolled sublime
war -- not just the Civil War but all the wars that made up the
nineteenth century -- with Mexico, against Native Americans, and now
Theindestructible states,
gallantry and heroism of your sons as they teach the haughty Spaniard
amid the carnage of Santiago to honor and respect the flag of our
country, which shall float forever over an indissoluble union of
was how one southern veteran put it.liberty to the oppressed islands of both oceans.
War with Spain allowed our boys to once more be wrapped in the
folds of the American flag, said General John Gordon, commander of
the United Confederate Veterans, in remarks opening the proceedings.
Their heroism, he added, has led to the complete and permanent
obliteration of all sectional distrusts and to the establishment of
the too long delayed brotherhood and unity of the American people. In
this sense, the War of 1898 was alchemic, transforming the lost
cause of the Confederacy (that is, the preservation of slavery) into
a crusade for world freedom. The South, Gordon said, was helping to
bring the light of American civilization and the boon of Republican
With Spain defeated, President William McKinley took a victory tour ofshow at Bien Hoa Air Base.
the South, hailing the the valor and the heroism [that] the men from
the south and the men of the north have within the past three years...
shown in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, and in China.
When we are all on one side, the president said, we are unconquerable.
It was around this time that, after much delay, Congress finally
authorized the return of Confederate flags captured by Union forces
during the Civil War to the United Confederate Veterans.
To Serve Mankind
World War I brought more goodwill. In June 1916, as Woodrow Wilson
began to push through Congress a remarkable set of laws militarizing
the country, including the expansion of the Army and National Guard
(and an authorization to place the former under federal authority),
the construction of nitrate plants for munitions production, and the
funding of military research and development, Confederate veterans
descended on Washington, D.C., to show their support for the coming
war in Europe.
About 10,000 men wearing the gray, escorted by several thousand who
wore the blue, marched along Pennsylvania Avenue and were reviewed by
the President, one observer reported. In the line were many young
soldiers now serving in the regular army, grandsons of those who
fought for the Confederacy and of those who fought for the Union. The
Stars and Bars of the Confederacy were proudly borne at the head of
the procession... As the long line passed the reviewing stand the old
men in gray offered their services in the present war. We will go to
France or anywhere you want to send us!
they shouted to the president.
Wilson won reelection in 1916, his campaign running on the slogan, He
kept us out of war. But he could then betray his anti-war supporters
knowing that a rising political coalition -- made up, in part, of men
looking to redeem a lost war by finding new wars to fight -- had his back.
Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his reelection on winning
the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even
as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington
and purged African Americans from federal jobs. And it was Wilson who
started the presidential tradition of laying a Memorial Day wreath at
Arlington Cemeterys Confederate War Memorial.
In 1916, he turned that event into a war rally. America is roused,
Wilson said to a large gathering of Confederate veterans, roused to a
self-consciousness she has not had in a generation. And this spirit is
going out conquering and to conquer until, it may be, in the
Providence of God, a new light is lifted up in America which shall
throw the rays of liberty and justice far abroad upon every sea, and
even upon the lands which now wallow in darkness and refuse to see the
light.
What alchemy it was -- with Wilson conscripting the Confederate cause
into his brand of arrogant, martial universalism. The conflict in
Europe, Wilson said at the same wreath-laying event a year later (less
then two months after the U.S. had declared war on Germany), offered a
chance to vindicate the things which we have professed and to show
the world that America was born to serve mankind.
American history was fast turning into an endless parade of war, and
the sectional reconciliation that went with it meant that throughout
the first half of the twentieth century the conquered banner could
fly pretty much anywhere with little other than positive comment. In
World War II, for instance, after a two-month battle for the island of
Okinawa, the first flag Marines raised upon taking the headquarters of
the Japanese Imperial Army was the Confederate one. It had been
carried into battle in the helmet of a captain from South Carolina.
With the Korean War, the NAACPs journal, The Crisis, reported a
staggering jump in sales of Confederate flags from 40,000 in 1949 to
1,600,000 in 1950.
Much of the demand, it reported, was coming from soldiers overseas in
Germany and Korea. The Crisis hoped for the best, writing that the
banners growing popularity had nothing to do with rising reactionary
Dixiecratism.
It was a fad, the magazine claimed, like carrying foxtails on cars.
As it happened, it wasnt. As the Civil Rights Movement evolved and
the Black Power movement emerged, as Korea gave way to Vietnam, the
Confederate flag returned to its original meaning: the bunting of
resentful white supremacy. Dixie found itself in Danang.
Dixie in Danang
We are fighting and dying in a war that is not very popular in the
first place, Lieutenant Eddie Kitchen, a 33-year-old African-American
stationed in Vietnam, wrote his mother in Chicago in late February
1968, and we still have some people who are still fighting the Civil
War. Kitchen, who had been in the military since 1955, reported a
rapid proliferation of Confederate flags, mounted on jeeps and flying
over some bases. The Negroes here are afraid and cannot do anything,
Kitchen added. Two weeks later he was dead, officially listed as
killed in action. His mother believed that he had been murdered by
white soldiers in retaliation for objecting to the flag.
Kitchens was one of many such complaints, as the polarization tearing
through domestic politics in the United States, along with the symbols
of White Supremacy -- not just the Confederate flag but the burning
cross, the Klan robe and hood, and racist slurs -- spilled into
Vietnam. As early as Christmas Day 1965, a number of white soldiers
paraded in front of the audience of conservative comedian Bob Hopes USO
After they were seated, wrote an African-American soldier protestinghalf-mast.
the display, several officers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers]
were seen posing and taking pictures under the flag. I felt like an
outsider. An African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender,
reported that southern Whites were infecting Vietnamese with their
racism. The Confederate flags seem more popular in Vietnam than the
flags of several countries, the paper wrote, judging by the display
of flags for sale on a Saigon street corner.
Black soldiers who pushed back against such Dixie-ism were subject to
insult and abuse. Some were thrown in the stockade. When Private First
Class Danny Frazier complained of the damn flag flown by Alabama
soldiers in his barracks to his superior officers, he was ordered to
do demeaning work and then demoted.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in early April 1968 and
American military bases throughout South Vietnam lowered their flags to
InConfederate flag.
some places, such as the Cam Ranh Naval Base, however, white soldiers
celebrated by raising the Confederate flag and burning crosses.
Following Kings murder, the Department of Defense tried to ban the
Race is our most serious international problem, a PentagonPentagon backpedaled.
representative said. But Dixiecrat politicians, who controlled the
votes President Lyndon Johnson needed to fund the war, objected and the
Instead of enforcing the ban, it turned to sensitivity training. Thewin.
Confederate flag, a black military instructor told a class of black
and white soldiers at Fort Dix, does not necessarily mean a man
belongs to the Ku Klux Klan.
The Sum of All Lost Causes
Back home, a backlash against the antiwar movement helped nationalize
the Confederate flag. The banner was increasingly seen not just at
gatherings of the fringe KKK and the John Birch Society, but at
patriotic rallies in areas of the country outside the old South: in
Detroit, Chicago, California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. For
instance, on June 14, 1970 -- Flag Day
--
pro-war demonstrators marched up Pittsburgs Liberty Avenue with a
large Confederate flag demanding that Washington... get in there and
For many, the Confederate flag remained an emblem of racist reactionunder the Confederate flag.
to federal efforts to advance equal rights and integration. Yet as
issues of race, militarism, and class resentment merged into a broader
cultural war,
some in the rising New Right rallied around the Stars and Bars to
avenge not the South, but South Vietnam.
In 1973, shortly after the U.S. officially ended combat operations in
South Vietnam, for instance, Bart Bonner, a conservative activist and
Vietnam veteran from Waterbury, New York, met with South Vietnams
military attaché in Washington and offered to raise a private,
volunteer force of 75,000 American veterans to fight in South Vietnam
Forwould become known as Iran-Contra.
Bonner, and many like him, that flag now stood not for the lost
cause but all lost causes conservatives cared about, an icon of
resistance to the liberal Establishment.
Bonner told Soldier of Fortune magazine that he had the financial
support of Texas millionaire Ross Perot and 100 men, including former
Green Berets, Air Force commandos, and Navy Seals, ready to show the
people of South Vietnam... that not all Americans are cowards. He
added: The Stars and Bars -- the Confederate flag -- is a beautiful
flag.
Nothing came of Bonners plan. But the scheme did anticipate many of
the strategies the New Right would use to circumvent all those
cumbersome restrictions the post-Vietnam Congress placed on the
ability of the executive branch to wage war and conduct covert
operations, including the rise of mercenary groups that continue to
play a significant role in fighting Americas wars and attempts to
raise money from private, often southern rightwing sources. Ross
Perot, for instance, would fund some of Oliver Norths effort to run a
foreign policy independent of congressional oversight, a scandal that
Moonlight, Magnolia, and My Laiover Calley.
Before Watergate brought him down, President Richard Nixon fused
overseas militarism and domestic racism into one noxious whole as part
of his strategy to win the South in 1972 and secure his reelection. In
southern Africa, where Black-led national liberation movements were
contesting white rule, this meant putting in place National Security
Adviser Henry Kissingers Tar-Baby Tilt, strengthening ties with the
white supremacist nations of South Africa and Rhodesia. Support for
Pretoria and Salisbury was popular in Biloxi.
But the foreign-policy centerpiece of Nixons Southern Strategy was
Vietnam. Senator George McGovern summed the situation up this way
after being told by Kissinger that the U.S. couldnt exit Vietnam
because the bosss whole constituency would just fall apart: They
were willing to continue killing Asians and sacrificing the lives of
young Americans because of their interpretation of what would play in
the United States.
The infamous March 1968 massacre at My Lai would prove especially
useful in helping Nixon win the Moonlight and Magnolia set. After it
came to light that members of the 23rd Infantry Division, also known
as the Americal, had slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians,
including women, children, and infants, Nixon made his support for
Lieutenant William Calley, the only soldier convicted for taking part
in the massacre, a key element in his reelection campaign. As
historian Joseph Fry points out in his new book, The American South
and the Vietnam War, Calley, who was from Florida, was extremely
popular in the South. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of
Alabama, flew to Fort Benning, where Calley was being held under house
arrest, to speak at a rally, replete with Confederate flags.
Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams told Nixons vice president,
Spiro Agnew, that his state was "about ready to secede from the union"
The campaign to depict Calley as an honorable warrior scapegoated byflag.
elites was but one more opportunity to generalize the historical
experience of southern humiliation into an ongoing national sentiment.
As after 1865, the solution to such humiliation has been more war,
forever war. And with endless war comes an endless tolerance for
atrocities. Most people dont give a shit whether he killed them or
not, Nixon said of Calleys actions at My Lai. The villagers got
what they deserved, commented Louisiana Senator Allen Ellender. You
can draw a straight line from such hard-heartedness to todays torture
coalition, to men like Dick Cheney, who defend inflicting pain on
innocent people as long as we achieve our objective.
The Confederate flag still flies overseas. It was carried into Iraq in
2003.
In Afghanistan, at the infamous Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a
platoon implicated in the torture of detainees, known as the the
Testosterone Gang, hung a Confederate flag in their tent.
It is good to see the Confederate flag coming down in some places, but
I suspect that reports of its final furling are premature. Endless
wars will always have their atrocities. And atrocities will always find a
© 2014 TomDispatch.comConfederacy.
Greg Grandin
The Confederate Flag at War (But Not the Civil War) by Greg Grandin
2 Comments
In this 1967 press photo by Toshio Sakai, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam
ride a tank displaying a Confederate flag. (Photo: manhhai/flickr/cc)
The Pentagon just cant let go. In the wake of the Charleston
Massacre, Amazon and Walmart have announced that they will no longer
sell Confederate flag merchandise. Ebay says it will stop offering
Confederate items for electronic auction. The Republican governor of
Mississippi calls his state flag, which includes the Stars and Bars in
the top left corner, a point of offense that needs to be removed.
Even Kentuckys Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the U.S.
Senate, agrees that a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis
in his state's capitol building belongs in a museum.
Yet the Department of Defense says it isnt even reviewing the
possibility of a ban on the flag, deciding instead to leave any such
move to the various service branches, while military bases named after
Confederate officers will remain so. One factor in this decision: the
South provides more than 40% of all military recruits, many of them
white; only 15% are from the Northeast.
Filling the ranks isn't, however, the only reason for the militarys
refusal to act.
Over the last few weeks, there has been near unanimous agreement
among liberal and mainstream commentators that the Confederate flag
represents hate, not heritage. The flags current presence in
American culture is ubiquitous. It adorns license plates, bumper
stickers, mugs, bodies (via tattoos), and even baby diapers. The
flags popularity is normally traced back to the post-World War II
reaction of the Dixiecrat South to the Civil Rights Movement. South
Carolina, for instance, raised the Stars and Bars over its state house
in 1961 as part, columnist Eugene Robinson said on "Meet the Press,"
of its massive resistance to racial desegregation."
All true. But like many discussions of American conservativism, this
account misses the role endless war played in sustaining domestic
racism. Starting around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck
backlash, the Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an
important pennant in the expanding American empire and a symbol of
national unification, not polarization.
It was a reconciled Army that moved out into the world after the Civil
War, an unstoppable combination of Northern law (bureaucratic command
and control, industrial might, and technology) and Southern spirit (an
exaltation of military ideals and virtues, including valor, duty,
and honor). Both law and spirit had their dark sides leading to
horrors committed due either to the very nature of the American empire
-- the genocide of Native Americans, for example, or the war in
Southeast Asia -- or to the particular passions of some of its
soldiers. And both law and spirit had their own flags.
Lost Cause Found
Northerners and Southerners agreed on little in the years after the
Civil War, historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman write, except that
the Army should pacify Western tribes. Reconstruction -- Washingtons
effort to set the terms for the Souths readmission to the Union and
establish postwar political equality -- was being bitterly opposed by
defeated white separatists. According to Cothran and Kelman, however,
Many Americans found rare common ground on the subject of Manifest
Destiny.
After the surrender at Appomattox, it was too soon to fly the Stars
and Bars against Native Americans. And it was Union officers -- men
like generals George Armstrong Custer and Philip Sheridan -- who
committed most of the atrocities against indigenous peoples. But
Confederate veterans and their sons used the pacification of the West
as a readmission program into the U.S. Army. The career of Luther
Hare, a Texas son of a Confederate captain, is illustrative. He barely
survived Custers campaign against the Sioux.
Cornered in a skirmish that preceded Little Big Horn, Hare opened
fire and let out a rebel yell before escaping. He then went on to
fight Native Americans in Montana, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and
Arizona, where he put down the last of the renegade Apaches, before
being sent to the Philippines as a colonel. There, he led a detachment
of Texans against the Spanish.
With Reconstruction over and Jim Crow segregation installed in every
southern State, the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the U.S.
took Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and
Guam in the Pacific, was a key moment in the rehabilitation of the
Earlier,versus Spain.
when slavery was still a going concern, southerners had yearned to
separate Cuba from Spain and turn it into a slave state. Now,
conquering the island served a different purpose: a chance to prove
their patriotism and reconcile with the North.
Southern ports like New Orleans, Charleston, and Tampa were used as
staging areas for the invasions of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Northern
soldiers passing through New Orleans were glad to see that grizzled
old Confederates were cheering them on, saluting the Union flag, and
happy to send their sons to fight and die under it. Newspapers
throughout the South, along with Dixie's largest veterans association,
the United Confederate Veterans, saw war with Spain as a vindication
of the Old Cause and reveled in the exploits of former Confederate
generals, including Robert E. Lees nephew, Fitzhugh Lee.
In June 1898, just weeks after U.S. troops landed in Cuba, two
train-car loads of Confederate flags arrived in Atlanta for a coming
reunion of southern veterans of the war. The Stars and Bars would soon
festoon the city Union General William T. Sherman had burned to the
ground. At the very center of the celebrations main venue stood a
30-foot Confederate flag, flanked by a Cuban and a U.S. flag. Speech
after speech extolled sublime
war -- not just the Civil War but all the wars that made up the
nineteenth century -- with Mexico, against Native Americans, and now
Theindestructible states,
gallantry and heroism of your sons as they teach the haughty Spaniard
amid the carnage of Santiago to honor and respect the flag of our
country, which shall float forever over an indissoluble union of
was how one southern veteran put it.liberty to the oppressed islands of both oceans.
War with Spain allowed our boys to once more be wrapped in the
folds of the American flag, said General John Gordon, commander of
the United Confederate Veterans, in remarks opening the proceedings.
Their heroism, he added, has led to the complete and permanent
obliteration of all sectional distrusts and to the establishment of
the too long delayed brotherhood and unity of the American people. In
this sense, the War of 1898 was alchemic, transforming the lost
cause of the Confederacy (that is, the preservation of slavery) into
a crusade for world freedom. The South, Gordon said, was helping to
bring the light of American civilization and the boon of Republican
With Spain defeated, President William McKinley took a victory tour ofshow at Bien Hoa Air Base.
the South, hailing the the valor and the heroism [that] the men from
the south and the men of the north have within the past three years...
shown in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, and in China.
When we are all on one side, the president said, we are unconquerable.
It was around this time that, after much delay, Congress finally
authorized the return of Confederate flags captured by Union forces
during the Civil War to the United Confederate Veterans.
To Serve Mankind
World War I brought more goodwill. In June 1916, as Woodrow Wilson
began to push through Congress a remarkable set of laws militarizing
the country, including the expansion of the Army and National Guard
(and an authorization to place the former under federal authority),
the construction of nitrate plants for munitions production, and the
funding of military research and development, Confederate veterans
descended on Washington, D.C., to show their support for the coming
war in Europe.
About 10,000 men wearing the gray, escorted by several thousand who
wore the blue, marched along Pennsylvania Avenue and were reviewed by
the President, one observer reported. In the line were many young
soldiers now serving in the regular army, grandsons of those who
fought for the Confederacy and of those who fought for the Union. The
Stars and Bars of the Confederacy were proudly borne at the head of
the procession... As the long line passed the reviewing stand the old
men in gray offered their services in the present war. We will go to
France or anywhere you want to send us!
they shouted to the president.
Wilson won reelection in 1916, his campaign running on the slogan, He
kept us out of war. But he could then betray his anti-war supporters
knowing that a rising political coalition -- made up, in part, of men
looking to redeem a lost war by finding new wars to fight -- had his back.
Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his reelection on winning
the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even
as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington
and purged African Americans from federal jobs. And it was Wilson who
started the presidential tradition of laying a Memorial Day wreath at
Arlington Cemeterys Confederate War Memorial.
In 1916, he turned that event into a war rally. America is roused,
Wilson said to a large gathering of Confederate veterans, roused to a
self-consciousness she has not had in a generation. And this spirit is
going out conquering and to conquer until, it may be, in the
Providence of God, a new light is lifted up in America which shall
throw the rays of liberty and justice far abroad upon every sea, and
even upon the lands which now wallow in darkness and refuse to see the
light.
What alchemy it was -- with Wilson conscripting the Confederate cause
into his brand of arrogant, martial universalism. The conflict in
Europe, Wilson said at the same wreath-laying event a year later (less
then two months after the U.S. had declared war on Germany), offered a
chance to vindicate the things which we have professed and to show
the world that America was born to serve mankind.
American history was fast turning into an endless parade of war, and
the sectional reconciliation that went with it meant that throughout
the first half of the twentieth century the conquered banner could
fly pretty much anywhere with little other than positive comment. In
World War II, for instance, after a two-month battle for the island of
Okinawa, the first flag Marines raised upon taking the headquarters of
the Japanese Imperial Army was the Confederate one. It had been
carried into battle in the helmet of a captain from South Carolina.
With the Korean War, the NAACPs journal, The Crisis, reported a
staggering jump in sales of Confederate flags from 40,000 in 1949 to
1,600,000 in 1950.
Much of the demand, it reported, was coming from soldiers overseas in
Germany and Korea. The Crisis hoped for the best, writing that the
banners growing popularity had nothing to do with rising reactionary
Dixiecratism.
It was a fad, the magazine claimed, like carrying foxtails on cars.
As it happened, it wasnt. As the Civil Rights Movement evolved and
the Black Power movement emerged, as Korea gave way to Vietnam, the
Confederate flag returned to its original meaning: the bunting of
resentful white supremacy. Dixie found itself in Danang.
Dixie in Danang
We are fighting and dying in a war that is not very popular in the
first place, Lieutenant Eddie Kitchen, a 33-year-old African-American
stationed in Vietnam, wrote his mother in Chicago in late February
1968, and we still have some people who are still fighting the Civil
War. Kitchen, who had been in the military since 1955, reported a
rapid proliferation of Confederate flags, mounted on jeeps and flying
over some bases. The Negroes here are afraid and cannot do anything,
Kitchen added. Two weeks later he was dead, officially listed as
killed in action. His mother believed that he had been murdered by
white soldiers in retaliation for objecting to the flag.
Kitchens was one of many such complaints, as the polarization tearing
through domestic politics in the United States, along with the symbols
of White Supremacy -- not just the Confederate flag but the burning
cross, the Klan robe and hood, and racist slurs -- spilled into
Vietnam. As early as Christmas Day 1965, a number of white soldiers
paraded in front of the audience of conservative comedian Bob Hopes USO
After they were seated, wrote an African-American soldier protestinghalf-mast.
the display, several officers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers]
were seen posing and taking pictures under the flag. I felt like an
outsider. An African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender,
reported that southern Whites were infecting Vietnamese with their
racism. The Confederate flags seem more popular in Vietnam than the
flags of several countries, the paper wrote, judging by the display
of flags for sale on a Saigon street corner.
Black soldiers who pushed back against such Dixie-ism were subject to
insult and abuse. Some were thrown in the stockade. When Private First
Class Danny Frazier complained of the damn flag flown by Alabama
soldiers in his barracks to his superior officers, he was ordered to
do demeaning work and then demoted.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in early April 1968 and
American military bases throughout South Vietnam lowered their flags to
InConfederate flag.
some places, such as the Cam Ranh Naval Base, however, white soldiers
celebrated by raising the Confederate flag and burning crosses.
Following Kings murder, the Department of Defense tried to ban the
Race is our most serious international problem, a PentagonPentagon backpedaled.
representative said. But Dixiecrat politicians, who controlled the
votes President Lyndon Johnson needed to fund the war, objected and the
Instead of enforcing the ban, it turned to sensitivity training. Thewin.
Confederate flag, a black military instructor told a class of black
and white soldiers at Fort Dix, does not necessarily mean a man
belongs to the Ku Klux Klan.
The Sum of All Lost Causes
Back home, a backlash against the antiwar movement helped nationalize
the Confederate flag. The banner was increasingly seen not just at
gatherings of the fringe KKK and the John Birch Society, but at
patriotic rallies in areas of the country outside the old South: in
Detroit, Chicago, California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. For
instance, on June 14, 1970 -- Flag Day
--
pro-war demonstrators marched up Pittsburgs Liberty Avenue with a
large Confederate flag demanding that Washington... get in there and
For many, the Confederate flag remained an emblem of racist reactionunder the Confederate flag.
to federal efforts to advance equal rights and integration. Yet as
issues of race, militarism, and class resentment merged into a broader
cultural war,
some in the rising New Right rallied around the Stars and Bars to
avenge not the South, but South Vietnam.
In 1973, shortly after the U.S. officially ended combat operations in
South Vietnam, for instance, Bart Bonner, a conservative activist and
Vietnam veteran from Waterbury, New York, met with South Vietnams
military attaché in Washington and offered to raise a private,
volunteer force of 75,000 American veterans to fight in South Vietnam
Forwould become known as Iran-Contra.
Bonner, and many like him, that flag now stood not for the lost
cause but all lost causes conservatives cared about, an icon of
resistance to the liberal Establishment.
Bonner told Soldier of Fortune magazine that he had the financial
support of Texas millionaire Ross Perot and 100 men, including former
Green Berets, Air Force commandos, and Navy Seals, ready to show the
people of South Vietnam... that not all Americans are cowards. He
added: The Stars and Bars -- the Confederate flag -- is a beautiful
flag.
Nothing came of Bonners plan. But the scheme did anticipate many of
the strategies the New Right would use to circumvent all those
cumbersome restrictions the post-Vietnam Congress placed on the
ability of the executive branch to wage war and conduct covert
operations, including the rise of mercenary groups that continue to
play a significant role in fighting Americas wars and attempts to
raise money from private, often southern rightwing sources. Ross
Perot, for instance, would fund some of Oliver Norths effort to run a
foreign policy independent of congressional oversight, a scandal that
Moonlight, Magnolia, and My Laiover Calley.
Before Watergate brought him down, President Richard Nixon fused
overseas militarism and domestic racism into one noxious whole as part
of his strategy to win the South in 1972 and secure his reelection. In
southern Africa, where Black-led national liberation movements were
contesting white rule, this meant putting in place National Security
Adviser Henry Kissingers Tar-Baby Tilt, strengthening ties with the
white supremacist nations of South Africa and Rhodesia. Support for
Pretoria and Salisbury was popular in Biloxi.
But the foreign-policy centerpiece of Nixons Southern Strategy was
Vietnam. Senator George McGovern summed the situation up this way
after being told by Kissinger that the U.S. couldnt exit Vietnam
because the bosss whole constituency would just fall apart: They
were willing to continue killing Asians and sacrificing the lives of
young Americans because of their interpretation of what would play in
the United States.
The infamous March 1968 massacre at My Lai would prove especially
useful in helping Nixon win the Moonlight and Magnolia set. After it
came to light that members of the 23rd Infantry Division, also known
as the Americal, had slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians,
including women, children, and infants, Nixon made his support for
Lieutenant William Calley, the only soldier convicted for taking part
in the massacre, a key element in his reelection campaign. As
historian Joseph Fry points out in his new book, The American South
and the Vietnam War, Calley, who was from Florida, was extremely
popular in the South. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of
Alabama, flew to Fort Benning, where Calley was being held under house
arrest, to speak at a rally, replete with Confederate flags.
Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams told Nixons vice president,
Spiro Agnew, that his state was "about ready to secede from the union"
The campaign to depict Calley as an honorable warrior scapegoated byflag.
elites was but one more opportunity to generalize the historical
experience of southern humiliation into an ongoing national sentiment.
As after 1865, the solution to such humiliation has been more war,
forever war. And with endless war comes an endless tolerance for
atrocities. Most people dont give a shit whether he killed them or
not, Nixon said of Calleys actions at My Lai. The villagers got
what they deserved, commented Louisiana Senator Allen Ellender. You
can draw a straight line from such hard-heartedness to todays torture
coalition, to men like Dick Cheney, who defend inflicting pain on
innocent people as long as we achieve our objective.
The Confederate flag still flies overseas. It was carried into Iraq in
2003.
In Afghanistan, at the infamous Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a
platoon implicated in the torture of detainees, known as the the
Testosterone Gang, hung a Confederate flag in their tent.
It is good to see the Confederate flag coming down in some places, but
I suspect that reports of its final furling are premature. Endless
wars will always have their atrocities. And atrocities will always find a
© 2014 TomDispatch.com
