Letter-to-the-editor on Trump and the Confederacy

This was published in the Boulder Weekly Jan. 26th 2023, here. The column I'm responding to is here.

Editor,

As much as I usually love Dave Anderson’s columns, his latest, about the Civil War, could have been better. I’d like to offer some facts that Dave at least kind of left out. In recent years I have frequently gotten the impression that a LOT of Americans are confused about the Civil War. People think it was about states’ rights and not slavery and racism. In recent decades many people in the Republican Party who were either closet racists (or had been fooled by them) thought it was fine to have the Confederate flag displayed wherever people wanted to display it, including as part of state flags.

The Confederacy and it’s symbols were and are about slavery and racism. The Confederacy was NOT about state’s rights as some have claimed. Those who pushed for it’s creation complained that northern States had anti-slavery laws. At one point, the Confederacy’s leaders briefly considered ending slavery to get military support from Europe- support that probably would have resulted in victory against the Union. They decided to keep slavery, meaning that slavery was more important to them than independence from Washington D.C. And there was at least one incident where Black Union soldiers captured by the South were executed instead of being taken to POW camps as were the White Union soldiers.

When Donald Trump needed a new Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2018, the position was filled by Robert Wilkie, a man with a history of involvement with the Neo-Confederate movement. In 2020 Trump passionately opposed re-naming military bases named after Confederate military leaders, including one responsible for the incident where Black POWs were executed. In 2017 Trump talked about the Civil War and said that the former President Andrew Jackson would have handled the slavery issue better than Lincoln did and the Civil War would have been avoided. Jackson was a passionate opponent of abolitionists and would have compromised with the South and slavery would have continued with (at most) minor changes to it's geographic scope and/or life time and/or there may have been minor changes in how slaves were treated. Or he may have done absolutely nothing about slavery- if it were up to Donald Trump, slavery might still exist today.

As Dave said, the Neo-Confederate view is part of the MAGA movement.

Tom Shelley
Boulder

The Stars and Bars II

Recently great attention has been placed on symbols of the Confederacy in our nation. It almost seems like there is a near consensus that such symbols belong in museums and nowhere else. But Trump, who is still supported to one degree or another by a large minority of the population and might be re-elected, passionately believes that there is nothing wrong with such symbols.

I have named this post “The Stars and Bars II” because I did a post about 11 years ago called “The Stars and Bars.” It’s about how legitimizing the Confederate flag contributed to a woman (whose story I read about in the publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center) becoming a Nazi skinhead.

A lot of people believe that the Confederacy was about independence from tyrannical Washington DC rule instead of being about slavery. But when they considered ending slavery to get military support from Europe and win the war, they decided not to. Slavery was more important to them than independence.

When people invoke states rights in connection with the Confederate cause, what they don’t know or ignore is that the Confederate states were unhappy with those northern states that passed laws interfering with the Fugitive Slave Act and which banned slave-owners from bring slaves with them while inside those states. They were against individual states passing anti-slavery laws.

The Confederacy didn’t believe in freedom. According to the movie “CSA: The Confederate States of America” (which is a fake documentary looking at an alternative history where the South wins), they intended to colonize Latin America if successful.

The idea that the South was oppressed by the North is ridiculous. In two ways their voting population was over-represented in the US government.

First, as I explain towards the bottom of this post, the way the US Senate works is undemocratic to the benefit of the smaller states. I have yet to create a 100% fool-proof argument, but take the number two for two Senators and divide it by the population of Wyoming, the smallest state and do the same thing with California. The tiny percentage of a vote that residents of the former have in the Senate is MUCH bigger than the same for Californians, about 67 times bigger. There is nothing wrong about small states being out-voted by big states, it’s not like living in a small state puts you in a protected class and you need some sort of Affirmative Action. I’m willing to bet that the population of the average Confederate state back then was probably about 1/10 the size of the population of the average Union state (UPDATE 9/4/23 I just found a way to sort of nail this down without a lot of work- the average Confederate state had 5.25 congressional districts and the average Union state (including the border states) had 7.4 congressional districts).

There’s also the 3/5 Compromise, where in terms of allocating US House districts, each slave was counted as 3/5 of a person. I’m sure in some Confederate states before the Civil War, this meant at least an additional House seat.

So, the states that formed the Confederacy had MORE power per non-slave resident than the States that remained in the union. They were not oppressed by the North. Even with their inflated political power, they were often just out-voted. Considering that the Constitution gives every state an additional two votes in the Electoral College based on having two Senators, which creates a small and false degree of equality between the states, that statement applies to the election of Lincoln as well.

They were also, if it’s not obvious, just racist. One example of that is that some Black Union soldiers captured by the Confederacy were killed instead of being held as POWs and more generally Black POWs were treated differently than white POWs.  One of the military installations that Trump wants to keep named after a Confederate general, Fort A.P. Hill, is named after someone who had his men execute Black POWs. According to this (two other things in this post come from there), when Texas seceded, it was explicitly in favor of the idea that the white race is superior.

The Confederacy was all about racism and slavery and had no legitimate claim to being oppressed by the North. The Confederate flag is a symbol of racism and should be removed from anything official and military bases named after Confederate generals should be renamed and statues etc. about the Confederacy should be removed to museums where they belong.

The Black Lives Matter Protests and the Trunp Administration

Although I have been following developments and reading commentary about the Black Lives Matters protests like crazy, I have not attended any protests. For MULTIPLE reasons, taking part in protests would cause me the kind of anxiety and stress that would make my mental disabilities much worse than they are.

But, even though I currently am not getting a lot of visitors to this blog (I’m getting some and will soon get more), here are my thoughts about the issues thrown up by the protests.

Many people (like Trump) don’t understand this, but this is not about George Floyd. This is about hundreds of years of black lives being valued less than white lives in this country, including an apparent surge in the murders of unarmed Black people by police in the last several years, as well as some modern-day lynchings that more or less don’t involve the police. I was told at a BLM protest march around 2015 that in a 365-day period ending shortly before that day about 200 black people, armed or unarmed, had been killed by American police. I’m sure some of them were armed, but A) I’m very open-minded about allegations that cops plant guns and B) around that time there were SEVERAL highly publicized cases where undeniably unarmed Black people were killed by police. Police are practically never convicted, or even prosecuted (and rarely fired) for such deaths. Although there isn’t solidly comprehensive information about how often unarmed black people are killed by police here like there’s information about the security forces killing Catholic civilians in Northern Ireland’s Troubles, one reason I believe it’s a widespread and serious problem is that both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, two organizations that generally get along with police, have expressed support for BLM. That’s here and here. They are making these statements because even though they are sort of pro-cop, they are even more anti-racist and anti-injustice and anti-inequality. And that’s the agenda they see in BLM. (And in the case of the ADL, their support for BLM is also despite the fact that BLM has expressed criticism of Israel)

Trump claims to be sensitive to the death of Floyd, but he clearly isn’t beyond the death of that one individual. He isn’t sensitive to what Floyd’s death symbolizes. His National Security Advisor has said “No, I don't think there's systemic racism. I think 99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans.” Based on multiple facts, a lot more than .1% of police are racist. That’s based on simple common sense, but also the following:

1) What I wrote about the SPLC and the ADL and BLM.
2) In 1992, when the controversy over the Body Count (Ice-T’s heavy metal band) song Cop Killer broke, the (then- 35,000 member) National Black Police Association kind of backed Ice-T. According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel:

The 35,000-member National Black Police Association says it won't join the boycott. Police should try to get at the root of black discontent and try to change it, said Ronald Hampton, the group's executive director.

"Where were these police groups when the police beat up Rodney King?" Hampton asked. "Why were they not appalled by the actions of their brothers? It rings of hypocrisy.”

3) From what I’ve heard, some massive majority of cops are registered to vote GOP and for the following reasons I believe that is a racist party.

A) Not only do they get no more than about 10% of the Black vote, and only around 25% of the Latino vote (and that would be lower if (more or less) white Latinos were excluded from the calculations), they also get no more than around 25% of the Asian-American vote. That last fact is crucial. Even though Asian-Americans as a group do at least as well financially as white people do as a group, and even though there is the history of FDR and Internment, Asian-Americanss look at the GOP and see it as even less attractive than the Dems.
B) There ’s also the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s Segregationist Democrats migrated to the GOP because the Dems became a civil rights party. In 2005 the GOP ADMITTED (and in all fairness apologized for) using the “Southern Strategy” of 1968 where they appealed to segregationist southerners in order to elect Nixon.
C) As I’ll explain further down, Trump is a racist.

There’s also the fact that, according to HuffPost, the Trump Justice Department ignored police brutality:

“Since President Donald Trump took office, his appointees at the Justice Department have all but eliminated the federal government’s police reform work. The Civil Rights Division’s police practices group has shrunk by half, and it hasn’t opened any major pattern-or-practice investigations that could rein in police departments that regularly violate constitutional rights.”

(Also, see this).

(There’s a lot of things I will gloss over because there’s so much attention on them anyway, like Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” or what happened to facilitate his photo-op with the Bible)

Trump is a racist. Here’s some of the most solid evidence:

1) A few years ago was the first time Trump called Antifa a terrorist organization. It was after Antifa members had done what they’re defined by, and that’s not actually or allegedly rioting. They were fighting people clearly identifiable as fascists, and no, I don’t believe that cops are clearly identifiable as fascists. They were fighting FASCISTS.
2) On a similar note, when an anti-fascist was killed in 2017 in Charlottesville by a fascist, Trump said there were “fine” people on both sides.
3) There’s his attitude to the exonerated victims of a racial miscarriage of justice.
4) When asked about David Duke endorsing him, his response in an interview was:

Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. OK? I don't know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don't know. I don’t know, did he endorse me or what’s going on, because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. And so you're asking me a question that I'm supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.

5) There’s his opinion that Lincoln screwed up dealing with what led to the Civil War. Trump thinks that if the then-late former President Andrew Jackson had been President in 1861 the Civil War would have been avoided. Since Jackson was a slave owner and an opponent of abolitionism, that would have involved, at best, a compromise friendly to the South that would have barely affected the life-span and geographic scope of slavery or the treatment of slaves. There’s information about that here and here.
6) His Veterans Affairs Secretary is a neo-confederate.

(As far as those last two, I should explain two facts about the Confederacy. First, they considered ending slavery so they could get military support from Europe and win the war, but decided not to- slavery was more important to them than independence. Also, when Black Union soldiers were captured, they were treated differently than White POWs and in at least one case were simply executed instead of taken to POW camps. The Confederacy was about slavery and racism)

I recently had a bit of a breakthrough on what needs to be done to make significant progress on ridding this country of racism. In addition to everything else people are doing, we need more unions. That’s based on the following:

1. Union households are more likely to vote Democratic than non-union households, and many of the organizers and staff in the labor movement are people of color and most of the whites are anti-racist and most union supporters are people of color or anti-racist whites.
2. In 2000 in a discussion on the email list of the Young Democratic Socialists (now YDSA) a member who was organizing workers in Indiana said that his competition was the Klan (UPDATE 1/26/22 That is, competition for the hearts and minds of the workers).
3. Eammon McCann is a socialist and anti-Unionist activist in Northern Ireland. He was one of the main leaders of the N. Ireland Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s (he was one of the speakers at the rally/march that was attacked by the British Army on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, and he was an organizer of the second Civil Rights march, the one in Derry in Oct. of 1968). He has held several different senior and very senior positions in the Northern Irish TRADE-union movement in the last 40 years. In 2016 he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly and in 2017 he would have been but they reduced the number of seats returned from each constituency form 6 to 5 so he was basically runner-up. As far as I can tell, in the last 40 years at any given time two mainstream or professional news publications have been publishing his columns. He is an expert on sectarianism in N. Ireland. In a column written in the 1980s or 1990s and included in the 1998 anthology of his columns “McCann: War and Peace in Northern Ireland” he wrote:

The trade union movement is better placed than any other to purge the politics of this island of sectarianism. No other institution brings Catholic and Protestant workers together on a regular basis in pursuit of a common purpose which is antipathetic to sectarianism

(Mark Langhammer, who was the leader of the Northern Ireland part of the Irish Labour Party for several years around 2010, told me in 2005 that he agrees with McCann)

I think you could easily say the same thing about racism in this country.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, as the labor movement has become more and more anti-racist, it has gotten smaller and smaller, thanks to the GOP, corporations, and moderate Democrats.

*************

In conclusion, although I’m concerned the protests will result in the spread of COVID-19 and I have been unable to take part in them, I am glad that the protests are happening. They seem likely to be successful in multiple ways and have exposed more than usual the fact that our society is racist and that Trump is a racist.


A new mural in Belfast, N. Ireland.

"The Party of Lincoln"

I first read about Trump's thoughts on the Civil War in an article on the BBC News site. I found another article there about it, where historians are asked to respond to what Trump said. In an analysis piece for the Washington Post, the author of that piece wrote: "Update: Trump clarified Monday night that he didn't actually think Jackson was alive during the Civil War, but he stood by his larger contention that Jackson somehow would have prevented it." That doesn't change anything at all about how what he said was offensive, as I'll explain below.

I need to point out a couple things that might not have gotten the huge amount of attention they should get- or at the very least, I want to say them too (the more the merrier). It's very important that the racism of what he said. gets exposed. The third item below seems to have gotten almost no attention at all.

1) He thought there should have been some negotiated resolution of the conflict around slavery, which, even though he hasn't said this- would have meant slavery continuing in some form, some where in the US for some number of years.

2) Andrew Jackson was a slave owner and a passionate opponent of abolitionists. If he were the one negotiating with the South, I guarantee the compromise would have meant slavery continuing with (at the most), VERY minor (if any) changes in it's treatment of slaves, and/or it's geographic scope, and/or and it's life-span. (

3) We now have another good response when members of the GOP say that their party is the party of Lincoln! : )

Tom

UPDATE 4/23/20 Bearing in mind that criminal "justice" reform is a issue of racism, see this.

Tearing Down the Swastikas- A New Poem!

I almost never publish just one poem at a time, but this might be my very best poem and I want to publish it, so here it is. For an explanation of how I write these poems see this. The rest of my poems can be found by clicking on the "lyrics" label at the bottom of this post. There's about seven pages so click on "older posts" at the bottom of the first lyrics page.

“Tearing Down the Swastikas,” based on “Tearing Down Red Flags” (or something like that) by Razor’s Edge. Original lyrics are here.

1. It’s set roughly during the last 5 or so months of the war in Europe.

2. I get the impression that the plotters of the 1944 attempted coup by part of the German military were far from ideal. They were happy to fight the Soviets and wanted an alliance with the West in doing that. And the coup’s leader was not as politically attractive as they make him look in the Tom Cruise movie, but I imagine he and the others would have called off the Final Solution if they had succeeded.

3. Himmler was head of the SS. UPDATE 4/22/18 I changed Himmler to Eichmann. although Himmler was head of the SS, I have gotten the impression that he didn't have much to do with the Final Solution, so it now refers to Adolf Eichman, who was the main person responsible for the Final Solution.

4. Davis was Jefferson Davis, head of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

5. I don’t believe in Hell, but the way I mention  it here I think  creatively makes a good point- if there IS a hell, I’m sure people like Hitler and Davis are there.

6. It’s a little more about the Western Allies than it is about the Soviets (that is, the 4th line of the 1st verse isn’t about the Soviets). I guess that line also is just about the campaign inside Germany (and maybe Italy and maybe some of the western countries that briefly had fascist puppet regimes and were liberated by the British and Americans (and maybe towards the very end, by the French)). 

7. Everything except 1st person statements is about the Nazis.

8. The half a line about the red, white, and blue (the American flag). It exaggerates how patriotic I am (in another poem (Oh, No, Here Comes a Republican) I attacked about 5-20% of the US population partly in connection with them displaying the flag (I tried coming up with something better that rhymed, but that line was the best I could come up with)). In general I have mixed feelings about the flag. I am fairly proud of the role that the US played in the defeat of Nazi Germany (in another poem I write: "And although the Allied leaders are not consistent/Defeating the fascist states is important.”). In this poem I am saying something nice about the flag in connection with the defeat of Nazi Germany, not in general.

9. The line about wankers. Obviously the US wasn’t tons better than Nazi Germany when it came to gay people, but there was some difference. There was a bigger difference when it came people of color but still not a huge difference, and I’d probably say there was an almost huge difference when it came to Jewish people.

**10. 57% of this version is me, and 43% is the original.

11. I give this poem 5 stars out of 5.
UPDATE 5/27/17 I added "attempted" to the second line of the 3rd verse. 
UPDATE 5/21/18 I think that "breaking" is rarely defined the way I'm using it without adding the word "down," but I think you know what I mean.

You fly your swastika flags, your symbols of war-making.

Don't you f*cking realize, that Nazism is breaking

We're tearing down swastikas, all the way to Berlin.

In their place the transformation to democracy will begin

 (Chorus)

We're tearing down the swastikas- we'll banish Europe's shame.

We're tearing down the swastikas - we’re kicking ass and taking names

We're tearing down the swastikas - we're never giving in.

We're tearing down the swastikas - we're gonna f*cking win.

German soldiers still fighting back, they haven't learned at all.

Don't they f*cking realize, it’s an anti-fascist free-for-all

They're just a bunch of wankers, who hate jews, blacks and gays

Well here's some headlines for you, "your defeat is on it's way".

 (Chorus)

You fly your red, white and black, we fly the red white and blue

It’s too bad Hitler survived the 1944 attempted coup

We're tearing down the swastikas, and we'll tear Eichmann up as well.

And all the Nazis can join Davis in the bigot’s fiery hell.

The Stars and Bars

(As far as the anti-bigotry part of this blog, I decided at some point early on that I wanted to work around the edges of battling bigotry, offering ideas and information that most people are unaware of but which might help them here and there with anti-bigotry work. So that’s why there are a lot of posts that seem a little weird, including this one)

This is about the left, (what I call) the populist far right, the Confederate Flag, Nazi skinheads, and the Civil War (I actually worked in a very small N. Ireland connection, and could have added one more but decided not to). But first I need to spend 2 paragraphs explaining some relevant things.

UPDATE 2/28/09 I just realized that when I say militia, it might be more appropriate to say Patriot movement.

I do a lot of thinking, and often think about things from my past. There's one thing I've been thinking about that came up in the period 1999-2001 when I was doing left-wing activism (at the time I wasn't doing hardly any N. Ireland activism). The big thing about the Confederate flag and this skinhead woman I'll refer to towards the end I only learned recently, but the rest I basically knew at the time. Unlike 10-15 other times in the last 15 or so years, I don't think my failure to say this stuff at the time involved my brain freezing, I think that after the first time it came up (and I did some research into it at that point), it only came up one other time with the student group I'll refer to, and it was kind of questionable whether or not I should have said anything. There were two other times when it came up and I said something, plus I sent an email to some people, plus one more time it came up and it would have been maybe a little inappropriate for me to say something (this thing where my brain freezes and I don't say stuff I need to probably happened more with me than it does for most people, but it only happened something like 1-10% of the time depending on how you look at it, and I think there's a good chance now that it's gone, since I'm more aware of it).

As you'll see, part of this post is about 9 years too late, but it's probably still relevant, and I like telling stories about my activism, even when it involves me admitting that I was significantly less than 100% (of my organizing abilities) (for the most part I was probably about 50%-75%, depending on how you look at it).On average, my N. Ireland stuff had about 25 people at each event, my non-NI stuff was about 175 on average each event (that figure is ignoring several events I did, for example, in Denver or the dorms) and in some other ways I was often mildly-very successful with my activism) (also, there have been several things which weren't my fault that held me back here and there) (this is all about the period 1994-2004 and in 2003 I organized an event where 1,500 showed up) (I was about 50-100% responsible for about 30 events total during that time, plus about 10 more I was about 25%-50% responsible for).

Anyway, here's the background. In the late 1990s until about early 2001, there was a very large successful student organization at the University of Colorado at Boulder, called WAAKE-UP, World Awareness and Action Koalition of Equal United Progressives. I think the main organizations involved were Stop Hate On Campus (an independent CU-Boulder group), the CU-Boulder Student Environmental Action Coalition, and CU-Boulder Amnesty International (I think I might be missing 1-2 main or semi-main organizations). Although we were a very tiny part of it, my group Students for Justice in N. Ireland, I THINK was officially a member in 1998-1999. In 1999 until the coalition faded, my other group, the CU-Boulder Young Democratic Socialists were a small but not tiny part of it, I went to a few meetings and did some minor stuff. WAAKE-UP was founded by Scott Silber (who was the main figure the first two years), an amazing activist. WAAKE-UP did a LOT of very good work, the information on that wikipedia page seems pretty complete and accurate, although I believe they also did some anti-racist work, and even considered adding a bunch of diversity related demands to their sweatshop campaign but decided not to, probably because the sweatshop campaign was going to be enough work (which it was, it required a huge amount of effort). They probably did some other social justice stuff here and there too.

On April 15th 2000, in connection with the A16 activities worldwide in protest of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, WAAKE-UP had a major demonstration. They had me give a 5 minute speech as a rep of YDS-CU and the CO Democratic Socialists of America. Another DSAer told me that at some point a WAAKE-UP member mentioned various groups that were there in support, and mentioned a group called the Tyranny Response Team, the local chapter (well, I think they were mostly from outside Boulder, primarily as far as I can tell, a nearby city called Longmont which is pretty awesome, and overall almost as liberal as Boulder, but I'm not surprised that there would be a TRT chapter there). This other DSAer had heard about them, and what he said prompted me to do some research.

I looked at the national web-site of the TRT, which had links to local chapter web-sites (or different parts of the national web-site, I can't remember). I got the impression that, aside from the web-site, there was no national structure, and if there was, it was VERY decentralized. But if they share a national web-site and a common name, they have to take some small degree of responsibility for what the other groups are doing, and it's safe to assume that the politics of the other groups and the politics of the national web-site were more or less reflected in the local group.

The TRT are more or less in the militia tradition, although probably different from most groups that were militias. At one point, in Longmont they showed up at a pro-gun control meeting (it was not a public event, it was a planning meeting) to videotape and intimidate people. On the web-site, it talked about a TRT chapter in New England, it was almost definitely VT or NH, that was protesting some move towards gay marriage. Another TRT chapter in the South (and you can bet that all the Southern chapters did the same thing) was demonstrating in favor of the Confederate flag, which I'll get back to in a second. I remember other stuff indicating opposition to Affirmative Action.

Although this guy might not have been with the TRT, I wouldn't be surprised if he was. Around 1996 there was a guy who was more or less militia in Boulder whose politics I'd like to describe. One night when I was volunteering at a left-wing bookstore, he came by because he wanted to know what the lefties were saying about some significant curbing of civil liberties at the time. At one point he said that the unions were collaborating with the corporations to force multi-culturalism on America. Another time, at a rally in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, he indicated that he thought supporting Mumia was ridiculous.

More generally, I get the impression that the militia types and this probably goes for the TRT, are more or less capitalist in the sense that they believe strongly in private enterprise and oppose regulation and taxes, and are also anti-union. What attracts some of them to progressives and some progressives to them (there was another time when a leading member of WAAKE-UP indicated she liked TRT)? It's possible the local TRT had some tendencies uncommon for that movement (I heard that one of them had earlier been involved in some progressive movement), but I'm pretty sure it's these two things- anti-globalization, and hostility towards government (at that point, probably somewhere around half of WAAKE-UP would have been anarchists).

Although I didn't say anything to WAAKE-UP directly, and I think I only mentioned their name in connection with this problem once (it's not just WAAKE-UP on the left that flirts/flirted with the less offensive parts of what I call the populist far-right), if it had come up more substantially I would have said something directly to them, even if it was a day late, as it might have been. But in any case, the left should not be working with those organizations. Organizationally (talking with them as individuals is a very good idea), the best approach is isolating them (winning support from people in that community, not giving them legitimacy (through, for example, welcoming them at your events), MAYBE trying to prevent them from holding meetings, etc.). After that, it might be appropriate to smash them organizationally. This could take the form of a law-suit, or getting the police to investigate criminal activities by the group and/or it’s members, or something else similar. (UPDATE 2/4/12 I having been meaning to further develop my thoughts about isolating and smashing, but for now this paragraph is what I believe)

(UPDATE 5/5/10- I just remembered that once (or twice) I DID say something to WAAKE-UP people that was critical of the TRT) (UPDATE 6/30/11 Of course I also recently remembered that the WAAKE-UPer (in response to me) said something even more offensive than his initial comment, and I failed to respond!!!)

So, in general, we shouldn't work with them. But now I want to come back to the Confederate flag, and why the association of the TRT with that flag and support for that flag in general is major problem.

First, I'm okay with it in certain areas- museums, plays/movies/etc. Civil War re-creations, and Civil War battlefields, I'm pretty sure that's it. I'm not okay with it as part of state flags or being flown at state capitols or anything like that, and when people display it at their homes or on their cars, or at rallies in support of it in general, including rallies that are not explicitly white supremacist. The thing is, that flag is drenched in white supremacy and slavery, and I'm not just saying that because the white supremacists have been using it. Although there were other factors with the Civil War, it's no coincidence that the South (and the vast majority of the slave states) broke off after the election of someone who was close to being an abolitionist. Also, towards the end of the war, the Confederacy considered ending slavery because it might improve their odds of winning, since it would affect European opinion in their favor. They decided not to, evidence that preserving slavery was more important to them than being independent of Washington D.C. (UPDATE 7/8/15 There's more about what the Confederacy was really about here)

So that flag is steeped in white supremacy and racism. We also know that, to one degree or another, people who display that flag (with the exceptions that I mentioned above and probably a hand-full of individual cases) are racists.

Here's another reason why it's not a good idea to legitimize the general use of that flag. In the Winter 2007 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center's publication, it talked about a woman who was a Nazi skinhead for about three years until she had a falling out and they almost killed her. The relevant part is where the article explains what led her to become a Nazi skinhead. It seems that very shortly before she became a Nazi skinhead, there was an incident at her school that the article strongly implies contributed to her becoming a Nazi, although clearly she was already mildly racist. Her school was 76% Hispanic and there were Mexican flags all over the place. She placed a Confederate battle flag pin on her back-pack and was reprimanded by school officials. She felt persecuted- all the Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans could display their flag, why couldn't she display the Confederate flag? She'd been given the impression that it was a legitimate symbol, and the article didn't say anything about her parents being racist, so the odds are that to one degree or another she got that idea from people who, to one degree or another, weren't racist. I mean, in the 2000 Republican Primaries John McCain (and probably most of the other candidates) expressed support for the Confederate flag, although he later retracted that. There is probably some small number of people who aren't racist but who support that flag. And in at least one case, it lead to someone becoming a Nazi skinhead- although based on the article, this woman didn't do anything horrible, but at the very least she gave comfort and encouragement to those who did, she probably spread hatred, and she may have recruited people.

I'm not saying Mexico is above criticism, and it's possible that if the Confederacy had lasted hundreds of years like Mexico, the history associated with that flag might have been less than 100% bad (slavery might have ended after a couple generations), but all we have is five years during which the Confederacy fought to (almost) the death (when I said "almost," I was acknowledging that they did surrender, not every rebel solider or sailor fought to the death) to defend slavery, and singled out Black Union troops captured for hanging. The Mexican flag is not at all comparable to the Confederate flag.

The Confederate flag stands for something about 90% as bad as what the Nazi swastika stands for. And no one says that the Swastika is an appropriate symbol for the German people, even though it represents a larger chunk of German history, and on average, things for non-Jewish Germans during those years were probably better than things were for White Southerners during the five years of the Confederacy. But even with those two things, no one argues that the Nazi flag is an appropriate symbol for people to use. That is, overall it would make as much sense to use the Nazi flag as it would to use the Confederate flag- so if people think it's very inappropriate to use the former, why do they think it's so okay to use the latter?

UPDATE 12/10/15 I found an important article (via a link from the blog of the Southern Poverty Law Center) about why so many Americans have a messed up opinion of the Confederacy. It's here. 



Which leads me to the last point I want to make. In about 2002 or 2003, I was at some rally, I think it was anti-war. One speaker said something about how the Civil War was the one good war America fought (I'd add WWII, and to a small degree Yugoslavia in the 90s, maybe the Revolution and I guess the War of 1812, to a small degree the original invasion of Afghanistan (I've believed since about 2003 that we should get out) I'm pretty sure that's about it). Someone in the audience booed. The odds that the person was anywhere near being a White Supremacist are very low. Much more likely he was an idiot. The likelihood is that his opposition to war and/or government is greater than his opposition to slavery and racism. The odds are that slavery was going to continue for at least a couple more generations in the Confederacy if they had been allowed to secede, and it might have possibly continued for a similar amount of time in the Border states that did not secede if the issue hadn't been forced by the Civil War. Early in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation resulted in what turned out to be permanent freedom for thousands of slaves immediately, with more freed every day as Confederate territory was taken by the Union Army. There was reason to believe that this would happen, based on Lincoln's' attitude towards slavery which went right up to the point of being an abolitionist (without actually being one), and the fact that after the 1860 election, the leader of the Republicans in the House, which had a large Republican majority, was a Radical. In fact, in July 1862, something similar to emancipation was passed by the Congress and signed by Lincoln. Anyway, with hindsight, the Civil War ended slavery and that makes it a good war, although as I often make clear, even "good" wars are still horrible, but some things are worth horrible things.

UPDATE 2/23/09 I found a national web-site for the TRT, odds are it's newer than the one I looked at 9 years ago (I actually found 2, but they seem to be the same group of people). On chapter sites, I found the following links:
1. Free Republic. A very conservative/right-wing web-site.
2. Those Shirts. I provide a link because the shirts are interesting and it provides some idea of the TRT's politics (it's kind of a right-wing version of snorg-tees, and last time I checked, most of their shirts were pretty cool). About Those Shirts:
A: About 1/3 are only mildly-moderately offensive (1/2 aren't offensive, just right-wing), but they indicate politics that the Left should not be working with.
B: The one about the Buerau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is kind of funny, even though I have roughly zero interest in those three things.
C: One shirt contains a quote from Ann Coulter right after 9/11 in which she said,. about Muslims "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to christianity."
D: Another shirt says "I'd rather be waterboarding."
E: Another shirt shows 5 days of weather, at the top it says Mecca Weather Forecast. The last day's weather forecast shows a mushroom cloud, and at the bottom it says "Partial Sunnis, Scattered Shiites."
F: Another shirt has a list of slogans for the US military abraod. The first one is "We don't like collateral damage, but it helps to stay the @#$% out of our way."
G: There's a few other shirts with material roughly as offensive as those four.