“Never Patriotic”: The Real Meaning Of The Confederate Flag
In the intensifying national debate over the Confederate flag, important clues about the seditious symbol’s true meaning are staring us in the face. Dozens of those clues were posted by an angry, glaring Dylann Storm Roof on the “Last Rhodesian,” website, where the alleged Charleston killer pays homage to certain flags – notably those of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, as well as the old Confederacy – while he enthusiastically desecrates another.
Pictures of Roof burning, stomping, and spitting on the Stars and Stripes are interspersed among the photos of him grasping and waving the Confederate battle flag, sometimes while holding a gun. “I hate the sight of the American flag,” he raged in a long screed on the site. “Modern American patriotism is an absolute joke.”
What this racial terrorist meant to express, in crude prose and pictures, is a lesson that the diehard defenders of the Confederate flag should no longer ignore: To uphold the banner of secession is to reject patriotism – and has never meant anything else.
For many years after the Civil War, the symbols of the Confederacy were not much seen outside local museums and burial grounds. The late general Robert E. Lee, a reluctant but justly revered war hero, rejected any post-war fetishizing of the Stars and Bars, which had actually originated as the battle flag of his Army of Northern Virginia. Lee believed it “wiser…not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”But such admonishments were cast aside by the exponents of white supremacy, whose own patriotism was certainly suspect. When the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia were revived as racial terror organizations in the 1930s and 1940s, carrying out a spree of cowardly lynchings, their grand wizards found natural allies among the leaders of the German-American Bund — whose funding and fealty were eventually traced to Nazi headquarters in Berlin. Indeed, the Klansmen burned their towering crosses alongside swastika banners at rallies sponsored by the Bund to attack President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the years following the Second World War, the Dixiecrats led by South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond – and the “uptown Klan” known as the White Citizens Councils that supported Thurmond’s movement – appropriated the Confederate flag as their own standard. Among its greatest enthusiasts was a young radio reporter (and future U.S. senator) named Jesse Helms, whose fawning coverage of Thurmond’s 1948 third-party presidential bid marked him as a rising star of the segregationist right.
As for the White Citizens Councils, those local groups were ultimately reconstituted into chapters of the Council of Conservative Citizens – a notorious hate group that has embarrassed many Republican politicians caught fraternizing with its leaders, and that ultimately inspired Roof with its inflammatory propaganda about black crime and the endangered white race. Headquartered in St. Louis, MO, the CCC festoons itself and its works with the Dixie flag, as does the neo-Confederate League of the South, which still openly advocates secession.
Meanwhile, racist, anti-Semitic agitators such as David Duke and Don Black — both Southerners prominent in Klan and neo-Nazi organizations for decades — have never ceased to manifest their reverence for the Confederacy. Stormfront, the notorious neo-Nazi website founded by Black, continues to promote the mythology and symbolism of the Southern cause, declaring in a June 23 podcast that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery — and that “the attack on southern symbols and heritage such as the Confederate Flag are actually part of an overall Jewish-led attack on European Americans.” Owing to Duke’s influence, in fact, the Confederate flag has served as a substitute for Nazi banners in demonstrations, often violent, by “white nationalists” in Europe — where the symbols of the Third Reich are widely outlawed.
Obviously, not every American who has displayed the Dixie flag endorses the treason and bigotry that it now represents to so many other Americans. There are sincere patriots, like former senator James Webb of Virginia, who still insist that it is only a remembrance of the valor of their ancestors. But over the decades, its appropriation by traitors and bigots has provoked little noticeable protest from the more innocent exponents of respect for Southern heritage. Today, the Charleston massacre has left it standing irrevocably for the most brutal and criminal aspects of that heritage – and it is more deeply irreconcilable with American patriotism than ever.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, The National Memo, June 26, 2015
“The Klan’s Vile Post-Charleston Recruiting Spree”: Pathetic, Sick And Disgusting Lollipops Of Hate
Days after the massacre at a black church in South Carolina, some Americans woke to a vile surprise: KKK fliers with candy on their lawns.
The propaganda—stuffed into plastic baggies with pieces of peppermint and Tootsie Rolls—included a phone number for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Planted under the cover of darkness, the fliers were distributed in California, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
It’s not something local police departments are taking lightly, and some have even reached out to the FBI for assistance. The Rockdale County sheriff’s department in Conyers, Georgia, collected more than 80 fliers and is investigating whether anyone can be charged with criminal trespass or littering.
“Whether it was a joke or from an organization doesn’t matter to me,” Sheriff Eric Levett told The Daily Beast. “The fact that it was done during this time is ignorant and cowardly.”
A message on the hate-spewing hotline, based in North Carolina, salutes 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who was charged with murder for the killing nine people in Charleston. Roof penned a racist manifesto before the June 17 mass shooting and wanted to start a “race war.”
“We in the Loyal White Knights of the KKK would like to say hail victory to … Dylan S. Roof who decided to do what the Bible told him,” a man chirps in the recording. “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. They [black people] have spilled our blood too long. It’s about time someone spilled theirs.”
“If it ain’t white, it ain’t right,” the message concludes. “White power!”
Robert Jones, of the Royal White Knights in North Carolina, told The Daily Beast that the Klan is undergoing a national recruitment drive that coincidentally started around the time of the South Carolina murders.
“We’re doing this from the East Coast to the West Coast, just to let people know the Klan’s in their community,” said Jones, the grand dragon of the hate group based in Pelham, N.C. “Especially with all the stuff that’s in the news—in South Carolina they’re wanting to take the Confederate flag down.”
Jones told The Daily Beast that he supports Roof’s crime, but preferred that he “shot the correct people,” such as minority drug dealers rather than churchgoers.
“It’s a racial war against our people,” Jones said. “The more the media pushes multiculturalism down our throat, the more you’re going to see killings like this.”
In Pryor Creek, Oklahoma, the Klan also recently caught cops’ attention when it got personal—naming and urging a boycott against local Mexican restaurants.
The fliers from the Northeastern Oklahoma Klavern warned of the same supposed “black on white” violence that spurred Roof’s militancy, and pushed “civil ways to discourage these animals from our community,” the Pryor Daily Times reported.
“Stop going to Maggie’s Mexican Kitchen … [she] thinks she can talk trash about white people in Spanish, thinking none of us will understand her anti-American, anti-white rhetoric,” read the flier discovered on Father’s Day. “Or, El Humilde Mexican Restaurant, which takes your money while employing illegals and sending our American currency back to their homeland.”
Captain Rod Howell of the Mayes County sheriff’s department in Pryor told The Daily Beast that “the timing’s not a coincidence.”
“They’re doing it for a reason,” Howell said. “They’re trying to get as many people as possible to put some fuel in the fire. With the political climate the way it is today, it’s really tough right now.”
Meanwhile, Alabama residents were horrified by the racially-charged hate bags filled with candy.
“I didn’t even know the KKK was alive and well,” Shannon Phillips of Lake View told local news station WIAT. “I certainly didn’t know it was in our area. It disturbed me that they put Tootsie Rolls in here trying to appeal to children. I mean that’s just pathetic, sick, disgusting.”
Phillips said she and other neighbors scrambled to pick up the bags before kids could find them.
“Why would they put a piece of peppermint candy in here? There’s no sweetness involved in this group,” fumed another resident, Charley Buckland, to ABC 13. “This is a very sad, sad situation when you find these in your yards. It’s very disheartening.”
Cops in nearby Bessemer, Alabama, filled a 30-gallon bag with the bulletins, which officers collected from one church and more than 60 homes.
“If we find out who has done it, we’ll deal with it,” Police Chief Nathaniel Rutledge Jr. told The Daily Beast. “For right now, it’s criminal littering at the very least.”
After the fliers were found in Topeka, Kansas, the police chief there called the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI and held a press conference with the city’s Black Ministers Association.
Other fliers were found as far as Fullerton, California, a city of 135,161 in Orange County. Proclaiming “Save our land, Join the Klan,” some of the baggies—anchored by rocks and candy so they wouldn’t blow away—misspelled “California.”
“It’s just wrong. There’s no words,” Fullerton resident Alia Cass told CBS Los Angeles. “Racism isn’t born. It’s taught.”
By: Kate Briquelet, The Daily Beast, June 24, 2015
“Oops, He Did It Again”: After S.C. ‘Accident’, Perry Downplays Gun Issue
About a year ago, following a mass shooting in Santa Barbara, California, Joni Ernst was asked whether it was appropriate for her to air TV campaign ads in which she pointed a gun directly at the camera. The right-wing Iowan, who went on to win her U.S. Senate race, replied, “I would not – no. This unfortunate accident happened after the ad.”
It’s true that the murders happened after the ad, but to call the killing spree an “accident” seemed like a poor choice of words.
Today, the word came up again, this time in reference to the massacre in Charleston. Right Wing Watch highlighted Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry’s remarks to Newsmax this morning:
[The former Texas governor] said that the president is trying to “take the guns out of the hands of everyone in this country.”
“This is the MO of this administration, any time there is an accident like this – the president is clear, he doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message,” Perry said.
Reality tells a very different story. First, President Obama has never even suggested Americans shouldn’t own firearms. There remains an important difference between safeguards that are consistent with the Second Amendment and a knee-jerk assumption that any and all safety measures are attempts to “take the guns out of the hands of everyone in this country.”
And second, I can think of a lot of words to describe the mass shooting in South Carolina, but “an accident” isn’t a phrase that comes to mind. {Update: see below.]
In the same interview, Perry acknowledged that the Charleston murders were “a crime of hate,” but then turned his attention to, of all things, drug abuse.
“Also, I think there is a real issue to be talked about. It seems to me – again without having all the details about this – that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used.”
It wasn’t altogether clear who the GOP candidate was referring to when he mentioned ‘these individuals.”
* Update: Perry campaign aides say the former governor misspoke; he meant to say “incident,” not “accident.” That certainly makes more sense. That said, Perry was also wrong in his characterization of the president’s position and his argument that drug abuse, but not guns, ought to be part of the conversation is difficult to take seriously. This isn’t, in other words, just about the unfortunate use of the word “accident.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 19, 2015
“Guns, Race, And Fox News’ Pathological Denial”: Conservative Media Desperately Searching For Political Cover
Like frantic shoppers running down a last-minute list, Fox News talkers last week desperately tried to cobble together an inventory of reasons why racist gunman Dylann Roof may not have been primarily motivated by racism.
As the conservative media anxiously and collectively searched for political cover, Fox News hosts and guests offered up an array of illogical explanations: Maybe the Charleston, S.C. church killing was an attack on Christians. Maybe it was an attack on South Carolina. Maybe political correctness was to blame. Or “diversity.” Maybe pastors should be armed. (In any case, Fox Newsers agreed, President Obama was being very, very “divisive” regarding the matter.)
On and on, the alternative explanations were offered up in the face of overwhelming evidence that Roof allegedly had set out to kill as many black people as possible because he wanted to start a “race war.” Period. And the way Roof allegedly chose to do that was to open fire, and then reload, in the basement of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, killing the pastor and eight parishioners.
Like so many Americans, Fox News has been reeling in the wake of the massacre, except reeling in a different way. While Americans recoiled from the raw hate behind the gun rampage, Fox News wrestled with bouts of pathological denial.
Indeed, for Fox News and much of the conservative media, the horrific killings in South Carolina represented a political challenge because the act of mass murder revolved around two topics Fox News has long insisted don’t really afflict America, or don’t require pressing action: Racism and gun violence. That denial has made it nearly impossible for Fox to address the shooting in any coherent way.
For years, Fox News and conservatives have routinely tried to underplay gun violence and even horrific bouts of mass murders — like the Sandy Hook school massacre — insisting the issue represents a “distraction” or a “red herring” touted by liberals to shift the nation’s attention away from truly pressing problems, like the national debt.
But the “distraction” spin is absurd. As Chuck Todd noted on Meet The Press, “50 Americans since 9/11 have been killed in terrorist attacks. We’re up to nearly 400,000 people since 9/11 have been killed by firearms.”
Meanwhile, if current projections hold, for the first time modern American history more people will die in 2015 from gun violence than from automobile accidents. Roughly 20,000 Americans kill themselves each year using firearms. And as Bloomberg News reported, the financial cost of U.S. gun violence in terms of lost work, medical care, insurance, court costs and pain and suffering amounted to nearly $175 billion in 2010.
Despite the avalanche of data, Fox News has led the charge to dismiss the importance of addressing gun safety, and has been especially ruthless in attacking advocates trying to pass new legislation. That hardened political opposition helps explain why the cable channel has been desperately searching for ways to explain away the shocking South Carolina mass murder.
Fox and conservatives have been even more adamant over the years in insisting that Democrats, liberals and minorities over-hype the issue of racism. For instance, on his Forbes.com blog, Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think tank, reported in 2013 that “racist attitudes” no longer “have any power or influence in American society.” Indeed, The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week casually announced that institutionalized racism no longer exists.
Racism, like climate change, is denied as part of the larger conservative political reality.
Like Prohibition and the Wild West, racism apparently represents a distant chapter in America’s past and is now filed under “archaeology,” as Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin dismissively put it last year while attacking Obama for addressing the issue at all. (Rubin claimed Americans are “held prisoners forever in a past that most Americans have never personally experienced.”)
Why the rising chorus of racism deniers under Obama? It fits a larger, right-wing political agenda. “Some on the right are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States, and certainly not a problem on the scale of false accusations of racism,” wrote Michelle Goldberg at the Daily Beast.
Added Zack Beauchamp at Vox last week: “basically, the fact that America’s got a Democratic, black president means Republicans have grown more skeptical that structural racism is a huge, enduring problem.” The result? “It’s very difficult for Republicans to talk about racism as a serious, enduring problem without alienating a real part of the base.”
The same, of course, goes for Fox News and not wanting to alienate its loyal viewership base. And so in recent years we’ve heard Bill O’Reilly announce, “We are not a racist nation. […] Fair-minded Americans should be deeply offended, deeply offended that their country is being smeared with the bigotry brush.” Steve Doocy declared, “I don’t know that Barack Obama could have been elected president if he was living in a racist nation.”
And there was this from Fox’s Eric Bolling [emphasis added]:
It’s getting tiring. We have a black president, we have black senators, we have black heads of captains of business, companies. We have black entertainment channels. Where — is there racism? I don’t think there’s racism. The only people perpetuating racism are people like this gentleman from the NAACP, are the Al Sharptons of the world. Let’s move on. Let’s move on.
Let’s move on? Tell that to the people of Charleston.
By: Eric Boehlert, Sr. Fellow, Media Matters for America; The Blog, The Huffington Post, June 22, 2015
“Whatever Did It, It’s Done”: I Wouldn’t Go To Sleep On The South Carolina Legislature Until The Change Is Consummated
So today SC Gov. Nikki Haley and both Republican U.S. Senators finally changed positions and called for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag that flies on the Statehouse grounds at a Confederate memorial. This is not some sort of profile in courage. Similar steps have been taken in other southern states (Mississippi joins South Carolina as the remaining states subject to a NCAA post-season boycott the NAACP requested). The “compromise” in 2000 that moved the Battle Flag from the top of the State Capital to the Statehouse grounds, making it the first thing many visitors saw when in the vicinity, wasn’t remotely enough.
It’s nicely ironic that Dylann Roof’s hopes of inciting a race war with his terrorist attack on Emanuel AME Church instead led to this symbolic but significant act. I suspect the prime mover in this development aside from simple shame was the agony of the national GOP, whose presidential candidates were being forced to deal with an issue that divided “the base” in an early primary state from the rest of the country.
My own basic feeling as a long-time opponent of Confederate insignia as a profanation of my native Southland (I was actually born not far from the flag in question in Columbia) is reminiscent of the reaction of the cartoonist Thomas Nast to Grover Cleveland’s breakthrough presidential victory in 1884 (the first Democratic win since 1856). Nast cited a lot of explanations of “what did it,” and then concluded: “Whatever did it, it’s done.” Or so it seems, at least; I wouldn’t go to sleep on the South Carolina legislature until the change is consummated.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 22, 2015
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