Let's be honest. Demands to take down the Battle Flag have more than to do with smashing any remaining vestiges of defiance that still exist in the South than any perceived offenses.
Bingo. Anyone who thinks politicians are deeply, personally, offended by slavery and therefore want to remove the flag needs to stop huffing glue.
They simply don't like it because it's a reminder that, once upon a time, people actually resisted the federal leviathan.
That's what the whole "history" of the civil war is about - giving the federalist cause moral cover via the slavery issue.
It's no different than any other nonsense war propaganda.
How some of you support the Confederacy is beyond me. Slavery and the Confederacy is the antithesis to liberty. You also don't have to be a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the north to realize how awful the Confederacy was.
Does the same apply to the founders and the first war of independence?
Or, for that matter, virtually every society in human history prior to the mid 19th century?
Are they all to be unconditionally condemned because they had slavery?
We cannot recognize something pro-liberty and valuable in, say, ancient Greece, Rome, or the Venetian Republic - since they all permitted slavery?
It's not true that the Civil War was entirely about slavery, and that the north was fighting to free the slaves and the south was fighting to preserve slavery. Obviously it's far more complex than that. But neither is it true that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery as some claim. The truth is more nuanced and is somewhere in between. The north didn't use slavery as a reason for fighting the Civil War until near the very end of the war, and it's not likely that the north in the beginning wanted to fight the war in order to end slavery. At the same time, the south did indeed secede from the union mostly to preserve slavery, as they stated in their written documents detailing why they wanted to secede.
Secession was
not at all about preserving slavery. The slavery question was a source of tension between North and South, but - since secession would obviously have undermined rather than helped preserve slavery - the preservation of slavery was not the material goal which the South hoped to achieve by seceding. That material goal was, rather, to escape the Morrill Tariff. Eliminating most tariffs was the first item of business for the South after secession. And that, incidentally, is why the Lincoln decided to invade the South and turn peaceful secession into war - to reimpose the tariff. Lincoln says this explicitly in his inaugural - he will invade the South to collect the tax. And so he did.
Why had South Carolina nearly succeeded in 1828 (hint: not about slavery)?
And why did New York City nearly succeed in 1861 along with the South (hint: not about slavery)?
And why did Lincoln endorse the Corwin amendment (hint: not because he was an abolitionist!)?
...and many other facts which make a mockery of the thesis that slavery was the cause.
See the
thread I linked earlier, where all this is documented at length from primary sources.
Yeah, people on this forum are defending the views of people who are most likely the same people who booed Ron in the SC GOP debate for saying that our government should follow the golden rule in foreign policy.
The South of today bears virtually no resemblance to that of 1861.
The people there are the biological descendents of the confederates, but their religion, culture, and ideology are totally changed (much for the worse).