Allegiance

Funny what you do and don’t remember from your childhood.

As someone who grew up in Georgia in the 1960s, I have no concrete memory of ever pledging allegiance to the American flag in school. Maybe we did it every day, and did it so routinely and mechanically that there was nothing memorable about doing it. 

(In the same vein, I don’t remember putting on my pants every morning before school – except the one morning when there was a scorpion in my jeans, something which I remember very well indeed – yet, I’m confident I never went to school pantsless. Despite all those dreams.)

It makes me wonder whether we actually ever did recite the pledge, as many conservative friends so often fondly recollect doing, if their Facebook comments are to be believed. I really do wonder.

What I do remember very plainly from those days was the glorification of a different flag.

Regularly, we students at Southwestern Elementary would gather in the cafeteria to watch educational films. These are the kinds of seriously earnest films that many might be considered hokey today. I remember only a couple.

One was “A Desk for Billie”, a story about a bright, young girl named Billie from a migrant family (in this case a family of Depression-era agricultural workers constantly on the move from place to place across the country) and how a sympathetic teacher helped her adjust to yet another new school and unfamiliar classmates. At least, that’s how I remember it. Another film was about a man who failed to heed his own wise and fatherly advice to his children about safe driving habits and got himself killed.

In any case, every one of these edifying little movies we watched began with a few seconds giving credit to the Georgia Department of Education for providing the film. These few seconds consisted of the image of the state flag of Georgia suddenly filling the screen, while the blackface minstrel tune “Dixie” blared from the speakers.

It is one thing I clearly remember from my school days. It’s as if it was seared into my brain. Which, of course, was the purpose. Keep in mind that, at the time, the Georgia state flag mostly consisted of the Confederate battle flag, a favorite symbol, then as now, among white supremacist groups.

That symbol had been added to the state flag just a few years before I started school, during a time of increased agitation over segregation (the American version of apartheid). The US government was in the process of trying to end segregation. The Georgia government was trying to keep it intact and resented any interference from Washington in the matter.

By prominently exposing (you might say “subjecting”) school kids to the new, segregationist flag – all to the accompanist of “Dixie” – the state government no doubt hoped to drive home a certain message. And it was not that “all men are created equal”. 

The fact that I don’t remember a morning ritual of pledging allegiance to the American flag, but can still vividly recall the propagandization of a symbol of racism makes me wonder:  where exactly were we impressible kids being taught our allegiance should lie. 

The Limitation of Statues

All the crazy news Donald Trump has generated over the past year or so has, until recently, overshadowed a long-simmering political issue that is extremely topical, though it has stayed a bit under the radar. It only occasionally broke the surface of my Twitter feed. And it got practically no media attention outside the States. Now, that’s all changed.

This is the controversy over the removal of Confederate statues. A controversy that was already heated this spring, but is now red-hot. Even before the tragedy in Charlottesville this past weekend, there was the potential back in May for violence in New Orleans -- that torpid city on the languid Mississippi I have not visited now for many years -- all because of the removal of four public statues or monuments.

I think folks in Finland would be shocked to hear that the removal of these statues had to be carried out mostly at night, by workmen wearing bullet-proof vests and face coverings to hide their identities. There were justifiable concerns that someone would shoot them, so irrational was the passion swirling around this simple public-works task, a fact that reveals some deep divisions in America, as we saw this week.

The monuments that the city of New Orleans decided to remove were of three men: Jefferson Davis (a senator from Mississippi before becoming the president of the Confederate States of America), PGT Beauregard (a native of Louisiana and prominent general in the Confederate Army), and Robert E. Lee (the Virginian who led the army which eventually went down in ignominious defeat). In addition, there was a monument honoring an 1874 uprising by white supremacist paramilitaries called “The White League”, in which they overpowered the New Orleans police force and replaced the Governor of Louisiana for three days before the US Army took control. You can see why residents of NOLA, many of whom are black, might find such a monument in poor taste.

Robert E. Lee coming down in New Orleans.
(Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans) 

You might understand New Orleans erecting a statue to native son Beauregard, but the only direct connection to Jefferson and Lee that I can see is that they were leading figures in the CSA. In other words, it’s a celebration of the fact that Louisiana was once part of a treasonous group of states that wanted to ensure their citizens continued to enjoy the freedom to own other human beings.

Is that something to celebrate? Most Americans today would (I hope) think not. At least, it's now being debated. Vigorously. 

The murder of nine black worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 reopened an earlier debate about whether the Confederate Battle Flag, used by the KKK as a symbol of hate for decades, should be part of official government iconography. The anti-flag forces won that issue in South Carolina, and the flag came down from the state capitol.

That may have prompted people to begin rethinking the issue of the hundreds of CSA monuments throughout the South. Personally, I would be fine with most being removed -- that is, unless they can be contextualized to explain their dismal role in the Jim Crow South and the perpetuation of the Lost Cause myth that was created to whitewash a disgraceful chapter of US history. Sadly, we now have someone, a young woman Heather Heyer, dying in part because a faction, and not a small one, of Southerners still cling stubbornly to that myth.

And it may only get worse. I’ve gotten the feeling that for many hard core “Southern traditionalists” in Georgia the flash point is Stone Mountain. 

Huge rock carvings on the granite side of that gigantic dome of exposed stone depict Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, all gallantly on horseback. None of these men were from Georgia, so their glorification is only meant to commemorate the traitorous CSA. Stone Mountain was also the birthplace of the second coming of the Klu Klux Klan, giving the place a special resonance with white supremacists.

I’m sure no one is seriously thinking of erasing the carvings from the side of Stone Mountain, but just the mention of the idea evokes some strong reactions from folks. You get the sense that some people would take up arms to prevent any such thing from happening, and that is scary.

It just goes to show the extraordinary meaning people often attach to representative figures in bronze or stone. Throughout history someone has erected public artworks to honor something or someone, and throughout history – at turning points in history, in fact -- someone else has chosen to bring those artworks down, if given the chance.

We probably all remember the image of Saddam Hussein’s 12-meter statue being pulled down by gleeful Iraqis in 2003 -- with the help of a US Marine armored vehicle. It was a mark of defiance and hatred toward a brutal dictator. After the Soviet Union fell, so too did many statues of Lenin as a repudiation of Communism. There must be something gratifying in that act of vandalism, though I must say that pulling down the confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina, this week was stupid, as mob actions often are.

The iconic statue toppling of our age.

Or course, not everyone welcomes such toppling of icons (there’s a word for it, “iconoclasm”), as we see with the protests over the CSA monuments. Sometimes, even simply relocating statues, no matter how carefully, can arouse dangerous passions.

A decade ago, the government of our neighbor Estonia decided to move a Soviet-era statue from the center of the capital Tallinn to a military cemetery a kilometer away. It was clearly a political move, motivated by the Estonians' long-held view of “The Bronze Soldier” as a symbol of Soviet occupation. The county's sizable Russian-speaking minority saw it differently, and as plans for the relocation went forward protests and three nights of rioting and looting ensued, resulting in one death. At the same time, Estonia came under an unprecedented cyber attack by foreign hackers (sound familiar?). Hopefully, by now everyone has come to terms with the soldier’s new home.

As far as I know, no such angry topplings have occurred in Finland. Okay, statue “topping” is practiced annually here -- when an oversized student hat is placed on the head of Helsinki’s lovely Havis Amanda statue as part of May Day celebrations. But that is a wholly different thing. 

There was a bit of ill-feelings when some perhaps overly patriotic Finns fretted that the new (“new” in 1998) Kiasma art museum would overshadow the nearby equestrian statue of Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, Finland’s George Washington in a sense.

Otherwise, the prominent statue of Alexander II* (monarch of Finland when it belonged to the Russian Empire) and the country’s two statues of Lenin have remained unmolested, as far as I know. 

I'd like to think of that as a sign that Finland has healed the wounds of its past much better than the Old South is healing its own -- even after 150 years.

Havis Amanda wearing a white cap on May Day, 2002.

* corrected from original

Forsyth County

Finland has seen some unusually prominent political demonstrations recently over the question of immigration, including a massive peaceful pro-multiculturalism rally in Helsinki’s Senate Square and a neo-Nazi gathering in Jyväskylä that resulted in some violence.

I’m hoping to write more about those events soon, but since I had almost finished this post on a conveniently related topic, perhaps I’ll get this one out of the way first.

Almost thirty years ago, I marched in what amounted to the only political demonstration I’ve ever taken part in. I even hesitate to use the word “march”, since to my ear that sounds far too self-important. Let’s just say I showed up.

I wasn’t an especially political person in my youth. The part of rural north Georgia I was from was not exactly a hotbed of political activism in those days. I think the status quo was just fine for most folks in my solidly conservative and God-fearing county. There wasn’t lot of diversity of opinion there when it came to the biggest political issues of the day, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. I think it’s safe to say that most residents supported the former and were at best uneasy about the latter.

In high school, the only overtly political act I engaged in was at a public hearing held in my hometown to gather “public comment” about a new four-lane highway to be built between Atlanta and North Carolina. As I recall, there were five proposed routes the highway could have taken through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt that at least one or two of them would devastate some beautiful, mostly secluded mountain landscape.

At the well-attended hearing in our old county courthouse one evening, I took my turn to stand before a microphone and briefly, and no-doubt awkwardly, expressed my opinion about which of those alternative routes should be rejected outright, mainly the one through Neels Gap, a high saddle along the Appalachian Trail. I thank God, or whomever, that there is no recording of my statement.

For what it’s worth, that four-lane highway was eventually routed through my own hometown, the least disruptive option really, so in a sense, my side won.

Also while at college in Athens, I don't recall there being any major student protests on the University of Georgia campus, where a diversity of opinions certainly could be found, as well as the kind of young, energetic, sometimes idealistic, student body that is tailor-made for political activism. If there had been some massive exercise of the right of assembly while I was there, other than for a football game, of course, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

Much later, after living abroad in Finland for a few years, I was again a resident of Athens, this time studying journalism, when an unexpected event occurred that harkened back to the civil rights movement of two decades earlier. That event occurred in Forsyth County.

Forsyth is a little county occupying some rolling countryside about halfway between Atlanta and the mountains of North Georgia, a county with a tainted history I had never heard about, despite growing up only two counties away.  

In truth, I didn’t know much about Forsyth at all. We never had much reason to go there. Cumming, the county seat, was not on the way to anywhere we ever went, though I have driven Highway 53 across the northeast corner of the county on innumerable trips back and forth between home and Athens – genteel enough wooded countryside that in a sense camouflages some truly horrible violence from over a hundred years ago.

In 1912, Forsyth County was the scene of some of the most explosive racial trouble to take place in the Jim Crow South. Within a week of each other, two women, both white, were assaulted by black men. Now, whether they were actually assaulted – and one certainly was – is almost beside the point, given the racial tilt of the criminal justice system in the South at the time (and arguably even today). The perception of assault was proof enough for the local white population.

In the first incident, it might have actually been only a case of attempted rape. Race relations being what they were, however, this was sufficient to stoke tensions to the point where white vigilantes patrolled the streets of Cumming, a local black preacher was nearly beaten to death for making disparaging comments about the white victim, and the National Guard was called out to maintain the peace.

The incident that quickly followed the first one was much more serious, resulting in the murder and alleged rape of a second young white woman. Two days later, a mob of townspeople dragged one of the suspects (just an accomplice, not even the alleged murderer) from the county jail, shot and then hung him from a telephone pole in the middle of town, no doubt to the great satisfaction of many of the white citizens.

The other suspects escaped mob “justice” only by being shuttled off to more secure jails in Atlanta.

The white mobs of Forsyth were not done, however. In the months that followed, practically every one of the thousand or so black people living in the county (about 10% of the population) were driven away, often forced to sell or even outright abandon their lands and homes. It was probably the biggest single example of ethnic cleansing to take place in Georgia since the Removal of the Cherokees.

By the 1980s, there were still practically no blacks living in the county, despite the fact that the urban spread of metro Atlanta had almost reached the southern borders of rural Forsyth. The county’s reputation as an unfriendly place for African-Americans had not been diminished in the least.

Presumably, to highlight this lack of racial progress in a county holding such a fateful place in Georgia black history and to commemorate the original violent banishment of the black population, Georgia civil rights leaders decided in 1987 to hold a demonstration in Cumming.

The rally on January 17 was not a huge affair. Fewer than a hundred marchers gathered there. I can’t recall much prior publicity surrounding it, if any. I suspect that, like many others, I hadn’t noticed anything in the news about such a demonstration about to take place. By 1987, that sort of thing seemed mostly out of date, Page Two sort of stuff, you could say.

That changed quickly. The small group of marchers, led by Hosea Williams, was met by a counterdemonstration that included elements of the Klu Klux Klan. Rocks and bottles were thrown, and some of the marchers sustained small injuries. Eight counterdemonstrators were arrested.

The specter of peaceful civil rights protesters being pelted by bottles, almost a quarter of century after Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, captured the attention of folks well beyond a core of civil rights activists. It sparked outrage with the wider public, and rightly so.

A week later, a second march took place in Cumming, following a mounting wave of publicity. I felt I had to be part of it.

I confess that part of me felt this was a chance to get a taste of the civil protesting of the Sixties that I had been too young to appreciate at the time. But mainly I felt ashamed of what had just taken place in Cumming, where thickheaded throwbacks to Georgia’s segregationist past had tried to revive their bigoted ideology in the crudest fashion. I wanted to help show the rest of the world that Georgia wasn’t like that anymore. Looking back, maybe I was too quick to be so optimistic.

On that chilly, sunny Saturday morning, my housemates and I gathered with other Athenians in front of the El Dorado vegetarian restaurant on Washington Street. Whether by design or coincidence, this was also the location of the Morton Building, which was built in 1910 as home to one of America’s first black vaudeville theaters.

Someone laid some old bed sheets on the sidewalk and painted some slogans on them as makeshift banners. We then drove to Cumming, joining the other demonstrators at a little shopping center on the edge of town, to wait our turn to begin a slow mile-and-a-quarter walk to the Forsyth County courthouse. There were some 20,000 of us.

I can’t say I remember many details from the march itself, but a couple of things do still stand out in my mind. One was the wall of National Guardsmen in riot gear lining both sides of the road along the entire route. They were part of the reported 1,700 troops sent, along with some 500 police of different sorts, to prevent violence.

I recall that they were arrayed with their backs toward us marchers. It wasn’t us they were keeping their eyes on, it was the counter-protesters. And there were some of those to be sure. Here and there, on the other side of the phalanx of National Guardsmen, were pockets of outwardly hostile people, shouting at us, though they were no doubt a bit subdued by the overwhelming presence of the police and troops. At least, there was nothing thrown.

There were, of course, some people just watching. I remember one young man standing alone on the road bank, watching the flood of outsiders filing into his hometown. He was wearing a watch cap and sunglasses. He had a big piece of duct tape prominently covering his mouth, and he held a handwritten sign that said, “I have to live here”. The message was clear.

Some of the other onlookers, standing on their front lawns or porches, reminded me of people I knew from my own home county of Gilmer, which was also an all-white county (if that status has been due to a Forsyth-like banishment of blacks, I’ve never heard about it, but I can’t be sure).

Many of these locals seemed to be basic country folks, people that I saw as ordinary, mostly decent people. I felt they weren’t bad people, but just out of step with the times. Watching them watching us, I couldn’t help thinking that they were in shock over the immense public display taking place in what they probably considered to be a town just fine the way it was.

And the public display was immense, with the thousands of marchers and police, helicopters flying overhead, Oprah Winfrey supposedly broadcasting from a restaurant somewhere in town, leading national figures like Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and presidential candidate Gary Hart giving speeches from the courthouse. The march certainly overwhelmed the sleepy little town, and I’m sure it blindsided the people living there. I felt they couldn’t comprehend why such a thing would happen. They just didn’t get it.

I didn’t necessarily see those individuals, watching from their lawns in stunned silence, as racists. And I had no reason, just by virtual of the fact that they lived there, to think they were. At least, not overtly so.

Nor did I necessarily see them as supporters of the hateful white-supremacists counter-demonstrators – many of whom, after all, had come from elsewhere, just we marchers had.

I had a bit of sympathy for them. Cumming, partly due to its history and partly due to its present, had suddenly become a focal point, a magnet of sorts, for the changing racial currents of America circa 1987, changes that were unstoppable and needed to happen. These folks, ensconced in a parochial, small-town bubble, were simply in no way prepared for those changes, as I saw it, though you could argue they should have been.

They were caught off guard, a bit like a deer in the headlights, at the magnitude of the change that was about to overtake them as. Despite their stubborn wishes for it not to be so, the world was continuing to turn and society was continuing to progress. I thought that for many of them, their biggest fault was only an inability to accept change.

Now, thirty years later, after seeing the recent furious uproar in support of the Confederate Battle Flag, which in my mind can only be seen as a symbol of racial hate, it’s obvious that resistance to change in the South is more entrenched than I would have ever imagined, at least when it comes to race. Not that much has changed. Even now, only about 3% of Forsyth County is black, compared to 26% in adjacent Gwinnett County. Race relations seem as fraught as ever, not only in the South, but all over the country, as witnessed by the Black Lives Matter movement, born almost exactly a year ago.

If I thought in 1987 that Forsyth County was an aberration in an increasingly progressive, modern Georgia, I’m thinking now I was wrong. 

Stillbirth of a Nation

Years ago, sometime after I had moved to Finland, I ran across a small pamphlet that Finnair had produced for their customers traveling to the United States.

The booklet offered practical guidance on such matters as how much to tip in restaurants or how the hell to identify a dime as a ten-cent piece, despite the fact that “10” or “ten” are nowhere to be seen anywhere on the coin. Another one of those little American oddities to perplex foreign visitors.

Among other useful information was a page dealing with US public holidays, listing about half a dozen of the most significant ones, including the quintessential American holidays of Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Labor Day. What struck me as odd, in fact extremely odd, was the inclusion of a day I did not recognize as any holiday – Jefferson Davis’ birthday. 

Though I was born and raised in the South, I can’t recall anyone ever talking about the birthday of the Confederacy’s one-and-only president, let alone celebrating it. As far as I was concerned Jefferson Davis had long been thankfully forgotten, certainly not a figure to be commemorated.

I’ve since learned that his birthdate is indeed an official holiday in Florida and Alabama. Of course. No doubt, it’s also celebrated unofficially by certain segments of the population in other southern states, and by that I mean folks who, 150 years after the fact, can’t come to grips with the thought that the South waged a misguided and treasonous war against the United States, and lost. Lost badly.

Obviously, the creators of the Finnair booklet must have sourced some bad information if they thought that Davis’ birthday merited a mention as any kind of national holiday. To me, it would be as absurd as celebrating Benedict Arnold Day. I trust no one does that.

When I was growing up in the South in the 60s, the Civil War was a very faint backdrop to the modern world, but not much more than that. No one took it too seriously where I lived, though we definitely identified ourselves as Southerners.

We jokingly called a neighboring family who lived along our dirt road “Yankees” because they had moved there from Ohio. That’s about the extent of the Civil War intruding on my childhood as I can recall. I remember hearing only one Civil War-era story handed down from the older generation of my family. 

Years later, when a co-worker from Boston asked me to demonstrate a “rebel yell”, I had to disappoint him. It was not something we ever did growing up in my part of Georgia. I’d be able to do an authentic rebel yell as likely as an authentic Swiss yodel.

Back then, if we were preoccupied with any events outside our own daily lives, it was with a different and still-on-going civil war, one in Indo-China, and a lower grade of political unrest in the US, the overall turbulence of the 1960s. The Civil War wasn’t much of a topic of conversation. No one felt strongly about what had happened 100 years in the past. No one harbored simmering resentments over it.

I should perhaps pause to explain that mine was not the South of “Gone with the Wind”, by any means. The Georgia haunted by the ghost of Scarlet O’Harra was actually a bit foreign to me, so my experience may not have been typical for what used to be called the Cracker State. ("Cracker" is a slang term for poor, white Southerners.) 

I grew up in the mountains of North Georgia, in a country of small upland farms and forested wilderness. This mountainous area was surely not as dependent as the rest of the state on the slave-based economy that sustained the genteel cotton-growing elites, the aristocratic plantation owners. In 1860, only about 150 slaves lived in Gilmer County, where I was born, according to one source I have found. Gilmer was mostly a county of “small-fisted” farmers.

The two delegates sent from Gilmer to the Georgia Secession Convention in the spring of 1861 voted against leaving the Union. When the war came, a decent number of local boys fought on the side of the North, including at least one of my ancestors. There were no battles fought near the county and no Civil War memorials erected there. Reminders of the war did not really exist there.

That's why it shouldn’t be too surprising that I don’t recall as a child hearing anyone expressing the view that the Confederate States should have won the war. In my predominately Republican county, probably no one strongly felt that that President Abraham Lincoln, the icon of the GOP, was wrong to fight in order to keep the Union together. (Obviously, this was long before Fox News arrived on the scene.)

As I write this now, it seems the Civil War should be even less of an issue than fifty years ago. It should all be ancient, and settled, history, with no real relevance to today.

Oh, how I wish that were true.

In recent years, I’ve spent enough time browsing the history sections of American bookstores to know there is a lucrative enough market for revisionist history books recasting the past from a right-wing worldview.

My impression is that the drive to rewrite (or to be more charitable, to “reinterpret”) history got a boost after the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, when the country took a noticeable turn to the right. And now, with the murkiness of the internet, where everything and nothing is true, rewriting history has never been easier.

I shouldn’t have been too surprised, therefore, to hear Andrew Napolitano, some kind of Fox News “personality”, railing on-air last year against Abraham Lincoln – Abraham Lincoln! – for his unnecessarily launching a “murderous war” against the South. What the hell?

I don’t greatly admire that many American presidents, but the more I read about Lincoln, the better I understand what an extraordinary politician and leader he was. I found it shocking that someone on “mainstream” TV would lambaste the president for struggling to hold the United States together. I might as well have been watching Russia Today.

I know that some contemporaries of Lincoln similarly railed again him as a “tyrant”, but those folks were on the side of the Confederates, dead set against any restrictions on the rights of the good people of the South to own other human beings. That was presumably a more acceptable form of tyranny, one based on race.

Following the terrorist killing of nine African Americans in Charleston last month, the issue of the Civil War is rising again, with a twist.

The white-supremacist murderer posted photos on social media of himself with the Confederate Battle Flag, provoking a groundswell of anti-rebel-flag sentiment that was inspired in part by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. In reaction to the shooting, Coates set his sights on the rebel flag still flying on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol in Columbia, insisting that it was time to “take it down”.

Let’s be honest, compared to the bigger problems of racism and political violence, the matter of one flag is small beer. Still, for a native southerner, like myself, who has come to see that flag as a disgraceful throwback to disgraceful times, it was a welcome development.

Perhaps because the Charleston shooter also posted photos of himself burning an American flag even some conservatives in the South have felt justified, or chastened enough by the public outcry, to come out in favor of taking the flag in South Carolina down. But, it also seems they’ve often missed the point.

The rationale I’ve seen repeated here and there is thus:  although the flag is in reality nothing more than a benevolent symbol of Southern heritage, it had sadly been appropriated as a symbol of white supremacy by hate groups, such as the Klu Klux Klan. (“Appropriation” is a particularly popular buzzword nowadays.)

Using this argument, it has finally become socially acceptable now in 2015 for even true sons and daughters of Dixie to support taking the flag in Columbia down. Progress, of a sort.

This conservative argument seems reasonable, up to a point, so perhaps it’s best not to quibble. It is true the flag has for years been used as a banner by reactionary groups opposed to civil rights. But what the new-found opponents to the flag conveniently ignore (assuming they even know) is that this “appropriation” is nothing new and the reactionary groups using the flag this way have also included state governments.

The familiar Confederate symbol of rebellion was incorporated into the state flag of Georgia, but not until 1956, at the dawn of the civil rights movement. It’s doubtful that pride in Southern heritage, on an official state level, had been dormant all the years prior to that.

Of course, it was clear to everyone at the time that the change was made as an act of defiance against a tide of racial integration. Georgia was thumbing its nose at folks, especially in the federal government, who thought that the “separate but equal” principle of segregation was a cruel joke.

Georgia removed the rebel symbol from its flag only in 2001, and only after an acrimonious debate. Mississippi, whose flag also features the old battle flag, is now discussing doing the same in the wake of the Charleston shooting.

Not everyone, though, is jumping on board the anti-flag bandwagon. Not far from my home county, a parade of pickup trucks and jeeps flying the battle flag whizzed through the streets of Fort Oglethorpe, protesting the removal of the flag from a gift shop at the nearby national military park. A couple of the trucks in the speeding procession rear-ended each other, showing that enthusiasm for a white-supremacist Lost Cause doesn’t necessarily breed safe-driving habits!

And while moderate southern conservatives are now seemingly willing to concede that the “optics” of the battle flag are a liability in today’s world (due to hateful appropriation!), I have come to understand that many of them are still in deep denial over the fundamental truths of the war that spawned the flag. Even today.

I recently had an internet debate (always a bad idea) about the Civil War with some folks from Georgia and elsewhere, some of whom I would have thought were thoroughly modern and well-educated people. While they seemed to agree the time had come to abandon the battle flag, they dug in their heels at any suggestion that the Civil War itself was fought for anything as unrighteous as slavery.

It was dismaying to see people of my general age and background, four or five generations removed from Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, insisting that a war that resulted in some 750,000 deaths on both sides was fought over "tariffs". Or the "banking system". Or the always-useful excuse of “states’ rights”. Anything, anything but slavery. At first, I thought they were joking or being ironic. They weren’t.

I thought such willful twisting of historical reality was only found on the fridges of society, bringing to mind marginalized loners hunkered down in some tumbledown house trolling the darker reaches of the internet, not people who function in the open sunshine of the modern life.

This kind of slavery-denial is difficult to understand, especially since all it takes to dispel such illusions is to read the Georgia Declaration of Secession*, basically the equivalent of the US Declaration of Independence.

A long-winded document by any definition – three times the length of the American Declaration (and even longer than this post!) – it leaves no doubt about what moved the pompous blowhards who wrote it to take the drastic action of revolution.

By my rough analysis, some 78% of the text is devoted to slavery. Only 15% deals with other grievances southerners had with the North, namely tariffs and “internal improvements” (infrastructure spending), where they felt they were being victimized by the Yankees. The Declaration reeks of victimhood.

Yet, despite the Declaration being readily available on-line and crystal clear in its meaning, some people contrive to find that slavery wasn’t the South’s motivation for secession, and therefore, racism wasn’t behind it. That, after all, wouldn’t be “honorable”.

Seriously, I can’t understand the point of trying to whitewash the past by denying that Southerners, even if they might have been our own ancestors, went to war over slavery. Why do folks today feel the need to make excuses for people long dead and gone? And why do I now seem to be encountering more of this denial than years ago?

I suspect that some of the people I was arguing with recently grew up in middle or south Georgia, or some other part of the state seeped in Civil War lore, dotted with war memorials and statues of Confederate generals. (Don't get me started on Stone Mountain, the "Mount Rushmore" of the Confederacy.) Perhaps most other Georgians learned such archaic attitudes at their mama’s knee. At least, I didn't.

Or perhaps the traditional, pro-American, narrative of the Civil War has now been successfully hijacked by neo-Confederate apologists, like Andrew Napolitano and other right-wing revisionists. I would see that as brainwashing. 

Anyway, I would hope the stark contrast of the Charleston shooter burning the American flag, while flaunting the rebel one, brings home to modern-day fans of the Confederacy a contradiction that has always seemed obvious to me: how can you claim to be a loyal patriot of the United States – as southern conservatives certainly do – and also feel pride at the sight of a symbol of an enemy “nation”?

In any case, on the Fourth of July this past weekend I was happy to commemorate the founding of the United States – and not the stillbirth of a different nation, one that did not deserve to be born despite what some folks in the South might still prefer to believe, even today. 

Words of President Barack Obama, in his eulogy for the nine slain parishioners of
the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

* Correction: This should perhaps be referred to as the "Declaration of Causes of Secession". While the "Ordinance of Secession", adopted Jan. 22, 1861, was more properly Georgia's "declaration of independence",  it was followed a week later by the Declaration of Causes.

Vexing Vexillology

Leading up to today's referendum in Scotland on independence, CNN has been giving the issue extensive coverage and at some point even trotted out an expert in...vexillology.

I confess, I never knew such a word existed, or even that there was an academic field justifying such an cryptic name, though in truth I sometimes have found myself interested in the subject, on a superficial level. The subject in question is the study of flags, and the precise reason CNN brought a vexillologist into the studio was to discuss what Scottish independence might mean for the Union Jack, the iconic British flag that nowadays makes me think, first and foremost, of Austin Powers. Yeah, Baby!

All kidding aside, the Union Jack encapsulates a lot of actual history, being as it is a “union” of flags from three kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland. These neighboring countries with shared histories began, in 1603, to also share the same king, James I, apparently quite the multitasking monarch who also lent his name to the best-known version of the Christian Bible.

The Union Jack: iconic mashup of saintly symbols.

The union between the three kingdoms was formalized over the next two centuries, eventually giving rise to a need for a new national banner, the Union Jack, created by overlaying the crosses of three patron saints, George for England, Andrew for Scotland, and – the only one to spawn a holiday observed around the world by wearing something green and drinking beer (often also green) – Patrick from the Emerald Isle.

The fact that St. Patrick’s cross (basically a big red “X”) remains on the flag nearly a hundred years after most of Ireland left the union begs the question: why would the departure of Scotland require any modification to the Union Jack anyway? Why bother changing it?

After all, with the British “brand” being so closely linked to the Union Jack, maybe keeping the flag as it is, and just happily living with the fiction that the “union” it represents still exists, would be the easiest course. No one has to know.

What is more interesting to me, in general, is the role that the cross of St. Andrew representing Scotland on the Union Jack, and of course on the Scottish flag itself, has oddly come to play in the symbolism of rebellion. I’m sure this is mostly coincidence. Or is it?

The flag of Scotland, bearing the cross of St. Andrew.

At the moment, the cross that is now identified with Scotland’s drive for independence has also emerged, with different colors, as the battle flag for the so-called Federal State of Novorossiya, the proxy state that Russia is apparently trying to create in eastern Ukraine.

The Novorossiya flag, in turn, is strikingly similar to the Confederate States of America’s Battle Flag, which is even today a popular symbol of rebellion for some misguided folks in the US who strangely enough find “honor” in the fact that some Americans were willing to wage war on the United States in the defense of their “right” to own other human beings. A disturbing kind of nostalgia.

Three rebellious movements, all sporting the cross of St. Andrew. Though that might look like a pattern, it is all perfectly random.

Supposedly, St. Andrew’s cross had no special significance for the southern US or, for that matter, racism. Andrew is not the patron saint of lost causes (that, in fact, would be Jude, who brings to mind a catchy tune sang by four lads from the then-still-united United Kingdom).

According to traditional mythology, Apostle Andrew, not wanting to upstage the Messiah by having himself martyred in an entirely copycat fashion, opted to be crucified on a large wooden “X” instead. I’ve read that, likewise, when the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was trying to choose between a flag with the regular upright “Latin” cross of Jesus or one with the diagonal cross of St. Andrew, they chose the “X”, influenced in part by a Jewish Southerner who suggested the more obviously Christian symbol of the Latin cross wasn’t appropriate on a national flag.

CSA Battle Flag: detestable symbol of treasonous rebellion.

If true, I find it deliciously ironic to think that, in this age when many religious Southerners get bent out of shape at any hint that the prominence of Christian symbolism is being threatened, a politically incorrect emblem of the “Lost Cause” cherished by some of the same folks might itself have been the product of a certain political correctness, circa 1861.

While the use of St. Andrew’s cross by CSA rebels was accidental, its use by Novorossiya rebels is completely natural and fits well with a certain kind of religious nationalism. St. Andrew is said to have personally traveled and preached to the peoples living on the north shore of the Black Sea in present-day Ukraine, Russia and Georgia, which is why he was adopted as a venerated patron saint of those nations.

It’s less obvious why he would also be the patron of part of faraway Great Britain. He, of course, never traveled anywhere near the glens, lochs and firths of Scotland, but part of him (literally, pieces of his body) reputedly did end up there, obviously good enough to win a place in the hearts of the Scots – and on their flag.

Likewise, St. Andrew’s cross earned itself a place in Russian naval vexillology. The cross was incorporated in a flag designed by no less than Peter the Great, though basically just a knockoff of the British Union Jack. In the 1990s, as all communist emblems were discarded following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Russian Navy restored the imperial flags, complete with the original logo commemorating the martyrdom of a roving apostle. Back to the future, you might say.

Battle flag of "Novorossiya", retro symbol
for a retro militia.

I suppose the Russian Navy Jack could have been the inspiration behind the Novorossiya militia adopting the same colors for its own flag (blue cross on a red field), though I can’t help thinking that in that choice there also wasn’t a sly salute to the folklore of rebellion.

Back in the 1970s in Finland there was a subculture of young men who styled themselves as rebels and dressed like James Dean. They wore denim jacket and slicked-back hair and were called “diinari” (Deanari, get it?). I recall seeing a photo in National Geographic once of one such young Finn with a Confederate Battle Flag sewn onto his jacket. So strong is the link between the CSA flag and rebellion that, even in a place as far removed from Dixie as Finland, the connection was completely clear. The symbolism was understood.

Maybe that’s true even today in the backwaters of Europe, where raising a flag that, consciously or not, resembles as closely as possible the universal symbol of an ill-fated rebellion seems perfectly appropriate for belligerent rebel misfits who play by their own “rules”.

And by that, I don’t mean the Scots.