Who Gets to Define the Meaning of the Confederate Flag?

This article is called "Beneath the Southern Cross."  It appeared in the TribunePapers.com.  Here is one excerpt:

"The right to define the meaning of the Confederate Battle Flag or any flag belongs to those who by their history and shed blood own its heritage. Radical and lawless groups often display the United States flag, but this does not change its true meaning to fair-minded people. Nor should fair-minded people rightly associate the Confederate Battle Flag with evil because the very same groups expropriate and display it. Groups such as the NAACP and SPLC have no right to define the meaning of Confederate flags any more than the French have the right to define the meaning of the Italian flag or any flag but their own. Redefining and slandering someone else’s heritage and symbols is incredibly arrogant and stirs up needless strife. Honorable people pursuing a just and civil society do not seek to dishonor and marginalize the heritage and symbols of others."

Read it all at the link above.

SCV Monitoring Attacks on Confederate Monuments, Markers and Plaques

Here is a message from SCV Headquarters (Hat tip:  Louisiana Sons of Confederate Veterans)

Compatriots,

Daily there are new attacks on our Confederate monuments, markers, plaques, etc. all over the United States. At this time, everyone is encouraged, either as a individual or camp, to report these defacements to your law enforcement agency as a Hate Crime. Report the crime so the criminal can do the time.

By posting the violation to scvheritagedefense.org, it will be automatically added to the list so others are made aware of the heinous offense. We, the descendants of those who fought for the ideas found in the Constitution, will not stand by idle while our symbols and rights are attacked


Deo Vindice!

Charles Kelly Barrow
Commander-in-Chief
Sons of Confederate Veterans

Black veteran, a 'Son of the South,' defends the Confederate flag

Courtney Daniels

By Courtney Daniels, a Birmingham native, former U.S. Marine and veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Mr. Daniels wrote a guest opinion for All Alabama, AL.COM, in which he defends the Confederacy and its flag, and tells of his own personal journey from animosity to admiration.  His well written and heartfelt essay should be read and appreciated by every Son and Daughter of the South.

He writes:

The removal of a historical banner won't stop racists from exercising bigotry. As a matter of fact, racists will be racists despite regulations and constant "feel good" legislation, no flag needed. The ignorance of the disgruntled protestors is evident in their refusal to acknowledge that the flag widely recognized as the "Confederate Flag" was never actually adopted as the flag of the Confederacy. They'll also never admit or realize that not only was slavery not the motivating factor for the ensuing civil war, but that slavery was an American institution, not a Confederate one.

The Confederacy, in its prime, never mounted the atrocities of the Trail of Tears or the Black Hills conspiracy. But it seems that all because a few cowards in bedsheets once hijacked the gorgeous colors of a banner so rich in history to terrorize and intimidate other Americans, we condemn the Southern cloth to oblivion as a misnamed symbol of hate. It doesn't matter that slaves outside of the declared boundaries remained enslaved in the North. Neither does it matter that many Southerners gave up plots of their property to house and provide compensable labor for black workers. It doesn't matter that Lincoln, who is often regarded as the liberator of enslaved blacks cared less for the welfare of slaves than for the sovereignty of an entire country.

Read it all here.

Black supporters of the Confederacy appear daily, in growing numbers...and I LOVE IT.

Here's another one:

Here's another:

"Dixie" -- The National Anthem of the South (Music, Video)

Here is the song that makes every Southern heart beat a bit faster.

Let's Get Rid of the NAACP, a Racist and Hateful Organization

Stone Mountain, Georgia

The NAACP, smelling blood in the water, wants more flesh for its Confederate feeding frenzy. Today, the NAACP has called for sandblasting the sculpture of Confederate generals off the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia.  Why should an ignorant minority with a huge chip on its shoulder, be allowed to bully the majority?  Why should their profound ignorance be allowed to displace historical fact?

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was once a civil rights organization, formed to protect the rights and safety of black Americans.  Now that equal rights have long been achieved, the NAACP no longer has the burning purpose that once motivated its members.  Rather than disband as obsolete, the leaders of this organization continue to seek relevance (and money, prestige and power) by stoking the fires of racial hatred.  They do not seek racial harmony, understanding and peace, because such things undermine their purpose and reason to exist.  As former slave Booker T. Washington said:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

He also stated:

I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

Booker Washington's two statements describe the NAACP to a "T."  The NAACP thrives on racial strife, and do everything in their power to provoke it and extend it.  Without white resentment of blacks, they are out of business.

What better way to keep racial hostility simmering than to eradicate the symbols, flags and monuments to the Confederacy?  The NAACP wants to piss on the graves of our ancestors, remove them from the public memory, and insult all who value our Confederate ancestry.  Has their strategy of engendering hatred worked?

Yes, it has worked on me, for I hate the NAACP and will do everything in my peaceful and lawful power to disempower this evil organization.  We need the IRS to audit them and revoke their non-profit status.  We need to stop granting them an undeserved and unearned respect.  Do not donate any money to the NAACP, and do what you can to disrupt their mischief on the local level.  Picket them with Confederate flags flying; sue them; denounce them.  Petition your state governments to cancel their non-profit status.  Confront them with courage, for they have feet of clay.  The NAACP is the enemy of racial harmony, and it is time to publicly state that fact for all to hear.

Related Posts: 
Rebellion:  NAACP Demands Stone Mountain Demolition
Moonbattery:  Now NAACP Demands the Demolition of Confederate Leaders Engraved on Stone Mountain

Why Do They Hate the South and Its Symbols?

By Paul Gottfried on Aug 4, 2014

This article is taken from The Unz Review and was originally presented at the Confederate Flag Day in Raleigh, NC in 2007.

Those Southern secessionists whose national flag we are now celebrating have become identified not only with a lost cause but with a now publicly condemned one. Confederate flags have been removed from government and educational buildings throughout the South, while Confederate dignitaries whose names and statues once adorned monuments and boulevards are no longer deemed as fit for public mention.

The ostensible reason for this obliteration or dishonoring of Southern history, save for those civil rights victories that came in the second half of the twentieth century, has been the announced rejection of a racist society, a development we are persistently urged to welcome. During the past two generations or so, the South, we have been taught, was a viciously insensitive region, and the Southern cause in 1861 was nothing so much as the attempt to perpetuate the degradation of blacks through a system based on racial slavery. We are being told that we should therefore rejoice at the reconstructing of Southern society and culture in a way that excludes, and indeed extirpates from our minds, except as an incentive to further white atonement, the pre-civil rights past, also known as “the burden of Southern history.” This last, frequently encountered phrase is from the title of a famous study of the South by C. Vann Woodward, who in his time was a liberal-minded Southern historian.

Arguments can be raised to refute or modify the received account of Southern history now taught in our public schools and spread by leftist and neoconservative journalists. One can point to the fact that a crushing federal tariff falling disproportionately on Southern states contributed to the sectional hostilities that led to the Southern bid for independence. One can also bring up the willingness of Southern leaders to free blacks and even to put them in grey uniforms, as the price of the freedom that Southerners were seeking from Northern control. And even if one deplores slavery, this commendable attitude, which was also shared by some Confederate leaders, does not justify the federal invasion of the South, with all of its attendant killing and depredation. That invasion took place, moreover, in violation of a right to secede, with which several states, including Virginia, had entered the Union.

READ MORE

It's a Southern Thing. You Wouldn't Understand.

Photo credits: Southern Historical Society

The Assault on Southern Heritage: "A Cultural and Political Atrocity"

Concerning the modern assault on Southern history and culture, the esteemed historian Eugene D. Genovese writes:

To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation.  We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity -- an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage, and therefore their identity.  They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame.

--The Southern Tradition, the Achievements and Limitations of American Conservatism, Harvard University Press, 1994; as quoted by Gene Kizer, Jr. in his recent book Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States

Wise Words from a Southern Patriot

Regarding the latest dust-up over Virginia's "Confederate History Month," I got really pissed off.  I hate it when ignoramuses attack the South.  I will always remember the words of a wise man, who wrote:

No Southerner should ever think he will be allowed to defend his homeland and her people without being insulted for it. If you're going to defend the South, you must be prepared to defend it down to the last boll weevil on the scraggliest cotton patch in front of the most decrepit tar-paper shack in Mississippi.

So widespread is anti-Southern prejudice, especially among the intellectual elite, that the man who presumes to defend the South might as well begin by foreswearing any further ambition in life. Assume at the outset that you will be denounced and castigated and exiled to outer darkness, and resolve that this daunting prospect will not deter you from your duty.

Ask yourself this, my Southern friend: Who are these people who insult you, your friends and your family? Why does it give them so much pleasure to insult you? And why do they imagine that you will let the insult pass by unnoticed?

Those are the words of Robert Stacy McCain, a true Southern patriot and gentleman. Yes, Stacy, I am resolved to do my duty.

A Rebuttal to "Crooks and Liars" on the Sons of Confederate Veterans

The brazen liars at "Crooks and Liars" printed a ton of misinformation yesterday about the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).  Perhaps they should rename their blog as "Crooks, Liars and Cowards" since they delete all comments that refute their positions.  This post will rebut their scurrilous article on the SCV.

They printed the following:

Experts say the divisions within the Sons vary between two extremes. On one side are the traditionalists, members who focus on cleaning up Confederate grave sites and conducting Civil War re-enactments.

On the other side are the so-called Lunatics, up to 2,000 members who deride traditionalists as "grannies'' and belong to camps named after notorious Southern figures such as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James.

John Wilkes Booth members have been known to put pennies in urinals, making sure to leave the Lincoln side face-up. Other Lunatic groups have removed the U.S. flag from their halls and banned the Pledge of Allegiance, says Walter Hilderman, who several years ago created an anti-Lunatic group called Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

"The problem is it's supposed to be a patriotic organization," says Hilderman, 59. "You are either that or you let guys in who want to secede."

What "experts" say these things?  None are identified.  There are no SCV Camps named after either John Wilkes Booth or Jesse James and there never has been.  You can verify this yourself by visiting the SCV website and browsing through the camps in each state and also the international camps.  I did so this morning and did not find any camp named "John Wilkes Booth" or "Jesse James."  Furthermore, I know the SCV is jealous of its reputation and would never allow such names.  However, suit yourself and browse the camps and see if I'm wrong.

The anecdotal story of non-existent "John Wilkes Booth" members putting pennies in urinals is another myth.  Note that no details have been provided for this camp (what's its Camp Number?  Where is it located?  Who is its Commander?).  The story is a lie.

I know of no SCV camps that have banned the American flag or the pledge of allegiance from their halls.  The story is just another lie -- note the complete lack of specifics or verifiable facts.

The so-called "Save the SCV" group was loyal to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and insisted that SCV members be kicked out based on their personal beliefs and memberships in other non-radical organizations (the Sons does kick out members of non-peaceful, radical groups like the Klan, Skinheads or Neo-Nazis).  The misnamed "Save the SCV" group insisted on forcing their personal political views on the entire membership and vetting members based on that criterion.  They were willing to damage the organization's reputation in support of their personal politics and most of us considered them despicable.  They had the attitude of rule or ruin and did their best to damage the Sons.

The "Save the SCV" group was overwhelmingly opposed by the majority of SCV members and was defeated.  The Sons does not screen members based on their peaceful, personal political beliefs.  It never has.  So the Sons has a few gay members because their sexual preference is not a criterion for membership.  My own SCV camp has a member who is a leftist peacenik from Berkeley who smokes "medical marijuana."  When he applied for membership he was not opposed, because his personal, peaceful political beliefs are not the business of the SCV.  (He volunteered this information, it was not requested of him.)

A couple of years ago the Sons reprinted in its magazine an article by Ann Coulter defending the Confederate South.  There were many letters to the editor by members, some praising Coulter and others denouncing her. It was obvious that the Sons has more than a few liberal members, although the majority are probably conservatives.  I don't know for sure because the Sons does not keep such statistics.

Another non-criterion for membership is whether the potential SCV member wants to secede or believes in the right of secession.  Those are political positions and the Sons' charter strictly forbids it to engage in politics.   I believe in the right of secession of any state; I do not have any great desire to secede at this time in history.  Before the Civil War, the right of secession was largely unquestioned.  It was even taught as a legal right at West Point.  Abraham Lincoln verbally supported the right of secession in a speech to Congress in 1848.  (When the South took him up on it in 1861, he suddenly changed his mind.)

Beliefs in secession are neither violent nor radical, and are none of the SCV's business, nor that of anyone else.  However, if the nation continues in its radical leftward direction, I would support secession of the Red States in order to preserve liberty and to reject Democrat/socialism.  Who agrees with me?  Walter Williams, a black libertarian university professor does.  The right of secession was not decided by Northern violence and is not a "lunatic" position.  "Crooks and Liars" has no valid argument and so is reduced to insulting pejoratives and ad-hominem attacks.  No fair-minded person will find their specious insults convincing.

The SPLC and "Crooks and Liars" rely on guilt-by-association in order to slime the SCV.  They mention Kirk D. Lyons, a North Carolina attorney who has defended members of radical groups charged with crimes.  So is this illegal or unethical?  No.  Every American citizen is entitled to legal representation and a defense.  It does not mean that the attorney agrees with their radical views.  If I'm wrong, then every attorney who ever defended a murderer must be in favor of murder.  Ridiculous.  Lyons is a member of the SCV and has done nothing to deserve being kicked out.  He has a close friend in a black man, H.K. Edgerton, who supports SCV causes and they have often appeared together in public forums.

The real reason why "Crooks and Liars" wants to slander the Sons of Confederate Veterans is so they can hang the albatross of "racism" around the neck of Rep. Joe Wilson, who offended them by accusing Barack Obama of lying (even though he apologized for it).

Liberals can't win any major political argument with rhetoric, logic or facts.  They must always resort to innuendo, guilt-by-association and slander of the opposition.  Their lack of argument is matched only by their lack of personal ethics.  Don't believe them.

Update:  I received official confirmation from the Sons of Confederate Veterans regarding some of the points I rebutted above:

There is at least one real camp named for Quantrill with whom James rode;
however, I know of no camp that has ever been named for either Jesse James
or John Wilkes Booth.  James and his brother were Confederate soldiers, both
well educated, and their parents taught at Georgetown College, a Baptist
School in Kentucky.  They turned to crime after the war.

At one time there was a social group who called themselves the John Wilkes
Booth camp, and at certain meeting locations individuals would get together,
have a drink and some would wear round disks around their necks that read
John Wilkes Booth camp.  I am not aware of any activity such as this since
2003 or so.  They had no traction and were not official in any way, shape or
form.

Ben Sewell, Executive Director, Sons of Confederate Veterans

Our Southern Heroes

For us Confederate descendants, this says it all.