Confederate symbols. So what?

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As a boy, I was taught in the classroom that the root cause of the Civil War was State's rights vs centralized Federal power. Unfortunately, like many things we learn in school, this wasn't exactly true..... LIke many other things in the history books, a little "white" washing happened.

On the eve of the civil war, the North and the South were very different geographically, economically and socially from each other and it was these differences that ultimately led to the Civil War.

The North was primarily an industrial economy whereas the Southern states was for the most part an agrarian society whose economy depended on agriculture and slavery.. And a booming agricultural economy it was, with the Southern states exporting cotton that accounted for 616 million pounds of cotton used in Great Britain just prior to the Civil War, with virtually every single ounce of cotton hand-picked by black slaves.

This was an age before mechanized equipment. The South's rice, Cotton and Tobacco plantations required a lot of manpower, and manpower was expensive. For any large land owner or upwardly mobile white farmers, slaves provided a cheap, profitable labor pool. It was a great deal for the White landowners. Not so much for the Black slaves who were bought and sold like so much livestock.

The North didn't need slaves; the South did. It was as simple as that. So the political battle lines formed decades before the Civil War, with the North and South on opposite sides of the slavery issue.

It is said that in 1860, the economic value of slaves in the United States exceeded the value of all of the nation's railroads, factories, and banks combined. The South's economy simply could not exist without slaves and they were willing to go to war to maintain their livelihood and slaveholder way of life. (Known today as Southern heritage)

When the Southern States seceded, they published their reasons for doing so and most, if not all, said that maintaining slavery was the reason they were leaving the Union. This is all part of the historical record and easily found on the internet.

Ultimately, when everything else has been said and written, one cannot separate slavery, the Confederacy and the Civil War.

The Southern States established the Confederate States of America, a separate breakaway nation from the United States, and at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor, marking the beginning of the Civil War.

What many people may not know is that Robert E. Lee, the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate States Army, was the Superintendent of West Point and resigned from the United States army two days after he was offered command of the Union army and three days after his native state, Virginia, seceded from the Union. The fact is that the Army of the Confederacy was led by a traitor to the United States.

It was the South that fired the first shot. It was the Confederacy that attacked the United States of America, just as surely as the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and again on September 11, 2001.

The Army of the Confederacy killed some 360,000 American soldiers and civilians during the Civil War. Neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother and fathers against sons. Almost as many Americans died in the Civil War as in all other American conflicts since. Gettysburg was the deadliest battle with some 51,000 Union casualties in three days! A country in ruins and four years of carnage, and it was all about slavery.

Just after the civil war, in 1865, a group of men consisting of former Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan as a social club. Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first leader, or “grand wizard,” of the Klan. This "social club" adopted the Confederate flag as one of their symbols and the rest is a blood-soaked stain on American history.

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Confederates were both traitors and racists, and the Confederate battle ensign will be forever and always inseparable from white supremacy, racial violence and intimidation, because the Confederacy was literally founded upon the institution of slavery. While many rightfully see the flag as a symbol of racism and slavery, many Southerners claim that the Confederate flag is simply a symbol of their Southern heritage. (Hint: it's the same thing, whether they admit it or not.)

Why is it that the mob that stormed the Capitol was waving Confederate flags? The men who carried and fought for the Confederate flag in the Civil War were traitors to the United States, and anyone who displays that flag today is no American patriot.

It seems that one of those modern day traitors actually carried a Confederate flag into the second floor of the US Capitol on January 6th 2021! Clearly, these were not American patriots but sycophants of a wannabe autocrat and violators of American law and the U.S. Constitution. Just as the Army of the Confederacy marched into battle in the 1860's with the same flag, these traitors sought to harm the United States.

Did you know that Texas actually celebrates Confederate Heroes Day. Why? It’s a state holiday created by the Texas Legislature approximately 50 years ago, more than one hundred years after the Civil War ended. Every year, on January 19, the birthday of Robert E. Lee, Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day. While state offices remain open, employees can take a paid day off “in honor of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate heroes.” O.M.G.

No state celebrates Nazi Heroes Day, Japanese Imperial Army Heroes Day, Viet Cong Heroes Day or Al Qaeda Heroes Day. There were surely brave men fighting for each of these enemies of our great country, but we don't celebrate them, because they were our enemies! Arguably, the Confederacy is worse than each of these, because the Confederates weren't foreigners, they were Americans who turned traitor.

Why do some Americans want to celebrate Confederate traitors as heroes? Why are there remaining monuments to Confederate soldiers all over the South to this day? I surely can't explain it.

I submit that you can be a proud Southerner, without waving this symbol celebrating treason, slavery and death. Confederate flags and monuments have no place on any official government or public property or flag. Those flags and monuments belong in the past. If they must exist, the proper place is in museums, cemeteries or on private property.

We need to move past the great divide that killed so many Americans and caused such destruction and sought to preserve slavery in America. One way is to rid our courthouses, town squares and flags of any iconography that celebrates the Confederate States of America.

If you cannot see how the Stars and Bars could offend Blacks and others, show a Nazi flag to a WWII American veteran, or the Rising Sun flag of the Imperial Japanese Army in front of anyone who lost someone at Pearl Harbor and maybe they can explain it you.

Each of the following flags was flown by enemies of the United States of America.

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