It demands that its adherents repeatedly look away, that they favor the fanciful over the plain, myth over history, the dream over the real. His essays can also be found atChaunceydevega.com. Neither Ira nor Lindy has asked black acquaintances why the flag is offensive, or asked why many believe it belongs in museums, but not part of a state emblem. I add that the division most hurts poor whites and people of color. It was an historic moment for gay. After last week's racially motivated slaying of nine African Americans in a South Carolina church, the flag has become a target for those who consider it a symbol of hatred, a strident reminder. History teaches us that if we don. As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. 661 likes. Most (southerners) did not have a dog in the hunt, he says. , a common flag symbol sometimes called the Southern cross. The night was solemn; speakers at marches coast to coast acknowledged the heavy toll a single rare verdict of a police officer found guilty of murder had taken. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again perhaps in amore dangerous and virulent form. Flags of Our Fathers Directed by Clint EastwoodStarring: Ryan Phillippe (John Bradley), Jesse Bradford (Rene Gagnon), Adam Beach (Ira Hayes), John Benjamin Hickey (Keyes Beech), John Slattery (Bud Gurber), Barry Pepper (Mike Strank), Jamie Bell (Ralph Ignatowski), Paul Walker (Hank Hansen) and Robert Patrick (Colonel Chandler Johnson).Running . I go to see and share the bitter end , I have ever held the South were right. To me, the flag is not a racist thing. You can also contribute via. Reader support helps us keep our explainers free for all. All Ive heard is a downplaying and whitewashing of history in an attempt to gaslight its population.. Embrace Violence. She supports Mississippians right to keep it as is. The flag could easily be honored or studied in museums, he adds. In a protest against police violence, police are counterprotesters, and it is first and foremost the police who riot, engaging in orgies of violence against their perceived enemies. That is not hate, nor is it racism.". Its a piece of our heritage that should be left there to honor sacrifices, Davis says in a cozy parlor, adding that most soldiers were dirt-poor farmers with no slaves. "Shared psychosis" which is also called "folie millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. The National Guard were deployed to Minneapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia. But slavery was waning, McCluney insists, and the north should have let it fade naturally. Give The Atlantic Politics Take Down the Confederate FlagNow The flag that Dylann Roof. The NAACP respects the constitutional, first amendment right for private citizens to maintain symbols and monuments on private property, he says. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolinas attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. Nonetheless, the police continue to operate under layers of legal impunity and institutional protection that vastly overshadow the rights of the citizens they brutalize, murder or assault. It's a symbol of how successfully the Civil War has been misremembered so that "heritage" and "hate" could be disentangled from each other. Save your lovely souls. In fact, police violence by Minneapolis law enforcement increased substantially following the 2020 murder of Floyd. Slavery was sidelined as the war's primary cause in favor of the vaguer term "state's rights" (the right to own slaves). Lindy nods, describing her childhood of poverty when the familys land was all they had left. The Thin Blue Line flag dates back only to 2014. The Confederacy itself was founded to preserve slavery and promote white supremacy (see, for example, : "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery the greatest material interest of the world," or the. Demands for change in American policing have outstripped the 2010s ethos of reform, which for years involved providing more and more resources to bloated police departments: for training that has proved ineffective, body cameras that can and do serve as aids in crafting meretricious narratives, for consent decrees in cities with particularly egregious police regimes that wind up protecting departments more than curbing their atrocities. By the morning, protesters with signs and chants had dispersed, leaving the Thin Blue Line flag to fly alone in a hazy sky. One mans prison sentence for a murder seen by millions on camera is a long way from the transformation we need. They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Their mentality is flag-draped, all noblesse oblige and wounded besiegement, but their actions are those of armies accountable only to their own leadership. Those who object are subject to exemplary violence. The only thing that has changed is how the rest of the country sees the cause it represents. There are plenty of big bangs in "Flags of Our Fathers," but because . White mobs at the University of Alabama carried Confederate flags when they threw rocks at Autherine Lucy, the university's first black student, before the university decided to expel her rather than protect her. Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. As a white woman who still flies the flag in a historically black South Carolina neighborhood put it, it's about "family history.". that the flag's Southern cross pointed to "the destiny of the Southern master and his African slave" the Confederacy's hoped-for expansion of slavery into Latin America. The phrase "the thin blue line" is older, perhaps first popularized in 1922 by New York City police Commissioner Richard Enright, who used the phrase to describe police as . Something went wrong. Then Johnson turns to Roof: All of the views and racial hatred symbols that informed his opinion walked into that church with him. A year of protest against police violence, and brutal counterprotest by the police in the name of public order, had reportedly little impact on a system of policing built around a core of violence. Property crime investigations altogether have an abysmal 17 percent clearance rate. Most of the soldiers were young a fifth were under 18 and few owned any of the 4 million slaves in the US. Embrace violence. If you dont breathe life into something, it will die, Massey adds. Until that kid went in that church in Charleston, people never thought anything about the Confederate or Mississippi flag, she says. I have struggled. At first, white Southerners mostly displayed it at Civil War cemeteries and at memorials and veterans' reunions. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this actit endorses it. Its a symbol of our state; its who we are., She continues: Northern people were down here trying to burn all our stuff true; the Yankees torched Jackson three times and we were trying to stop them They didnt think it was right we had slaves. Three died in battle, and one in a makeshift hospital in the Lyceum at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi one of numerous buildings built by slaves. Mississippi had 436,631, the most in the nation and 55% of the states population. Most of em dont know what it means, she says. Their God, our God, it doesnt matter. Their beliefs will be turned upside down as entire units are brought down without mercy as if God himself smite them. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. My prayers have proved as idle as my hopes. As the country prepared to hear the verdict in the Chauvin trial, more police armies massed in American cities. They release a curt statement in grammar designed to deflect responsibility (officer-involved shooting; incident). Two supporters are seen wearing orholding Kek Flags, an alt-right symbol. I met Be after reporting that her grandfather, Pastor Clyde Briggs, was a target of the Klan in the 1960s for trying to organize and arm black people against white supremacy. Just a point of history Prior to Roofs massacre, the South Carolina NAACP had waged a 15-year boycott against the state for its [Confederate] flag display, Johnson says. They understand that after all else fails and evil overwhelms the powers of the pen, it is they that will be called upon. When the April 11 death of Wright prompted renewed civilian protests in Minneapolis, police gathered as they have gathered so many times this year, as they had in response to Floyds murder nearly a year ago in tight formation, in full riot gear with shields and batons and service weapons, ready to repel an invading army. I would not be up around the last flag making a chain gang to keep somebody from taking it down, Davis says. The friends reject being offended over what Hentz calls just a piece of cloth. In our world there lives a relativity small group of guardians who not only stand ready to do violence on the behalf of others, but actually wait anxiously for the opportunity. The Americans who fly the Confederate flag. Fascism is not asimple machine with an on-and-off switch. Booth absorbed his lesson too well. 100% Cotton. Reporting by Jack Goodman, Christopher Giles, Olga Robinson and Shayan Sardarizadeh. It's how Mississippi and Florida could include the Confederate flag in their state flags during the 1890s with little fuss. The Confederate flag represents pride in the face of poverty to Massey, who came to Mississippi in 2001, the same year voters decided against changing the state flag. Men who would rather dance with the devil in the valley of the shadow of death than sit at a Starbucks, sipping a $10 coffee while contemplating whether their skinny jeans are adequately squeezing all available testosterone into their systems in hope of fulfilling their latest desire of obtaining a beard. "If displaying the flag of the Confederate States of America is a fad, it is one of the longest-lived fads in history, lasting some 90 years," one sniffed in a letter to Life. Other slogans on flags, clothing or signs . The educator points to Roofs horrible, horrible 2015 massacre of black worshippers and his viral photo holding the Confederate flag as inciting a war on the emblem. History teaches us that if we dont, someone else will. Violence is Golden by Jack Donovan, Most will see the above admonition and others like it and automatically relate it to the malevolence of those who wish to do nothing more than tear this world apart. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. She immediately brings up Roof. But that reverence now stops at the capitol grounds. Google Pay. Theyre not afraid of being filmed, because being filmed simply reinforces the central theme: If you come to protest, an action that explicitly challenges the order and my place in it, this is the consequence. But many of their households owned at least one, or they aspired to ascend to slave ownership. That post,"Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You? And luckily for all of the others, it is! We try to help people.. And they`re willing to take up arms for it.". In the early 1950s, stock car racers, Southern universities, and social groups embraced the Confederate flag, Coski wrote in his book. I would be sad about it, not violently upset. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? Still, Davis balks at the need to exorcise the emblem from the state flag today out of respect to Mississippians who descended from slaves. The Confederate flags defenders often claim it represents heritage not hate. I agreethe heritage of white supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. The matter is especially raw in Mississippi, a state that suffered tremendous Confederate casualties and went from being the richest state from slavery before the civil war to one of the poorest. All rights reserved. In this way they honor their ancestors. The treatment is removal of exposure. Asmediacritic Eric Boehlertrecently noted,the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascistssupport for terrorism and other political violence. Such a stark symbolic contrast reminds us that our nation's long-standing cultural embrace that equates guns with liberty ignores the degree to which gun violence has historically also meant. (Buyenlarge Archive Photos via Getty Images). They are protected by "law enforcement officers bill of rights" laws in more than a dozen states, which cushion them from the legal fallout of felonies and abuses; by the egregious doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields them from lawsuits against constitutional rights violations; by unions that embrace without qualification the worst offenders in police forces and exercise considerable power over municipal governments with both flush finances and the implicit threat of a heavily armed and punitive membership. The history, though, is clear: from the Civil War through the civil rights movement, the flag has always been about white supremacy. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longerAmerica and thatthey no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. 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