Here's a good article about the PC stupidity surrounding the Confederate Battle flag.
February 15, 2006
<H1>Time To Hang My Confederate Flag</H1>
By Bryanna Bevens
I miss Sam Francis!
It was many moons ago, at an exit off I-40 between Jackson TN and Memphis, TN, and I had stopped to buy something to drink at the only store for miles around.
As it turned out, the store specialized in Confederate memorabilia. I swear, you could find the Rebel Flag emblazoned on everything from thongs to bongs.
I bought a Coke and a large Confederate flag.
Although the MSM would have you believe otherwise, my flag does not compel me to run out and commit hate crimes—it does not create in me some crazy desire to enslave or lynch Black people.
I bought this flag for two relatively simple reasons:
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<TD vAlign=top width="100%">It is a hallowed fragment of American history and;</TD></TR></T></TABLE>
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<TD vAlign=top width="100%">I really, really, really enjoy offending the militant multicultural faction of American society…it’s a bit of a hobby, really.</TD></TR></T></TABLE>
Here’s the best part: the store was managed by two extremely amusing black people who loved their Southern heritage.
This is what has happened since:
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about two boys in Missouri who were suspended from school after unfurling a Confederate flag at a multicultural (gag) assembly.
The response from our readers was overwhelming—and overwhelmingly outrage at this PC atrocity.
So I looked into the issue a bit further and found a story of two girls at a school in Texas who met a similar fate over their handbags.
The girls carried "rebel purses" to school which had the rebel flag (the Battle Flag of the Armies of Northern Virginia) painted on one side.
Rather than surrender their apparently offensive handbags to the principal, the girls agreed to leave the school for the day.
They also refused to stop carrying their "rebel purses" and the school continues to send them home—their parents are fighting the district as we speak. [Girls to fight ban on rebel-flag purses, by Jim Douglas, WFAA-TV, January 7, 2006]
Then I saw an article written by somebody called Tim Wise for Counterpunch called Racism, Neo-Confederacy and the Raising of Historical Illiterates[February 3, 2006.]
First of all, do you think Tim Wise could have fit more liberal buzz words into that title if he tried?
The only one missing is "white supremacy". But not to worry, that one gets ample playing time in the actual article.
Wise addressed the flag fracas down in Texas and the student revolt that ensued following the girls’ dismissal from school.
Several students began carrying purses and school bags with the word "censored" written across the front. Mr. Wise wrote:
"[the students responded] by plastering ‘censored’ signs over their purses (be they rebel or not) and book bags, all the while caring quite little as to how the whole thing might feel for the statistical handful of blacks in the school."
This is what his comment sounds like to me:
The supposed feelings of Black students are more important than the constitutionally protected freedoms of everybody else.
White people may only celebrate history that is acceptable to other races.
In contrast, non-white races may take pride in and celebrate the history of anything they want.
It’s actually worse than that.
Once-upon-a-time during a dinner discussion (at a political function no less, because I’m such a genius) I said Nelson Mandela may have done well for South Africa but that did not change the fact that he was also basically, a murderer.
I barely made it out of there alive—I broke the rules, you see.
Black history (any non-white actually) is not to be questioned or criticized. And should you deign to call it "offensive", you will undoubtedly walk away from the fray with a special parting gift:
The label of racist.
After reading his column and glancing at some of his books, I decided that Tim Wise is one of the few people I would call an expert.
He’s an expert on White Liberal Guilt…in fact he might be the Grand Poobah of the Lodge.
From his website [timwise.org]
"Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, NY: Soft Skull Press (2005); and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White, NY: Routledge (2005)."
In his anti-Confederate article, Wise wrote:
"But what, other than wallowing, and most certainly pitiable, can we call those who insist on waving the standard of a defeated government, some one hundred and forty one years after it fell?"
What indeed should we call them?
"But what, other than wallowing and most certainly pitiable, can we call those who insist" on elevating the worth of one ethnic heritage above another—by censoring that which is displeasing to the liberal elite?
(Then again, after glancing at the content of Mr. Wise’s books I am not sure why they are not all titled: Why I Hate My Race by Tim Wise)
Those who hate the Civil War claim that it was about slavery because they have to…how else can they justify more than a century’s worth of guilt and compensation?
Was slavery wrong? Absolutely!
But there is more to American history than our moral blemishes. And there is more to this war than a single hot-button issue.
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<TD vAlign=top width="100%">Nearly half of the Medals of Honor issued to date were awarded during the Civil War </TD></TR></T></TABLE>
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<TD vAlign=top width="100%">63 were awarded at the Battle of Gettysburg alone</TD></TR></T></TABLE>
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<TD vAlign=top width="100%">1,100,000 soldiers died between 1861 and 1865</TD></TR></T></TABLE>
More soldiers died at the Battle of Gettysburg alone than during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War combined.
This was a war that saw a man killing his own brother…literally.
This was a war that saw our nation split in half—12 states (arguably 13) seceded from the Union.
Maybe we have become desensitized to the magnitude of such an occurrence. But a lot of Americans at the time were angry enough to take up arms against the federal government.
My Lord, are we to believe that all of this was because of slavery…just slavery?
Are we to believe that man was willing to kill his neighbor, his fellow countryman and indeed, his own brother just to preserve the slave labor on his plantation?
That is beyond ridiculous and I refuse to believe that even the liberal elite (Tim Wise) really believe it.
Here’s the bottom line:
I don’t care what started the Civil War…I don’t care if Lincoln just lost a bet with Davis and the bullets started flying.
I don’t care if it was about slavery…I don’t care if the Confederate flag reminds people about slavery.
We should accept American history for exactly what it is…not what we think it should have been or what we need it to be.
The Civil War and the Confederate Battle Flag should not be reduced to a symbol so that professional guilt-mongers can point and say "see…see, racism is alive and well so let’s throw more money at the phony idea of social equality."
Hmm…people like Tim Wise (email him) should be careful.
If they succeed in removing Confederate symbols from society, what would they left to complain about?
Oh, wait—that other banner of slaveholders—Old Glory itself!
Bryanna Bevens [email her] is a political consultant and former chief of staff for a member of the California State Assembly.
I'm sure you've read of Overland High School teacher Jay Bennish who spoke out against President Bush and the administration last week, and is suspended because of it. Here's what else he said that didn't get as much press.
"In no way am I implying, I don't know, you got to figure this stuff out for yourself, but I want you to think about these things--you know, think about this right here. [Apparently pointing to American flag.] Here's the real homeland security. Fighting terrorism since 1492! Ok. I mean, to many Native Americans, that flag is no different than the Nazi flag or the Confederate flag. It represents the people that came and stole their land, lied, brought disease, rape, pillage, destruction, etc. So it all depends upon varying people's perspectives varying. And of course, we're going to see ourselves as being in the right , at least the majority of us, because that's us."
I do not know Jay, but I hope he meant that to Indians, the American flag is bad, nto the Confederate flag, but I imagine he has been brainwashed like countless millions who have been told the lie that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. Anyway, it was at least good to hear the American flag being called on in this way for a change, instead of the Confederate flag. I think there is much more evidence to make that claim for the former flag than for the latter.
Here's a somewhat interesting article I just found. Too bad there isn't a real Robert E. Lee Day to make the last sentence come to fruition. I so wish people would realize the lopsidedness that exists against the South. The fact that we have a holiday to a whoremongering liar and agitator like MLK and not one to one of the best men to ever set foot on American soil is a shame and a testament to that fact.
H. Brandt Ayers: Knowing you’re Southern</NP>
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<TD></TD></TR></T></TABLE><NP=COLUMN1>The sentence executed — there being no appeal from parental judgments in those days — Dad left me standing alone on a stone walkway. It was a gray, chilly September afternoon in the Connecticut foothills of the Berkshire Mountains.
Among the many things I would learn during four years of happy exile at the Wooster School was that I was a Southerner, a little different.
They called me “the Colonel,” I organized an all-Yankee Confederate Underground, and in one deeply disapproved prank, we took down the U.S. ensign from the flagpole and ran up the Stars and Bars.
My feelings about the South then were uncomplicated, but for the rest of my life, I have struggled to reconcile ambiguous sentiments — loving and despairing of my native region.
A recent book by a first-rate University of Georgia historian, “Away Down South” by James C. Cobb, has both helped and thrown confusing chaff to clutter my mental picture of Southern identity.
As others have noted, the end of legal segregation has drawn the South and the rest of America closer, commercially and culturally. We have been “Wal-Martized,” though when Dale Earnhart died, T-shirts with his name or No. 3 flew off shelves in North Carolina faster than in North Dakota.
Cobb is right when he says growing regional similarities blur Southern identity because we define ourselves by what others think and say about us. The corollary, of course, is that the way “other” Americans define us also defines them.
“My” South stands between smug Yankee superiority — exporters of moral concern — and the angry, one-dimensional South of the 35,000 Sons of Confederate Veterans. I do not understand the loathing, the miserable isolation of the League of the South.
When I see the battle flag, I know it is part of me, though soiled by misuse. Symphonic arrangements of “Dixie” touch me at a deeper level (the merriness of the tune speaks of innocent childhood in the South), but underneath the bright melody, melancholy cellos remind us that the South has a unique burden of loss, separation and tragedy.
In that sense, the South has experienced the whole cadenza of human history, all of the sharps, flats and discords of the Irish, Jews, Slavs — the common lot of man.
Fate, whether kindly or unkindly, allowed the East a longer period of innocence. Arnold Toynbee, a 19th-century economic historian, said that a boy at Groton, for instance, would have felt as Toynbee himself did during the Diamond Jubilee in England.
“Well, here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there — forever! There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people,” Toynbee wrote. “If I had been a young man in the Southern part of the United States, I should have known that history had happened to me.”
For luckier regions, history was a time machine that noiselessly sped New England from triumph to triumph — in battle, in finance and in the pulpit of moral superiority. History finally caught up with the last American innocents and rained 2,000 years of experience on them in a single decade: Watergate, Vietnam, economic decline, urban riots and the discovery that the sin of prejudice is not exclusive to the warmer climes.
Did the “other” America’s brief experience with the unpleasant edge of history, and the South’s century-long experiences of European or Asian travails, make either more wise?
There is a deep and abiding insecurity in the South, partly self-made and partly inflicted from outside. The South’s historic burden includes defeat, occupation, statutory prejudice, economic and civil punishment and, worst of all, the scorn of the more fortunate. Out of genuine respect for noble icons such as Robert E. Lee, but maybe more from injured self-respect, we have clung to “our” flag as if our heritage, the sum of our time on Earth, depended on its preservation.
This I understand, because that is a part of me, too. But I am depressed by knowing that so many Southerners are so desperate about their identity that the flag issue defeated three Southern governors. And I cringe when Alabama again makes a joke of itself as it did in rejecting a constitutional amendment “that would have nullified a segregation-era amendment declaring that Alabama’s children had no constitutional right to an education at public expense,” as Cobb puts it.
The author notes that the amendment’s defeat out of fear of judicially mandated school taxes was not mitigating “in light of Alabama’s dead last standin\g in most national rankings of public educational support and achievement.”
The South I write about, “my” South, is neither fearful nor desperate about its heritage. My South is a colorful, exciting, sorrowful pageant of heroes and scoundrels, statesman and fools, of hard times capped by better ones, forbearing in defeat and hopeful about the future.
My South is not one thing, one flag, but the whole pageant, a South so confident, so comfortable in its own black and white skin that it can celebrate Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee days together.</NP> </TD></TR>
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About Brandt Ayers:
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<TD>H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Anniston Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co. His column appears on Sundays in the Insight section. </TD></TR></T></TABLE>
Contact Brandt Ayers:
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bayers@annistonstar.com
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I may have written about this before, but I figured I'd put it on this thread as well. One of the only episodes of South Park I ever watched was situated around a Second War Of Independence reenactment. The hilarious thing was that the yankees were flying the First National Confederate flag instead of the US flag. I don't know if this was a slip for sure or done on purpose. Anyway, I looked it up and it wasaired during the third season of the show. Although its not a positive portrayal of the South, it is a good example of yankee ignorance on the history of the Confederacy. Here's a picture from it, and you can see what I mean. The only US flag in the whole show is the one the kids have.
Edited by: Colonel_Reb
Here is more craziness from the haters of America. Even though I don't havemuch for Allen, these articles are somewhat interesting and enlightening. It really isomething to see how they phrase things in anti-Confederate articles.
Allen’s Rebel artifacts haunt his rise
The Virginian-Pilot
© May 5, 2006
George Allen has a problem, which he’s gamely trying to remedy.
The problem centers on race. Simply put, is the GOP presidential aspirant and U.S. senator from Virginia a racist? Or not?
In our view, not.
But that’s not the complete answer, because Allen’s embrace of Confederate symbols and Southern mythology throws open a window into his character.
An article in the May 8 edition of The New Republic fuels a fire that has blazed and subsided, only to blaze again, numerous times over the years.
There’s the matter of the Confederate flag that hung on the wall of Allen’s home in Charlottesville, until he took it down in prelude to the 1993 gubernatorial race. Ditto the noose that hung on an office ficus tree.
There’s also the matter of his track record as a legislator and governor: one of some two-dozen House members to vote against a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. in 1984; acceptance — before rejection — of a membership in a barely integrated Richmond social club; and, as governor, consent to a Confederate History and Heritage Month proclamation in which slavery went unmentioned.
Now add The New Republic’s accounts (some new, some recycled) of Allen’s driving around Palos Verdes, Calif., as a teenager with Confederate memorabilia on his Mustang, an episode in which he and buddies faked some incendiary graffiti (the message appears lost to history) before a football game with a predominantly black high school, and the piece de resistance, Allen’s high school yearbook picture with a Confederate pin in his lapel.
That’s a long enough menu to give anyone concerned about racism in America indigestion.
Counter those stories with anecdotes that the household of Allen’s 1960s boyhood was unusually integrated for the times, a place where winning trumped all. Papa Allen, fabled football coach for the Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins, cared nothing about the color of the arm that spiraled or caught the football, only that the pass be complete. His eldest son grew up enmeshed in that ethic.
More recently, Allen has undertaken a personal rehabilitation course, sponsoring an apology of the Senate’s failure to outlaw lynching decades ago, joining in a pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery, and last week, appearing with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a genuine civil rights hero, at a symposium on Massive Resistance in Prince Edward County, Va.
How to square one Allen face with the other?
The generous explanation is Allen’s — that as a youth he equated Southern symbols with rebelliousness and masculinity and, until recently, did not fully appreciate the struggle of blacks in the South. Should Allen run for president, millions of Americans will render individual verdicts on that defense.
Taken as a whole, the package points less to racism than to a shallow regard for the tragedies of Southern history.
Compassion and introspection aren’t Allen’s strong suit. Like his father, he has no time or stomach for nuance, complexity, weakness or excuse.
How else to reconcile Allen’s actions with a little-known episode recounted in The New Republic article? Driving across rural Mississippi with his family one night in the aftermath of some freedom-rider killings, Allen says he saw a cross burning in the distance. “I just remember the sense of urgency as we were driving through the night, a carload of people with Illinois license plates — that this is not necessarily a safe place to be.”
A few years later, Allen posed for a high school photo with a Confederate flag on his lapel.
Voters will rightly ponder the myopia that put a romance with Confederate symbols over the reality of a burning cross — as a teenager and for a quarter-century thereafter.
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t's hard to make out, because the video is fuzzy. The copy I obtained was originally recorded off a television using VHS in 1993 and then transferred to a second tape, further degrading the quality.</IMG> But, once you know what it is, it makes sense. It sits folded on a bookcase of trophies and bric-a-brac behind George Allen, who is seated at a desk in his home office. It's right there next to the fax machine. You can see the red field. You can make out the diagonal blue bar. And you can see what looks like a white star. It is the Confederate flag, and it appears in the very first ad that Allen broadcast in 1993, when he ran for governor.
"The ad ran in the beginning of his campaign, when we were introducing him," says Allen's 1993 media consultant, Greg Stevens, who made the spot. Stevens denies that the flag was purposefully added to the scene, which lasts for ten seconds of the 60-second commercial, to appeal to pro-Confederate voters. "To be honest, this spot helped him enormously, and it had nothing to do with the Confederate flag," Stevens says, adding that any criticism about "a Confederate flag supposedly put there to subtly suggest to people that he is a Confederate" is "horsesh*t, and you can quote me on that." Allen's communications director, press secretary, and deputy press secretary did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.
Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there's the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a Confederate flag pin ( May 8). Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears as a decoration in Allen's first statewide ad, even though he has long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992.
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Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about Allen's high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so old. "f we're going to scrutinize people's high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run," columnist Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993 campaign ad--as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping forward--his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive than tnr previously reported. According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.
fter his Confederate flag pin-wearing days in Palos Verdes, Allen attended the University of Virginia from 1971 to 1977. According to two law school classmates and one undergraduate classmate, Allen displayed the flag on his pickup truck while at UVA. "I can independently confirm," Allen law school classmate Don Cornwell writes in an e-mail, "as can hundreds of my classmates at the UVA Law School, that for the three years that George was there he drove an old pickup truck with notably newer Confederate flags on the bumpers. George and his truck was sort of a running joke in the law school."
According to a little-noticed 1993 Los Angeles Times article, Allen also displayed the flag in his room at UVA--a university where it was an explosive issue. According to the school newspaper, one of the hot debates on campus in 1971 was over students displaying the Confederate flag at football games, a spectacle that caused a near-race riot at one game, prompting the school to temporarily ban the flag from all athletic events. It would have been hard for Allen to miss this controversy: He was a quarterback on the football team.
Allen's fetish for Dixie did not wane after UVA. When he was a member of the House of Delegates from 1983 to 1991, Allen was known for his interest in the Confederacy. According to Clint Miller--a Republican who served with Allen in the Virginia House and later ran against him in the gubernatorial primary--while discussing a Civil War battle at a subcommittee meeting, Allen referred to Northerners as "Yankees." A woman agitated by the remark rose and retorted, "Young man, I'll have you know that those people that you referred to as the Yankees--that was the United States Army."
In the '80s, Allen lived in a cabin in Earlysville, Virginia, where he famously displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. Allen has long argued that the flag in his cabin was simply part of a collection. "I have flags from many countries, many states," Allen told me in a recent interview. "I have a Betsy Ross flag, the Virginia flag, the Mexican flag, the Portuguese flag, the Canadian flag, and the Confederate flag, and I just collect flags." Now that it is known that Allen displayed the Confederate flag on himself, his cars, and in his homes since the late '60s, the "flag collection" explanation, first peddled the year he ran for governor, seems hollow.
After all, according to his own campaign commercial, Allen seems not to have disavowed the flag so much as simply removed it from his wall and placed it on his bookshelf. And that's not the only evidence of his peculiar views of the Confederacy. In 1995, according to The Washington Post, Allen "referred to his neighboring state as 'the counties that call themselves West Virginia,' evoking the old argument that their decision to secede and stay with the Union was illegal." In 1995, 1996, and 1997, Allen issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrating April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. The document made no mention of slavery. His successor, Republican Governor James Gilmore, repudiated Allen's proclamation and wrote a more balanced version that denounced slavery. Under educational guidelines proposed by Allen's administration, which were revised after an uproar, students would have been taught that slaves were "settlers." As recently as 2000, Allen still publicly expressed support for the Confederate flag. A Post reporter accompanying Allen at an event in Virginia captured this scene: "When one man at the Pork Festival said to Allen, 'Long live the Confederate flag!' he replied, 'You got it!'"
n the right, a debate is now brewing about what Allen's four-decade embrace of the Confederate flag means for his presidential ambitions. Some are bothered by the revelations. At the influential conservative website Redstate.com, the blogger TheCollegian, who volunteered for Allen in 1993, writes, "George Allen did not simply adopt an affection for the South, but the South at a certain time: a time when it was fighting to keep slavery legal. Even this would be ok if he had some family tie to the region at that time, but he doesn't. I find that to be disturbing."
But there's a second view. It is best expressed to me by Stevens, now a consultant to John McCain. He argues strenuously that I should not write a piece about Allen and the Confederate flag. He says it would be unfair to Allen. But, when I explain Allen's record on the issue, he makes another argument that has nothing to do with fairness, and I figure out why he is so forceful. "Well, you also realize you're getting him votes for the primary, right?" Stevens says, alluding to key states in the South. He raises his voice to a shout: "You're getting him votes! Big time!"
Ryan Lizzais a senior editor at The New Republic. Edited by: Colonel_Reb
Here is an excerpt from an online article I came across yesterday. These people are so confident in their ignorant opinions that they'd never believe the truth. He is writing about the Dukes of Hazzard movie, of which I am not a fan, but still the hate of anything Confederate along with a good dose of arrogance, shines right through.
By Mark Zimmer-digitallyobsessed.com
"The updating doesn't work very well at all, except during the sequence when the Duke boys head into Atlanta and the Confederate flag atop the car evokes wildly varying responses both embracing and condemning the implicit racism and treason behind the flag. But the Dukes remain utterly clueless, shrugging off the opportunity to make something more out of this anachronistic device that couldn't very well have been left out of the picture. "
I could post this in immigration too, in fact, I think I will. Its from an ABC News article online today.
Aug 20, 2006 —By Jon Hurdle
RIVERSIDE, New Jersey (Reuters) - Opponents of a local law cracking down on illegal immigrants clashed on Sunday with residents chanting "go home" as both sides proclaimed their loyalty to the United States.
An estimated 300 to 400 people gathered outside the town hall to protest a recently passed ordinance that bans hiring or renting to illegal immigrants, who are accused of overburdening local services such as schools and hospitals without paying taxes.
The protesters, representing the largely Brazilian immigrant community of Riverside, were heckled by about 500 counter-demonstrators kept at bay by police on the other side of the town's main intersection.
As immigration supporters accused the town's council of racism, opponents chanted "USA, USA" and waved placards saying "Scram" and "Stop Illegal Immigration." A passing pickup truck drew loud cheers by flying a Confederate flag with the motto "The South Will Rise Again."
Riverside, with a population of about 8,000, is the latest community to pass local regulations on illegal immigration in the absence of a federal law that would address the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States.
I just posted this over at Caste Football as well. I thought it was harsh towards the South as usual, but I also thought Brian Ferguson could have done a better job explaining himself. I really hate it when these reporters are so investigative towards conservatives and are the most ignorant, innocent people in the world when they are reporting about liberal issues. What a double standard they portray! They never grill their own. Anyway, this wason the Kansas City Star website,a liberal rag.
Southern discomfort
By BILL REITER
The Kansas City Star
Deep South memories
OXFORD, Miss. | So this is what it’s come to for the Rebel.
He’s Brian Ferguson, a 23-year-old University of Mississippi graduate leading an effort to bring back the school’s banned mascot, Colonel Reb, and he’s driving down the streets of Oxford in his pickup truck, trying to tell you that he’s not interested in the Confederate flag.
He’s telling you all he wants is for the school to bring Colonel Reb back to football games. He’s telling you the South is facing a crisis of a fading culture, and the battle to save it has moved to the football field. He’s telling you this isn’t about the Confederate flag.
“We don’t support that — we support Colonel Reb coming back,” Ferguson says.
He’s forgetting there are six Confederate flags hanging from his rearview mirror.
You point them out. He pauses. He changes the subject. He pauses again. The truck hums on.
“I have it for my ancestors,” the Memphis native says, finally. “It represents where I came from. I have relatives who fought in the Civil War. It’s part of my history.”
Football is a part of his history, too — his, the history of those who support him, and that of those he’s up against.
That’s why this fight, over a mascot who looks like a white plantation owner, seems so important.
“To the South, football is the moral equivalent of the Civil War, where you can battle once again with the demons of an unhappy past,” said Char Miller, director of urban studies and a professor of history at Trinity College in San Antonio. “That’s why I love football in this area. There’s so many things playing out on the ground, and only a few of them have to do with football.”
It has to do with the SEC having won 15 national titles since 1934. It has to do with the South losing battles, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement, but dominating the North on the football field. It has to do with a region that sees the sport as its last chance to fight back.
It’s as Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Particularly when it comes to football in the South.
•••
This is the past: It is the University of Mississippi’s administration, in 2003, banning Colonel Reb from the sidelines at games. It is Ferguson, then a student, forming an organization to save the mascot. It is Ferguson and supporters passing out bumper stickers, talking to the press and creating a similar mascot named “Colonel Too.”
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Each game, someone dresses as the new mascot and sits in the stands. The administration doesn’t bend. Neither does Ferguson.
The past is 1997, when the administration came up with a unique ban for football games in an effort to curtail the number of Confederate flags flying in the stadium. “The way we dealt with it was to have a ban on all sticks in the crowd,” says Chancellor Robert Khayat, a former Ole Miss football great who went on to play in the NFL. “You can’t bring an umbrella, or a hot dog on a stick, or a flag on a stick.”
Though it diminishes the number of flags, it does not eliminate them.
The past is Oct. 1, 1962, the day James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, and the riots his enrollment sparked on campus. It is the federal troops and U.S. marshals brought in, and the violence that leaves two dead and dozens injured.
The past is the Confederate flag used as a symbol of opposition to a black man going to school here. The past is that flag flown for decades on the Grove, the school’s campus green, on game days.
The past is the Civil War. It is the entire student body and much of the faculty leaving school to fight in a company nicknamed the University Greys. It is none of them coming home. It is the university being turned into a hospital that serves Union and Confederate soldiers.
It is dying during Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, when the Greys help the Confederacy push as far into Union territory as it would ever go.
It is Sherman burning down the South but sparing this campus, in part, say school officials, because of the Union soldiers who were treated well here.
It is all of this, all across the South, now being played out on football fields from Greenville, Miss., to Greensboro, N.C. It is Bear Bryant leading Alabama to six of the school’s 12 national titles; it is thousands of Auburn fans lining Donahue Drive on game day; it is the pride of LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and, of course, Ole Miss.
“There’s a sense in the South that they have experienced something no other part of the country has experienced in terms of loss,” Miller said. “Oddly, it has been attached to football.”
Every Saturday, another shot at victory.
“There’s a deep, emotional, historical connection with the military here, with combat, with young Southern men wanting to serve,” said Jeffrey Alford, the associate vice chancellor for university relations. “It’s that deep-rooted tradition that attracts young boys in the South to play football.
“And its heart and soul is here in Mississippi.”
The past is people like Ferguson fearing an end to those traditions. It is also people like Warner Alford — former football great, assistant coach and athletic director, a man who has seen the Confederate flag waved his whole life.
It is Warner Alford wishing people could learn to let go, just as he has.
•••
The evolution of Warner Alford starts in the fall of 1956. He is a 6-foot, 175-pound freshman from McComb, Miss., recruited to play center and linebacker. He has grown up in segregated schools. There are no black people, not one, attending the university during his time there.
He does not think about these things.
Not about segregation, or a sense of tradition in jeopardy, or a feeling of any kind about the Confederate flag. It’s as common and unimportant as seeing the score on the scoreboard, or cheerleaders cheering.
“I didn’t even think about it when it was here,” he says.
He thought about football. He played the game, moving to guard on one side of the ball and linebacker on the other. He was co-captain of the Rebels’ 1960 national championship team.
“It was a good time,” he says. “We won a lot of football games.”
And that was it: He left college and ventured into the real world. He went home and helped run his family’s retail department store. And then football, of all things, forced him to pay attention.
“I was at a game in Jackson,” he says. “Ole Miss versus Kentucky, and the governor came into the stadium.”
The crowd erupted. Confederate flags flew. Gov. Ross Barnett’s voice spilled from the speakers. James Meredith wanted to enroll in school, and the governor vowed to take a stand against the black student.
“I love Mississippi!” Barnett told the crowd. “I love her people [and] our customs! I love and respect our heritage!”
The crowd cheered frantically, and Alford turned to his wife: “This is not a pretty sight,” he remembers saying.
That started it, that moment altering the way a man can see the world. Then it was 1971, and Alford came back to Oxford as an assistant football coach. He was there when Ben Williams became the school’s first black player. He was there in 1972, when Pete Robertson and Gary Turner made it three black football players.
“My evolution was coaching and recruiting our black athletes,” he says. “I knew them one-on-one, personally. I watched them succeed, watched them graduate. I know their children now.”
Watch closely. Because this is as much about how a state changes as it is about how a man does. It is how the past connects to today. It is why football matters. It is Alford, and many men like him, thinking about things in a way they never had before.
Things like the Confederate flag.
“I said (to our black players), if it’s a problem for you,” Alford said, “it’s a problem for me.”
Yes, some of those black athletes said, the rebel flag is a problem. Can you see Alford changing? Because a few year later, as the athletic director, he hires Ken Gibson to be the track coach. Gibson will be the first black man to ever lead an Ole Miss team, and one of the first black coaches in the SEC.
And then it is 1983, and Alford stands at a news conference with Chancellor Porter Fortune Jr. They announce the Confederate flag is no longer an official symbol of the university.
“That was a first step,” Alford said. “It was not a popular decision.”
This is how a man changes, and how men like him, in changing, transform their little part of the world.
The 18-year-old boy who arrived in 1956 wouldn’t have given a second thought about that rebel flag. The 68-year-old man Alford is today can’t stand the sight of it.
“The odd thing about the Confederate flag was, it was mainly only at football games,” says Alford, who’s now the executive director of the university’s alumni association. “Not to baseball games, not to basketball. Confederate flags only came to football games.”
Alford does not say the flag is necessarily racist. He does not say those who wave it are racists. He simply thinks people should let go, just as he has.
•••
Jerry Walker wishes he could let it go. He truly does.
But there are six Walkers buried 50 miles from his little gas station west of Oxford, all casualties of the Civil War. When he talks about them, his voice rises as if he’s pleading. He stares out with the eyes of a man used to being judged.
“I have ancestors that were in the Civil War,” the 51-year-old says passionately. “It’s about telling a guy he has to forget his past and can’t mention it. My people were part of it. Right or wrong. My people were part of it, as were all the people of the South.”
Hundreds of Confederate flags sit around him. They’re for sale, ranging from $1.75 for the tiny, hand-held variety to $15.95 for bigger ones. Dozens of football mementos hang around him. Ole Miss schedules. Signed footballs. Pictures of Ole Miss greats stretching back to the 1959 season.
The football collection and Confederate paraphernalia, all cramming this rundown gas station, seem as naturally linked as baseball and beer, as hockey and ice.
Walker is still talking, and Don Mills is standing next to him, nodding with approval. He’s built like a 53-year-old linebacker and is wearing a bandana dotted with dozens of Confederate flags. He’s an Oxford police officer.
“That’s what separated us from the North, this Mason-Dixon line,” Walker says. “It’s in your heart. They can’t take what you have in the past, right or wrong, sad or bad. You can’t change that. It still happened.”
Two black men walk inside the gas station. The four of them greet each other pleasantly.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Real good.”
Someone tells a joke, and they all laugh, the two black men, the white man wearing the Confederate bandana, the white man whose relatives are buried nearby.
The men leave, and Walker picks up where he left off.
Colonel Reb and the Confederate flag are “the traditions of the school,” he says. “It’s the school’s heritage, team spirit.”
“I’m not prejudice,” Mills chimes in. “I treat everyone the same … (but) I think if you keep giving a little piece at a time, you’ll end up with something totally different.”
Brian Ferguson’s name comes up.
“Is he the guy with the other Colonel Reb?” Mills asks.
“Yep, that’s him,” Walker says.
“He’s always in the stands.”
“Yep, he’s done a great job.”
•••
Standing inside the Grove, Ferguson sees so much: The history of his school. Saturdays overflowing with 100,000 football fans. The Walk of Champions — the sidewalk in the Grove players march through on their way to the stadium.
He sees much of that history in jeopardy.
“By taking away Colonel Reb, you hollowed out the university,” he says.
He frowns, caught between anger and sadness. What, he wonders, will they remove next? The term “Ole Miss,” because it’s an old moniker for a plantation owner’s mistress? Or the word “Rebels” because of its link to the Confederacy and, by connection, to slavery?
“It’s something we’ve feared for a long time,” Ferguson says. “If they continue to take away the traditions, we’ll end up as Bland University.”
For Ferguson and those like him, this isn’t about a mascot. It’s about an avalanche of political correctness overwhelming what it means to be Southern. It’s about tradition. It’s about not giving in.
“People like the athletic director and chancellor, in many people’s eyes, have lost a little bit of their connectives of this whole concept,” says Charles Ross, director of African-American studies at the university and author of a book on the reintegration of the NFL. “Football games take this notion of this lost cause, and this nobleness of the Civil War.”
It is a battle played out in bars and restaurants, from the old Taylor Grocery south of town where folks eat catfish and talk sports, to the Grove on game days, to the small towns that make up Mississippi.
“We’re winning the battle,” Ferguson says. “But when we get him back on the field, we’ll have won the war.”
The chancellor says that will not happen. Ferguson sees it differently. Get a new chancellor or athletic director, he points out, and things could change.
“When it comes back to it,” Ferguson says, “the only people that want Colonel Reb gone are the chancellor and the athletic director.”
•••
That’s not quite true.
People say many things. They get emotional talking about Ole Miss, football and a tradition steeped in rebellion. They feel many different things but seem to communicate the same way, with the painful pauses of those who assume they will be misunderstood.
This is what they say:
Chancellor Khayat, who received death threats after the stick ban. He is white: “Our students and our alumni realized it was not in the best interest of the university to continue that rigid position of we’re not going to give up this flag. It became uncool, in our students’ terminology, to wave the flag.”
Larry Happs, 62, who is white and lives outside Oxford: “Folks still want it, but the chancellor and the higher men said no. They still get them on the campus and at the ballgames, but it’s not allowed.”
Reshika Coleman, 21, a senior at the university who is black: “I don’t have a problem with (the Confederate flag) … I would say it’s not good that we don’t have a mascot.”
Brock Harrington, an 18-year-old sophomore who is white: “People have always looked down on the South and haven’t understood us. You don’t have to come here if it offends you.”
Ross, the director of African-American studies, who is black and has lived in the South for 11 years: “At football game tailgating, I’ve got to tell you: I’ve never experienced that level of Confederate paraphernalia. It is intimidating, psychologically, particularly for African Americans. And yet they’re inviting you over for chicken, and they’re so inviting. So I don’t know. Maybe it’s a Southern thing, maybe I don’t understand it, maybe I’m too sensitive.”
Adam Jones, an Ole Miss alum whose dad played football for the Rebels. Jones is white: “The flag and Colonel Reb, let’s just say this: The people it was a big deal to were in the minority. They want to see the university as a positive, and anything that could hold the university back, they oppose.”
Jon Rawl, an alum, radio show host and founder of Y’All, a magazine for Southern people, on opposition to Colonel Reb and the Confederate flag. Rawl is white: “I think it’s silly, absolutely silly … the flag is beloved… You’re going to see, in the not-too-distant future, the revival of a lot of these things.”
Khayat: “I don’t see how people can argue the flag should be a symbol of this university, given the negative light of the flag today.”
Jill Miley, a 25-year-old Ole Miss grad and local bartender who is white: “I love tradition. It goes hand-in-hand with SEC football. I don’t like the fact it offends people. It’s such a touchy issue. I wish we could meet in the middle, but I don’t know if the university can. I’m glad they took the Confederate flag away, but I miss the Colonel. It just seems like tradition is slipping away a little bit.”
Khayat: “You’d do a good thing to tell people that the Confederate flag is no longer associated with the university. Truth is a powerful thing … People think we’re down here hanging black folks by their toes.”
•••
The wind blows through the cemetery. It is the first cool breeze of the 100-degree day. It makes you smile as you walk across the charred grass.
The granite grave marker juts out of the grass. Flowers sit at its base.
The block letters on the 10-foot marker read: “Here rest more than seven hundred soldiers who died on the campus of the University of Mississippi when the buildings were used as a war hospital, 1862-1865; Most of them Confederate, wounded at Shiloh; A few federals of Grant’s army; A few Confederates of Forrest’s cavalry; Even their names, save these, known but to God.”
There are about 124 names. Union and Confederate soldiers buried together in a mass grave not far from the school’s football stadium.
“The cemetery is a history lesson,” Ferguson says. “There have been a lot of hardships, a lot of things we look at now and view as something we wish had never happened. But at the same time, we have to understand the situation. You have people on both sides of the fight.”
“What’s buried there is, they’re all Americans,” Alford says. “Just different sides of an issue. When you think about it, they were fighting each other and they were buried together. It’s kind of an emotional thought, to tell you the truth.”
Four-hundred yards away, the Mississippi Rebels football team is practicing. You hear a coach yelling. You see young men — white and black — playing together.
You take a moment and watch the game.
Today on ESPN Gameday in Columbia, South Carolina, there are several S.C. Secession flags as well as Confederate Battle flags being flown behind the stage! Turn it on now and you will see them. This will be on throughout the day at different times.
Hi Colonel Reb! Great posts
I have a Battle Flag proudly festooning my den. There's a C-Flag hanging in front of "Apehangers" biker bar in southern Maryland on U.S. 301. I salute it whenever I drive down that way
It's really a treat to see one displayed north of the Potomac River
Some news...
<DIV>Reports are in from Franklin, Tennessee this evening indicating a good showing and solid support fromthose who turned out to "March For Our Father's Flag".</DIV>
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<DIV>The Commander-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Christopher M. Sullivan reports that about 200 marchers left historic Winstead Hill,located south of the Carter House on Columbia Avenue; the vantage point from which General John Bell Hood observed his advancing Confederate troops as they marched toward Franklin. Another 30 to 40 marchers joined in during the 2.4 mile trek to the Franklin Square where they met a crowd of Confederate Flag supporters. In all, estimates indicate around 300 attended the event at the Squarewhere the crowd encircled the Confederate Monument displaying hundreds of Confederate Flags.</DIV>
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<DIV>Remarks were shared by Commander-in-Chief Christopher M. Sullivan and Tennessee Division Commander, Michael R. Bradley followed by a ceremony and the lighting of around 10,000 candles, representing those killed at the battle of Franklin.</DIV>
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<DIV>Check the General HQ's Web site for photos of the march in the coming days.</DIV>
An article entitled "Anti-Racists Implicated In Yet Another Murder" Basically it appears that a man was murdered for wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt.
http://www.overthrow.com/lsn/news.asp?articleID=10180
An arrest has been made in a Confederate flag murder case.
http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art...20070211/NEWS/ 702110393/1004/BUSINESS
Sickening story. I've never heard of this gang, but it sounds like it needs cleaning out. You really do take your life into your hands when you do anything different these days.
Another politician complaining about the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag has become a symbol of the struggle against the repression of the New World Order. Ironically, if the CSA had won and become independent they would likely have fallen under Zionist domination but in defeat arose a resistance that though not completely successful at throwing off the Zionist yoke has allowed the USA to maintain far more freedom than many European countries (i.e. freedom of speech). The New World Order crowd hates the symbols of the CSA and its people for they (along with other White nations’ symbols who have opposed the New World Order) stand as a reminder that opposition to the New World Order is possible.
http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/to...tory_050165921 .html
Spurrier wants S.C. statue flag gone.
Pictures courtesy of myself.
Read more here.
http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/6684398
from-hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com
<H3>April 13, 2007</H3>
<H1>More On Rudy's Federalism Dodge</H1>
Andrew Sullivan implies that we take issue with federalism. Certainly not. There are certainly a great many questions, most of them cultural and provincial, that are best decided by state and local governments. And Rudy Giuliani might even be correct, in an ultimate sense, that the topics he’s been confronted with are best deliberated and adjudicated by state legislatures.
We’re a politics blog, and so we’re making a political point.
Giuliani is also deliberately using federalism as a cover to avoid having to reveal his personal opinion about topics of longstanding cultural controversy.
It’s one thing to say that the topics of slavery apologies, or gun control, or even abortion, are best handled stateside. But saying so does not magically obliterate a presidential candidate’s duty to explain why said issue is best grappled with by the states, and most importantly it is no excuse whatsoever for the candidate not to give his personal opinion. Personal sentiments are vital clues to character. And Rudy’s candidacy is predicated on characterological attributes: his force of will, his personal tolerance, his candor, his strength of convinction, and his leadership abilities.
By scooping up so many issues into his state right’s satchel, Giuliani dodges his responsibility as a presidential candidate to explain to the electorate why he believes that the right to abortion is not absolute, or why he believes that states can fly the Confederate Flag, or whether he believes that, as abhorrent a symbol as that flag may have become, states certainly have the “right” to fly it. That last example is instructive. No one we know of has ever asserted that Congress should ban the Confederate Flag. It is a dodge – a plain dodge – to simply say that it’s a state’s rights issue. No one disputes that. Rudy has decided he does not need to tell Alabamans whether he personally endorses the idea.
In 2000, John McCain was asked about the flag in South Carolina. In a thin voice, he proceeded to tell reporters that it was a state issue and he wouldn’t get involved. McCain now admits that he was intellectually dishonest. There was never any doubt that South Carolina had the right to fly the flag, but by omitting his personal opinion, McCain avoid the political consequences of acknowledging that the flag evoked very painful and even hurtful feelings in black South Carolinians.
Give Mitt Romney credit. In 2002, he told Massachusetts residents that while he personally was pro-life, but he said he recognized that both the law and the state’s cultural habits would not countenance any significant changes to abortion law. (Disregard, for the sake of this argument, anything else you’ve read about Romney and abortion).
By not saying something like
<BLOCKQUOTE>I think the flag is divisive, and I don’t like it. But Alabamans can do what they want.</BLOCKQUOTE>
And instead saying only “Alabama should do what it wants,” Giuliani implies that each side’s arguments have equal merit – which, in an of itself, is a moral judgment whether Giuliani realizes it or not. [MARC AMBINDER]
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Yeah, this is what's really getting to me about Rudy. I originally supported the guy because of all those character traits he projected. But now, I see he doesn't have vision or moral fiber. You can't run your entire platform on cleaning up after 9/11. He provided a great service then, but if his entire candicacy is running on the conviction that arose out of 9/11 that we need to "fight" the terrorists, then it's not enough for me. What George Bush has neglected to realize during his entire presidency is that in addition to mismanaging a war that has been his ENTIRE focus, he is also running a country (or failing to).
C'mon Rudy, REALLY stick to your convictions, don't just pretend to when you have no defense 'cause it's on youtube for all to see. EXPLAIN your convictions. Otherwise, it's gonna sound like pandering and hollowness. Force of personality means nothing if there's no inner moral compass there. Force of personality means nothing if it's just used to buck people up in a crisis or to assert who's boss. You're good in a crisis BECAUSE you like to be boss. But that's NOT ENOUGH. Show us there is.
And learn some facts about world politics and policy. You're very thin/weak on those, and sorry, travelling to 40 countries does not make you an expert.
An indication of a good leader is somebody who is able to MANAGE people (which is done with diplomacy both political and interpersonal), not just intimidate them into submission or ignore them if they don't agree with you. The world hates us. We need to realize that we exist within the world context. I don't think you do. It's a failing of many americans, and an understandable one given our geographical isolation, but eventually that bubble is going to burst. That's what 9/11 should have told us. But it didn't. I don't want another 9/11. I'm afraid, with the direction George Bush has taken, we will.
But maybe that's what you want. After all, you are so good in a crisis. And that's what I'm afraid of. Convince me I'm wrong. For a start, you can stop being vague about your positions. Put meat behind the words.Stand behind all of them, not just the ones you can't back out of because they've been captured on video.
politicalangst | 04.13.07 09:51 AM
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Are you joking by calling Rudy a strong leader. Remember Bernie Kerik? Remember how he ignored fire fighters during WTC cleanup process? Now its reported that Rudy is being advised on Iraq by none other than John Bolton who was even ignored by Bush.
By the way a leader leads from the front by expressing personal opinion, he does not hide behind "state issue" facade.
Giving Romney the credit for abortion stance is another joke. The flip-flopper has changed his positions so many times that he is more than mutiple choice Mitt. He was telling one thing to pro-choice groups and another thing to anti-choice groups. None of the statements uttered by Mitt have any cerdibility.
me | 04.13.07 09:54 AM
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I understand Ambinder's point, but I'm still uncomfortable with the fact that we expect political candidates to pass moral judgment on everything under the sun, regardless of whether the issue is something that they would even have any purview over in office.
"What do you think of people who fly the Confederate flag?" "Do you think Don Imus should be fired from his job?" These questions are asked as a way of playing "gotcha", and don't have much to do with what a president would do in office. How far do we go with this? Should we ask every presidential candidate to explain in detail what his or her religious beliefs are?
If you don't think an issue should be handled by the federal government, then I don't see why you should be asked to comment on how you would deal with the issue if you *did* think it should be handled by the federal government. It's as if we're asking the federal government to pass moral judgment on every possible activity in the country, whether they regulate it or not.
Chris S. | 04.13.07 10:17 AM
The CBF is the universal emblem of freedom. Here's a Cuban gentleman who understands it, commenting on the ruckus that's been idiotically kicked up by the jackasses of PC in Florida over the flag's use at Sons of Confederate Veterans meetings. Interestingly, he hints that Cuba may not be a hellhole of thralldom much longer. From SHNV:
Re: The Confederate Flag Causes Controversy at the Golden Corral
<DIV>From: libertyman50@bellsouth.net
To: tara.herrschaft@wctv.tv</DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/10567001.html</DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>Ms. Herrschaft:
First of all I wish to let you know that I am originally from Cuba where there has not been any type of freedom of speech for about four decades although a change will take place soon.
Having stated the above, I find the demand of the taking down of the Confederate flag as outrageous and despicable. The meeting that was held by the Sons Of Confederate Veterans was apparently private. They had rented a room in the restaurant to hold their meeting.
The Sons Of Confederate Veterans is an association of the descendants of those who fought along side the Confederacy in the War Of Northern Aggression.
They had every right to show their flag as it has to do with heritage and not hate. You have other groups showing their flags such as those from other Latin American countries at heritage functions. No one objects to the showing of those flags. Then we have this situation where someone is offended? Talk about political correctness! The person in question could have walked out of the restaurant and could have gone elsewhere instead of raising all this unwarranted commotion.
During the war, Cubans fought along side the Confederacy. See Cubans In The Confederacy by Philip Thomas Tucker in Amazon books. See also Hispanic Confederates at www.confederatehispanics.com
This is again an attempt on the part of the politically correct crowd trying to infringe on the first amendment rights of a particular group. The individual in question should be ASHAMED OF HIMSELF ASUMMING OF COURSE THE PERSON UNDERSTANDS THE DEFINITION.
I came over from Cuba due to political repression WITH NO FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
If the person does not like the fact that freedom of speech applies to all groups then that person should go elsewhere even leaving the United States or at least the South. One idea would be for this person to go to Cuba and see if he likes not having any freedom. He has absolutely no right to infringe on the rights of others. In my opinion I find bigotry and racism hideous and despicable no matter from where or who it comes from.
Enough with Southern bashing! Southerners are one of the most decent people I have ever met and that is why I have many good Southern friends. I very much enjoy southern culture. </DIV>
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<DIV>Sincerely, </DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>Al Gutierrez
Titusville, Fl.</DIV>Edited by: Nelson
Promote the NationalisTimes—order and deploy extra copies—bring all whom you know into the Forum! Fresh opportunities arise constantly. ANU.ORG is THE number one news page of them all. \"JUST DO IT”...
An article entitled "Communist Student at SIU, Brandon Allen, attacks Southern Heritage"
To some, it represents a region, an era or a heritage. But to others, it symbolizes an attitude.
To Brandon Allen, the Confederate flag is more than just a piece of cloth.
Allen, an Undergraduate Student Government senator representing Brush Towers, has written a USG resolution calling for the university to ban non-faculty employees from wearing clothing that depicts the flag.
Allen said he was offended when he noticed maintenance workers in a university vehicle wearing shirts and bandanas emblazoned with the flag. He said he talked to other students and discovered many were upset after witnessing similar occurrences. Allen said he and other students viewed the flag as a symbol of hate, racism and white supremacy.
Senators on the Undergraduate Student Government voted on Allen’s resolution Wednesday evening. It did not pass
http://cofcc.org/?p=861
These attack on the Confederate flag and other symbols of the White race are part of the oppression of the White race. The man called Martin Luther King, Jr., the great oppressor, though he was little more than a slave to his masters, the Jews and their lackeys!
The nonwhites attack and destroy symbols and artifacts that the White race built and cherished for generation and far into prehistory in many cases. These are the symbols of our race and freedom. The nonwhites fear these symbols and call them by disparaging names for in their heart of hearts they know that they are tyrants and if the Whites become free all that the nonwhites stole, including the lands, must be returned and the nonwhites must answer for their numerous crimes against the White race and the nonwhites must return to their true homelands and leave their lives of leisure of living off the Whites.
An article entitled "Rally ‘Round the Flag"
In the carnage and chaos of battle a good soldier always knew that the guiding principle was to rally around the standards or the colors of his unit. For the Romans it was the eagle, for the patriots from Lexington to Yorktown it was the stars and stripes, and for us today it is the Stars and Bars of the Old Confederacy as our enemies circle around us like wolves. As the season of white guilt approaches and our enemies equivalent of All Saints Day (not that Martin Luther King even approached saintliness in character or conduct) will soon be upon us they are using this event in correlation with the South Carolina primary to attack the Confederate flag. Seeing that the supposed conservatives in the Republican Party are of no help in this fight, it is up to the good people of South Carolina and their comrades around the country to denounce the efforts of the elites, their rabble of ethnic cohorts, and anyone else who attacks the hallowed heritage of our ancestors. The cause for which they fought, and indeed we still do today, is a noble cause in who’s service we will not back down or surrender.
It was the treason of the country club Republicans such as Richard Quinn that saw the Confederate flag cause betrayed the last time the flag fight was front in center in South Carolina. Many backers of the fight were satisfied with the compromise and believed that the Confederate flag was safe on the Statehouse grounds and that the jackals who opposed us would have be appeased. Instead the sharks smelled blood and are only invigorated all the more to remove the Confederate flag from public view in any official capacity. That any one who dared call themself a South Carolinian or a Southerner and sanction such an outrage only reminds us that we must fight back all the harder or the public display of the Confederate flag will be a thing of the past. This can not, must not, and shall not come to pass if the members of this organization have our say in the outcome. I urge all our members to bring this up in debates, radio show call ins, newspaper editorials, and any public forum that will allow you to let your voice be heard on this matter.
We must never allow the controlled media and education system to brainwash anyone into thinking that we have anything less the proudest heritage known to man. The SPLC, NAACP, and all the other alphabet soup organizations are determined to purge any pride in Southern and European-American history from our collective conscience for all time. Whether it is guilt or greed that motivates our enemies they are attacking the most fundamental aspects of our lives and we ought to respond with a vigor and righteous fury as we resist by all honorable means. The Confederate flag is much more then a symbol of the noble cause that was the Confederacy. It is the symbol of all of us who have struggled since 1954 to fight back against the gradual marginalizing of white Christian thought and culture. Let us recapture the spirit of all who went before us and the essence of the freedom loving blood that flows within us as we stand up in the defense of Dixie, America, and European-Americans worldwide.
http://cofcc.org/?p=1035