Of course whitewashing the Confederacy is bad. Just saying this is not an unexpected outcome in America today.
The conservative right is perfectly capable of whitewashing history to suit their ideology and world view, it takes a truly blinkered lack of self-awareness to pretend otherwise.
The Atlantic nails it.
The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was white supremacy. This claim is not the result of revisionism. It does not require reading between the lines. It is the plain meaning of the words of those who bore the Confederate flag across history. These words must never be forgotten. Over the next few months the word “heritage” will be repeatedly invoked. It would be derelict to not examine the exact contents of that heritage.
The danger is putting the infrastructure of censorship in place, and normalising it to the point people self-censor (as I witnessed in the Roof thread), as they believe the act of viewing an icon or flag is dangerous.
No, its the use of a flag or icon. Wearing or flying a confederate flag, wrong (and omg, on a state capitol? blimey) Viewing a picture of criminal wearing a flag, or media using the flag in a historical context, entirely acceptable and within context.
I can understand removing the flag from Government Buildings and such.
But games about the Civil War?
Apple jumped so high in reaction I’m actually surprised. I thought Apple did what Apple generally does and screw anyone’s opinion.
I’ve only heard reactions for games. Board and Video games both it seems. I’ll have to skim this thread and be amazed, lol.
Yeah, the reaction is over the top, but it makes at least a little sense when you think about companies being risk-averse. Getting caught in a negative PR cycle is worse than whatever extra sales they may otherwise generate, so they just pull the potentially offending products and probably start to loosen up with their policy as they get a better idea of what the public will tolerate.
Just give it 48 hours and most of them will come to their senses. This first wave is a junior line-level worker who got the memo “PULL EVERYTHING WITH A CONFEDERATE FLAG” and just did his/her job. Now comes the (rightful) backlash and someone will come in to scrutinize some of the decisions and it’ll get fixed.
They were just abused by Taylor Swift, that’ll make anyone a little sensitive.
Eh, we could play this game all day with direct quotes from Lincoln. Whether he was being politically expedient or not (hey, just like Obama!), trying to reduce history to a blog post of quotes from one side is kind of ridiculous and anti-educational, which again goes back to the recent internal struggle on the left (i.e. identity politics) between principles and end results.
If the South did not have slavery, or alternately had the North not abolished slavery, would there have been a civil war at all? I think not. You can blame the economic & political imbalance that slavery caused as the pragmatic root cause of the conflict but it’s still ultimately about slavery, an institution that the rest of the western world had done away with on moral grounds many decades prior.
The North had not abolished slavery. Lincoln didn’t do it because he was afraid of losing the Union border states.
You can blame the economic & political imbalance that slavery caused as the pragmatic root cause of the conflict but it’s still ultimately about slavery
Ultimately I’m okay with this simplification, though The Atlantic muddles things up by saying it was about “white supremacy,” which does include slavery but is usually a wider term that includes more casual racism and oppression.
…an institution that the rest of the western world had done away with on moral grounds many decades prior.
Peacefully. :-\
Not blaming anyone or saying it shouldn’t have happened. Just such a waste of life.
In many situations, I’m all for a more nuanced look at the issues. In this case, I’m fine with simplifying the matter. The Civil War was about slavery. You can dig deeper into States rights, economics, foreign interests, voting, and a myriad of other points because yes, it was complicated, (most frontline soldiers in the Confederate Army did not, and could not own a slave) but Civil War revisionism is rampant amongst many defenders of The Southern Cross. Let’s keep it simple for the goofballs that insist on saying the war wasn’t at the core of the conflict for the Confederacy.
Edit: To be clear I’m referring to defenders of the flag that specifically go with the “it’s just a flag” and the “it’s part of my proud southern heritage” arguments. Those may the points they go with, but they’re either ignorant, stubborn, or just plain lying when they say that flag shouldn’t be deeply offensive to people.
I disagree the northen states had all abolished slavery, in most cases 60 years before.
Not blaming anyone or saying it shouldn’t have happened. Just such a waste of life.
Quite; the south fought a futile war from a morally indefensible position. They could have simply accepted that slavery would be progressively abolished.
Like I said, ultimately I’m fine with this. (My favorite line is Lisa Simpson wearily telling Apu to “just say slavery” if it comes up on his citizenship application. :) But we’re all sophisticated here. No need to say “this blogger nails it!” about a topic that people have dedicated their lives to studying.
I disagree with this statement as well!
Quite; the south fought a futile war from a morally indefensible position. They could have simply accepted that slavery would be progressively abolished.
The necessity, timeline, and blame for the war (and war in general) is a separate topic than the origins of the Confederacy and their damned flag. Since it’s easy to get sidetracked on endless tangents in P&R, I’m just going to drop it.
I live in one of the few liberal bastions of Dallas and within 6 blocks of my house are 2 elementary schools: Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. I’m grabbing my popcorn as the neighborhood goes into conniptions this week with petitions to change the names and the anti-petition crowd vehemently protesting.
Flying the Confederate flag over a statehouse is obviously wrong, I haven’t personally met anyone who disagrees with that - and anyone who displays it when it offends a ton of people is a dipshit.
But Apple’s ham-handed approach and the attempted removal of school names are really bad precedents - and it is a dangerous slippery slope. I’ve got a serious issue with Apple removing historical wargames where the flag is not being glorified at all. It’s history. It happened. That ain’t gonna change. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and so forth.
And nobody’s sticking up for these school names because southern heritage, they’re sticking up for them because that’s what they’ve been named for 85 years and generations of kids have gone to school there. And Robert E. Lee has generally been respected by everyone - there are nuances to anybody you want to honor.
Next thing you know the name Washington will be verboten due to the association with slavery and every school will be named Mother Teresa High. Until public opinion changes and everyone has a problem with her.
Well here we agree. It has historical context in THE CIVIL FUCKING WAR. This is a perfect example of overreaction to something.
Keep religion out of our schools! :)
You can’t read history backwards. Nothing was certain in 1861, and South had every chance to win the war. It did not, but it could have and nearly did on several occasions. I would also caution against injecting modern morality into the conflict. Lincoln didn’t go to war to free the slaves, he was trying to preserve the Union. Period letters make this clear, from Lincoln all the way down to the lowest levels of the US Army loyalist were fighting for Union. This was a deeply racist society, and that was true north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. Northerners viewed African-Americans in the same light that Southerners did, they thought African-Americans were intrinsically inferior. While northerners were opposed to the extension of slavery (they believed their free labor system was morally superior) and they were not in favor of ending it. Ending it, they worried, would result in a mass migration of former slaves into the North. Which was an unthinkable horror. Indeed, when it came, emancipation was seen in strictly utilitarian terms. Lincoln hopped that it would damage the Confederate war effort, which it did.
It was only after the war that the conflict became a noble effort to free the slave. This was a purely revisionist effort to give the conflict meaning. In 1861 only a small portion of society believed in ending slavery, and they were generally derided as unhinged radicals.
As a sidenote, there are many things to take issue with in the film Gettysburg. The beards are famously bad, but I would point to Sergeant Kilrain’s monologue on tolerance and understanding. The Irish community was not known for its high minded attitudes on slavery. And as an Irishman he would have seen ex-slaves as a threat to his post-war livelihood.
Took less than 48 hours:
Update: Apple later confirmed to TechCrunch that games featuring the flag for educational or historical purposes will survive today’s announced culling.
Nah, Lincoln had deep abolitionist roots but knew that wouldnt get him elected. Similar to how Obama was probably in favor of gay marriage early on but knew it would hurt him with the electorate.
The bottomline was that everything that could be comprised on in the US between the North and the South was, except slavely. Slavely was the root cause. And although northerns were racist, those state had banned it. Otherwise The Dredd Scott case would never have been an issue.
Lets face it, the south was the bad guy, just like the Nazis.
Have you ever read Christopher Hitchens take on Mother Teresa? Makes a great case for the woman being a sociopath.