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neoconfederates

Friday 3 February 2012

Throughout American history, South Carolinians have led the fight to preserve and defend slavery, white supremacy, racial segregation, and race fear. South Carolina is the soul of the Confederacy. It is safe to say that South Carolina gave birth to Dixie, so much so that it is a matter of pride to many South Carolinians that their state was the first to secede from the Union and that Citadel cadets fired the first shot of the Civil War. South Carolina’s singular role in United States history is as a conduit for the growth of slavery. Between 1700 and 1775, forty percent of all enslaved blacks came to America through the state. As Ellis Island in New York was the first stop for many Europeans willingly entering the New World, Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, was the first stop for many Africans who were brought here against their will. South Carolina had the highest percentage of slaveholders in the nation. In 1860 almost half (45.8 percent) of all white families in South Carolina held enslaved Africans. The Confederate flag represents the glorification of that history. The flag represents slavery, racial oppression and a deep-seated belief in the very existence and rightness of the Confederacy. The flag symbolizes a privileged, landed class, white supremacy and patriarchy. Those who fought and died under the Confederate flag were willing to die for the expansion of slavery. This, not some vision of mint juleps and ladies in ringlets and lace, is the “heritage” that modern Confederates defend when they champion this flag. For most Americans, let alone most African Americans, the men who died under the Confederate battle flag were not heroes; they were traitors to the fundamental notion of human freedom. Kevin Alexander Gray

Sunday 25 November 2007

There is another, far more common type of beast. I call this other kind “Rabid Lemmings” and the name speaks for itself. Angry, vicious, narrowminded and dogmatic, these are the culture warriors who are hell-bent to stampede off a cliff, and take America with them. Just like the great majority of Confederate troops, who fought and died valorously, gloriously for a thin veneer of aristocratic slave-owners that treated them like dirt, today’s lemmings will do anything, believe anything, for the very same criminal gang that is getting super-rich at their expense, not through enterprise or capitalism but the far older process of parisitism. David Brin

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