With everything going on people are complaining about having the Confederate flag scrubbed of the face of the Earth. I feel like people should be able to fly that flag, it has deep roots in culture to this country, especially to the south, and people's ancestors died under fighting for their beliefs. Now I'm not saying I agree with slavery, but there was more to the civil war than just that. If people want the Confederate flag gone because of the negative history associated with it, shouldn't we just remove every flag then? Each flag has it's own culture and history associated with it whether it be good or bad, so why should one flag be banned (or whatever they want) because of the history of it and the fact that some crazies hijacked it. Am I wrong for thinking this? Am I crazy?
As someone who lives in the South, specifically Tennessee, all I can say is that in certain places it's not as common to see the Stars and Bars as one would think. The Deep South are the ones who hang on to "Southern heritage", Mississippi especially (of course, the state that didn't abolish slavery until 2013). However, I can't really say much on the matter; my ancestors (to my knowledge) took no part in the Civil War and got here somewhere around the time Reconstruction ended. My state is also home to five public statues dedicated to one Nathan Bedford Forrest, who as we know was the first bigwig of the KKK. Fucking Pulaski, Tennessee, man.
I would say that people should be allowed to fly the flag, mostly because it's a first amendment right. It was the flag of the Tennessee Army, the ensign of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederate naval jack, and so many more things; it's also a symbol of pride. Southern pride by and large is probably about as taboo as white pride; the "white race" has done too much wrong to be proud of their heritage, and the South isn't allowed to be proud simply because their rebellion failed. You can see the pattern in this: the people that flew the flag failed, so no one's allowed to fly it without offending people. We see this in Germany (for obvious reasons), not just with the flag of the Third Reich, but also with the flag of the German Empire from World War I.
A flag on its own cannot be bigoted. While those 11 states that flew the bonnie blue flag that bears a single star did in fact explicitly state that among their intentions was to preserve slavery, we have to remember that it was people who wanted that rebellion. Just like people wanted the Jews in Europe exterminated, people that enslaved other people, and it was a person who killed those 9 black people with the intention of starting a race war. Take these people away, the flag no longer has any meaning outside of what is said in history texts. If Southerners can't fly the Stars and Bars for their heritage, no one can fly any sort of flag for their heritage, because every single country in this world that proudly flies their flag has been responsible for some pretty questionable shit.
