Hate Not Heritage

Symbols

It is time, that we as Americans recognized a simple truth - there is nothing honorable about the Confederate Flag.  It is a symbol no less polarizing or horrifying than the Nazi Flag.  And in saying this, I am not pulling the Nazi card, where people today conflate a relatively minor atrocity (or something they disagree with) with Nazi Germany.

I have stated this as a point of actual, on par, comparison.  (Yes, more people died during World War Two, but how many millions died under the yoke of slavery in the United States in the 200 years that it was legal?)

When I first moved to the South to take a job in Savannah, I passed through a gas station in Tennessee that had a large amount of merchandise that displayed the Confederate Flag.  Coming from Colorado where the Confederate flag is considered at best an inappropriate thing to display, these products shocked me.  Most upsetting of all was one T-shirt that read, "It is better to have fought and lost than to never have fought at all; the South shall rise again."

I realized in that moment that even though 150 years have passed since the start of the Civil War, the South still thinks it was in the right.  And in that moment, I also realized that I would never be able to call the South "home."  I might live there, but that would be all that I would do.  I also realized that I needed to leave that part of the country as soon as I could.

I have now left, never to return.  And that vow is brought about in no small part because of the attitude in the South toward the Civil War and the Confederate Flag. 

First, I want to state, the Civil War was entirely about Slavery, specifically, about the South refusing to accept the end of it.  If you read historical accounts of the time, you will discover that this is the truth.  At the time, the South did not even try to hide that fact.  They came right out and said that they would go to war before they would allow any further restrictions on slavery.

It is only a historical revisionist attempt to state that the war was not about slavery, it was about state's rights.  The right of the state that it was about was the "right" to own other people.  Americans need to stop thinking that "Gone With the Wind." is a historical document, it is one of the most vile reconstructions of history ever perpetrated in America.

So I will say again, the Civil War was about one thing, the South's desire to own people, and the Confederate Flag is the banner that they rallied around in that rebellion.

The actual symbol on the Confederate Flag, the Saint Andrew's Cross, is not an evil symbol, any more than the original swastika is evil.  Both symbols have become perverted and changed out of their original form.  The inverted Swastika that comprises the Nazi flag has become a symbol of hate, divorced from it's original positive meanings, just as the Saint Andrew's Cross is perverted by the addition of the stars and the red field it is displayed on. 

I would see bumper stickers all over the South that proudly displayed the Confederate Flag paired with the statement "Heritage not Hate."  Let's look at that.

If it is about heritage, it is about a heritage of causing a needless war that killed more Americans than all other the other wars we have fought as a country COMBINED.  More American soldiers died in the Civil War than died in the rest of our 200+ year military history put together.  And it was a war of choice, a war that happened solely because the Southern States knew that sooner or later slavery would be ended.  The South sunk the United States in a ocean of blood, just for the right to own other human beings. 

Some heritage.  It makes a person proud.

 Again, this is all fact, not spin, and can be easily sourced.  I would start with the excellent book "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen.  Or better yet, just examine The "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union" where South Carolina specifically holds up the rights of slave owners above "State's Rights."  (Which blows a hole in that entire "State's Rights" falsehood)  Another damning document is Mississippi's "Declaration of the Immediate Cause" which says, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world."  If you read the actual documents of the time, you see that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

These attitudes towards slavery have not died with the end of the Civil War, they've not died with the Civil Rights Movement, they've not even died with the election of a black President.  In the South, there is still a deep, although rarely voiced, desire to bring back the institution.

I first discovered this shortly after moving to Savannah.  I went driving around the region, trying to discover the land in which I was now living.  I got lost in the backwoods of Georgia, to the point that I started listening for banjos.  I came upon what I can only describe as a compound, ringed by Confederate Flags.  In front of the compound was a billboard that read "And the children of Ham shall ever be servants of Man."  This is a direct reference to Genesis 9:25, which is the bible verse used to not only justify the slavery of Africans, but to state that it is God's Will that they be slaves.  (Africans have been interpreted by Biblical scholars to be the "Children of Ham.")

I wanted to pull the car over and take a picture of the sign, but as a long haired "Yankee" driving a small British sports car, I decided that it was in the interest of my continued health and well being that I drove quickly on.

After seeing this, I asked one of the Administrative Assistants at work about it.  She grew up in Savannah, and as a black woman growing up there, she was quite familiar with the racism in the South.  She informed me that she was certain, that if they put the issue to a vote, and only whites were allowed to cast a ballot, that they would vote overwhelmingly to reinstitute slavery.  She said that she personally had met people who got angry every time they saw an African-American who was not wearing shackles.

After this incident, I was speaking with another friend of mine who knows a couple of white supremacists.  (I need to note, he is not one himself, but he comes into contact with them through his line of work)  He informed me that there are lists out there that document who owns who so that when slavery is returned, the owners can take back their property.

This is not ancient history, this is the underbelly of modern America.  An underbelly that rallies around the Confederate flag as the symbol of it's goals as surely as the neo-Nazis rally around the Swastika.

In my last few weeks in the South, I saw a pickup truck with large Confederate Flags plastered on the sides and a sign in the back window that read, "Vote 2012, it's time to take back the plantation."  He was driving with this sign, proudly, through the streets of Savannah, with no fear of reprisal what so ever.  The boldness of this astonished and terrified me.

A symbol is a powerful thing.  It can raise up armies, it can turn brother against brother, it can tear a country apart.

That is what the Confederate Flag is.  And that is it's power, and why it must be repudiated by all Americans.

I saw another bumper sticker down there that said, "Bring back the Old South."  I wish I could have asked the car's owner what part of the Old South did he want to bring back?  Did he want to bring back the shackles, the chains, the whips, the beatings, the forced labor, the degradation, the humiliation, the forced rapes, the families torn apart, the dogs, the grinding of an entire race into the dirt, the boots on the throats of people who did nothing wrong except to be born a different color?

We need to accept that, for a large segment of the American population, the flapping of the Confederate Flag will always carry the sound of the rattle of a slave's chains. 

Congratulations, You Have a New Behavior Pattern

Reconciliation

There are two ways for a person to reconcile and come to terms with fear: contemplative sublimation or the fear - anger - hate chain. 

The first method requires a strong epistemology, which at it's core is the ability to know what we know.   This method of catharsis (purging yourself of fear) forces you to examine your fear, asses it's validity, come to terms with it, and ultimately purge it from your system.  In short, you move on from your fear - you get over it and get on with life. 

Although this sounds easy, it is actually one of the hardest things for a person to do.  Most people lack the self awareness to sublimate fear.  Understand, that by saying this, I am not being derogatory, I am saying that we typically do not teach people the tools to do this.

Lacking these skills, most people revert to the other method: the fear - anger - hate chain.   This is a root structural behavior, just a step above being instinctual.  For proof of this, look at animals.  A dog may be afraid of the vacuum when it's running, then he gets angry at it and attempts to attack it.  Eventually, he comes to hate it and attacks it the moment he sees it.

I discussed this chain in my post about "Southern Nice" which is a phenomenon observed by my friend Patrick where in the South, hate gets cloaked by this false veneer of "nice."  In the South ingrained ideas are under challenge, which leads to fear, then anger and culminates in hate.

I'd like to explore this process in a bit more detail, because there are aspects of this cultural artifact that I did not address in the previous post.

As I said before, the South was a insulated cultural ecosystem basically until the invention of air conditioning, at which point the sphere of isolation was ruptured.  This brought new ideas into the South, ideas that challenged fundamental belief systems.

Because of the effects of enculturation, these different attitudes sparked fear.  These attitudes raised questions about the validity of the way things were done in the South, which challenged the naturalized culture.  One of the things about naturalized culture is that it is not examined, it is accepted as Truth.  When you question Truth, you knock the foundation out of a society, which is what happened in the South during the Civil Rights era.  You had new attitudes about race, about class mobility, about religion, and ultimately about peoples' role in society. 

This digging away at the bedrock of Southern Society undermined the entire cultural edifice in a way that had not happened since the Civil War.  And in fact, it was worse in a way, because after the Carpet Baggers left, Southern Society for the most part reverted back to an Antebellum mindset.  Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, sharecropping and segregation replaced slavery, but in general allowed the South to continue in much the same way that they always had.

In the Civil Rights Era, the influx of cultural challenge did not come from Carpet Baggers, who were destined to leave in a short time, it came from sources that would never leave, internal immigrants and televised media.  This time, the questions and the fear were not going to go away.

There could have been two ways the South responded; sublimation or anger/hate.  The first was highly unlikely from the start, it is hard enough for an individual to achieve this, let alone an entire culture.  (Ireland still hates the English 400 years after Cromwell) This was also unlikely because of the basic nature of Southern Culture, rooted in the philosophy of the Southern Baptist chuch, which takes Truth as an unquestioned absolute.

And when you question that which your culture tells you cannot be questioned... you get the picture.

Hence, we are left with only one possibility for the resolution of fear anger and hate.  Anger is a good short term solution for fear; it gets people through a short burst of terror, but it is wholly unsuited for an unending dread caused by the systemic undermining of cultural foundations.  Hate becomes the perfect armor to protect from this type of fear.

"I hate them because they are wrong and they are evil.  I am good and I am righteous, and I am shielded from their evil by my hate."

Throughout history, this is the typical response to cultural threat.  It leads to war, to genocide and any number of other horrors, and this hate crystallized in the Southern Soul.

But there is something peculiar to Southern Culture, gentility.

The South held on to the aristocratic traditions of etiquette and courtesy  present in the Colonial era far longer than the North did.  It should be noted these traditions arose from the Dueling societies of Medieval Europe, where if you were discourteous, you would end up dead on the field of honor.  Because the South maintained the trappings of this culture, etiquette and courtesy became part of the naturalized culture. 

Now we hit the Catch 22. 

The fear - anger - hate progression was kicked off by cultural challenges, but courtesy is at the core of the culture in question.  Therefore, overt hate is not an option, because it leads to an irreconcilable internal paradox of abandoning your enculturation because your enculturation is being challenged.

This way lies madness.

Thus is born "Southern Nice."  Southern Nice allows people to maintain their cultural norms, while sending out an encoded message that lies beneath the surface.  It becomes a complex mechanism to respond to a significant threat, while still keeping a veneer of socially acceptable behavior.  This layered meaning allows them to mask their hate and disdain in a way that does not further undermine their cultural belief structure.

It is a natural response.

And Will There Be Passion Plays About Liberals?

Demonization

There is a truly frightening trend emerging in the politics of the 21^st century, declarations of your political opponents as icons of pure evil.  We see this in the casual comparisons of leaders to Hitler, Stalin, Eichmann or others just as evil.  (I’m just waiting to see someone compared to Cthulu, because I’m tired of them going for the Lesser Evil.)

All joking aside, the most appalling name calling is saying someone, especially the President, is the Anti-Christ.  Not an accusation of behaving in an un-Christlike manner, but actually saying they ARE the Anti-Christ.  This is something that has cropped up from time to time in history. (And thank you Nostradamus for this little gift)  But it is especially prevalent in certain circles in modern America.

Before I go any further, I want to make something perfectly clear, the Anti-Christ was Nero.  End of story.  Most true biblical scholars agree that the entirety of Revelations was an allegory about the Christian persecution at the hands of Rome and its emperor. 

Revelations was an apocalypse, a term which has completely lost its meaning.  An Apocalypse means literally “lifting of the veil” or “revelation.”  To say that the Book of Revelations describes the Apocalypse is a recursive statement, it is saying the same thing.  You might as well say the Book of Revelations describes the Revelation.  It makes no sense.   The apocalypse described in Revelations is the lifting of the veil on the evil and corruption of the Roman Empire.

The Apocalypse referring to the actual end of the world is a product of later theology.  And while we are at it, since the world didn’t end today, I also want to state that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the Rapture in the Bible.  That has no true Biblical origins.  The entire story about the Rapture was developed by the Dispensationalists in the era just prior to the Civil War; it grew out of the writings of John Nelson Darby.  At best it might be considered a Christian version of Midrash.  And unlike Midrash, where they are reinterpreting existing stories to have a deeper understanding, the Rapture has no legitimate biblical lineage.

Now back to the regularly scheduled rant.

Calling someone the Anti-Christ is not playing with fire, it is lighting a fire under an armed nuclear device, while pounding it with sledge hammers.  It is an absolute call to action for devout Christians.  The Anti-Christ, as an agent of pure evil, must be destroyed.  (See any number of cheesy Hollywood films from the last 50 years.)  You cannot be a “good” person and not try to kill or at least hope for the death of the Anti-Christ.  It is a call for Presidential Assassination, wrapped up in Christian Drag.

Imagine if the Left had openly called for Bush’s assassination.  They would currently have lifetime accommodations in Gitmo.  It was branded un-American and evil to accuse Bush of being a war criminal, and saying he should be arrested and tried for crimes against the Constitution.  Calling someone a war criminal is small potatoes compared to calling them the agent of Satan.

I do not understand this phenomenon.  Trying to do good (bring universal health care, fix the economy, and rejoin the world community) is considered to be evil, while actually doing evil (starting wars that are illegal under international law, torturing in violation of the Geneva Convention, and shredding the Constitution) are held up as paragons of good.  (Did someone declare this the Opposites Millennium when I wasn’t looking?)

You can disagree with the President, you can think his policies are bad for the country.  This is not beyond the bounds of decorum.  You can even say they are one of the worst Presidents in history.  But when you begin to compare the President to some of the worst characters in history (fictional or real) you have crossed a line that should never be crossed.

Which leads to the other scary thing going on in America today.  Not only is the President being denounced as the Anti-Christ, the left is generally being accused of treason or worse.  Herman Cain is saying Liberals killed Jesus.  In saying that the Left killed the Christian Savior, it is not hyperbolic to compare this to the Nazi propaganda about the Jews.  The Nazis, and all anti-Semites, point to the Jews killing Jesus as one of the root sins of their people.  This is the core point of most of the Passion Plays, and most of them were written, in part, to stir up anti-Jewish fervor.

The Nazis stirred up animosity toward the Jews, blamed them for everything bad in Germany, and created general hatred of one segment of the population to unify the rest of the country.  The Liberals are the new Jews.  Liberals are the one group that it is culturally acceptable to hate.  And term Liberal is now so politically toxic that even Liberals shun the word.  They describe themselves as Progressive.  

It should be noted as a sideline that the term Progressive used to be a term applied to socially conscious Republicans.  Teddy Roosevelt was regularly termed a Progressive.  Liberal was the Democratic equivalent.  Now liberals wrap themselves in Republican terms, because they have been so marginalized in the national discourse.

Liberals are being so demonized in society today that they are considered de facto traitors and criminals.  Liberals are evil, they even killed Jesus.  At MiniTrue, the Liberal point of view is condemned.  This condemnation resounds through the echo chamber of the mainstream media.  The left is denounced from the speaker’s podium and the pulpit.  Liberal Christian has become an oxymoron. 

To illustrate this comparison, I am going to quote Hitler, changing the word Jew to Liberal.  (The book I am quoting from is ‘Lunacy Becomes Us’)  “If the Liberal wins, his crown will be humanity’s funeral wreath… I believe I fight today in the spirit of our Almighty Creator.  When I fight against Liberals, I am doing the work of the Lord.”  I am not making this statement to be offensive and perpetuate the Hitler meme, I am doing it to make a very specific point.  The parallels with the statements coming out of a Glenn Beck type are very ominous.  There is a segment of the population on the right who, rather than debate Liberals on their views, and criticize them for their positions, resort to blatant hate speech to turn them to the enemy.

It's called de-personalization. When you de-personalize someone, you make them sub-human and worthy of hate.  You don't just minimize a view, you minimize a person or  group.  You remove any compulsion of human dignity toward the targeted population.   

   

This demonization of the President and the Left in general needs to stop.  The rhetoric will only lead to tragedy.  How many Oklahoma Cities and dead Presidents do we need before we understand that this sort of out of control behavior will tear the country apart?  We barely survived one Civil War.  I don’t think we can survive another.