What is your take on this post on a social website?

I have no take. Other than that the family of slaves should be paid money owing for building up the united states .

The flag doesn’t bother me, as much as the shifty logic demanded with the interpretation of it as a monument celebrating the slaves. There’s also absolutely no evidence of any validity to the assertion that the industrial revolution would lead to the South abolishing slavery. This man’s argument is equivalent to stating that Jews should accept the display of swastikas lest they forget the Holocaust.

Apologist bullshit. We are not enshrining the makers or the government that produced my iPhone. That flag will always be associated with slavery and to fly it makes me question why anyone wants to associate them self with that disgusting part of our history.

More Americans have died this year from proponents of the Confederate Battle Flag than by those who have died fighting the black flag of ISIS.

I hope the site has a unfriend button.. Because that was written by a fucking idiot.

He says slavery sucks and we should not forget it and yet we should celebrate the Confederate States. A clear example of doublethink.

The industrial revolution would have happened with or without slavery and slavery would have been abolished with or without the industrial revolution. An idiot trying to connect dots that are not connectable.

My take is it’s incoherent to me. I think whoever wrote it is taking leaps of logic between assumptions that I don’t even recognize, so I don’t even get what he means. However I am sure I don’t think the way he seems to assume I do.

I just spent the last hour trying to find this article again. It answers the post you copied here.
Yes You’re a Rasist and a Traitor
It’s a great article and well worth the read.

To late to edit, But since I rarely click on posts, I thought I would copy and paste the most compelling parts of the article to me:

“Let’s go one-by-one through some typical Lost Cause-tinged revisionist talking points:

The Civil War was about economics, not slavery!

Yes, the Civil War was about the economics of slavery.
The Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery!

Yes, the Civil War was about the states’ right to maintain slavery.
That’s not the Confederate flag!

True, it’s the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which actually makes your usage even worse. It’s the banner under which men fought and died to enact secession.
Heritage not hate!

Funny story: the heritage is hate. This is my favorite talking point because it sets up a false dichotomy and then tries to pretend “heritage” is a signifier for some romantic, noble culture just waiting to be recaptured. When Lindsay Graham says things like, “The flag represents to some people a civil war, and that was the symbol of one side. To others it’s a racist symbol, and it’s been used by people, it’s been used in a racist way,” he makes a mockery of the history. Yes, Senator, it does represent one side of the Civil War: the side that advocated slavery and secession. It’s the flag of treason.”

Slavery was not necessary to have the prosperous America we have enjoyed.

The north and west was full of hard working white people who got their hands callused. Not that there wasn’t some slave trade up north, there was, and certainly one could argue laborers back in the day of all ethnicities were often treated like slave labor at very low wages. Still, they were free, not owned. It’s not like slavery was a necessary evil.

I realize that some southerners take pride in the confederate flag as a symbol of the south and pride in their ancestors who fought in the civil war, but it doesn’t change that it represents to many people slavery and bigotry, and can even cause great discomfort and fear. Just like this recent shooting in Charleston causes another thought in a black person’s head that their churches might not be safe, they see that flag and it’s unnerving. I see that flag, and I’m unnerved, although less so now than years ago. It doesn’t matter that the person setting that flag out proudly isn’t racist, a whole bunch of people see it as a symbol of the slave south, and it can be scary. Living in the south I became more used to it. As a northerner, before I moved to the south, seeing that flagged made the blood in my body drop to my feet. I just couldn’t believe it.

There is no justification for slavery. Most people disgusted by slavery, and segregation, and all that from our past, are also disgusted by slave labor and great disparities in wages, so they are consistent.

Secession means leaving the United States. These same people who talk about being proud Americans and supporting the troops and actually trying to say people who don’t agree with them aren’t American enough, or whatever they say, make no sense when you think about—they want to leave the union.

Would the south have gotten rid of slavery? Probably, eventually. Even when the US got rid of slavery and the south had to comply, they still did a whole hell of a lot to keep things separate. Segregation was a pretty big deal. Not that other areas of the country didn’t have some discrimination and bigotry, but I’m not sure it quite compares.

Here is the article that gave birth to the post. Confederate flags burned and monuments defaced as South Carolina protesters lash out in wake of racially motivated Charleston church massacre

So, it sounds as if the intent of the post is to say that it is wrong to deface publicly displayed monuments that are symbols of Civil War heros and pass judgement on those that publicly display a Confederate flag. If that is the case, then I agree with him.

There is also a time when these symbols representing the position of pro-slavery need to be retired and put in a museum. They shouldn’t be forgotten. They are a reminder of how some white Southerners still cling to the romanticism of the Civil War.

The rest of the post sounds like a bunch of strawmen.

@Judi Thank you for taking the time to find that article. It will be shared with the writer of that post listed in the OP.

@Pied_Pfeffer I agree those symbols have a place in museums and should not be forgotten. It could even be argued the flag can be out at memorial sites. The problem is putting it on state capital buildings and other public buildings that represent our government.

I think what’s interesting is it seems to me a lot of southerners do take some pride or romanticize that time in the south, and you would think they would be embarrassed by it. I see our German jellies extremely vocal about nationalism, even patriotism, as a thing they are practically appalled by, because of what that country went through with Hitler.

My closest friends in the south aren’t waving the confederate flag, I don’t think most southerners do romanticize that time, nor do they want that flag a flying, but enough do that it’s a current event topic obviously.

@JLeslie , But they do romanticize it. I bet you could count on one hand the number of spputhern women who don’t adore “Gone with the Wind.”

@Judi I agree about movies like Gone with the Wind. I just meant I think the average southerner takes a lot of pride in being southern, and many of them feel they are more polite and respectful than people from other parts of the country, I think that is part of the pride they feel, but I don’t think most of them are racist or believe slavery is, or was, acceptable. They can romanticize the current south without including slavery or segregation as part of that picture.

I finally made it through Gone with the Wind several years ago. I don’t get why people adore that film.

There’s an awful lot of wrong and injustice involved with the history of our country and it certainly isn’t confined to the South. The urge to dump on the losers of the Civil War is sometimes irresistible, but there are great lessons to be derived from reflecting on the history of our house, and the place would be the better if all of us spent more time doing it. When I was younger I used to puzzle over how it was possible that good decent people could tolerate slavery and the brutal segregation that trailed after it for better than 100 years. I think the answer simply is that people are very adaptable to their environment, and as such, the most appalling situations one can imagine appear “normal” if you’re reared and immersed within them. No Southerner grows up educated to the reality that all that mint julep gentility is based on the horrors of slavery.

Consider the arguments offered in defending the Confederate battle flag:
They boil down to Southern Pride, freedom of expression, State rights, honouring the ancestors who fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Southern pride is not about celebrating the region in which one was born or from which ones ancestors come. It is celebrating segregation, White power and overt racism.

Any freedom in a civilized society is constrained by our obligation to respect and protect the freedom and rights of other.

On issues of just treatment of others who comprise society, the States rights argument is an attempt to appeal to some external principle to justify racist practices and attitudes. It was used by S. Carolina and the States that formed the Confederate States of America to preserve a way of life dependent on the slave labour of blacks. It was used to justify all the practices they used to maintain that way of live.

One can honour the Patriotism of ancestors who at that time felt their actions preserved their way of life, no matter that prevailing values oppose slavery, oppression and racism.
A society should acknowledge and remember periods of history so we all can learn of the past, the consequences of now outdated beliefs and repudiated practices. In modern Germany, they actively document and teach about the era of the Third Reich, the horrors associated with it and the lessons learned.
In the American South, they have a right and responsibility to document and teach about the beliefs and values of the South during the Civil War. This does not involve perpetuating the practices and social attitudes of that time.

The defenders of public display of the Rebel flag in public places have no better intentions nor more righteous justifications than those who want to fly the Nazi Swastika flag.