That Pesky Rebel Flag

[LittleRed]

I do not fly the rebel flag, but to me it symbolizes the SOUTH! In my eyes it does not down the slaves or anything else. I am a southern girl from birth and I always will be. It also stands for the Civil War and all the lives that were lost during that fight. In my opinion, all these people that get offended when they see someone flying the rebel flag has a problem. They do not need to get upset because someone wants to express their feelings about something. One, they do not know the true meaning as to why that person is flying that flag, so why mis-judge someone because of what they feel. I do not dislike anyone or anything! But I will tell you one thing! I will continue to be an American Southern Girl and I am proud of my ancestors who fought in the Civil War. I LOVE YA!!

[Papa2]

I am also proud of My southerm heritage and will always be proud of it! Yes, I had ancestors that fought for the South and I have no problem with anyone flying the Battle flag if they do so as I would if I did so to pay tribute to the My ancestors and friends ancestors that went to battle for the CSA!
A couple times it has been mentioned about swaztikas and such on here and for anyone to equate the Rebel flag with the swatztika is absolutley ridiculous as no one and not no one of the CSA killed mass people that had no chance ot fight back!
now if We wish ot discuss slavery lets go back to the basics of slavery and how someone's family ended up in slavery to begin with! Is it not true that slaves were imported to the USA from other countries and if you wish the truth of slavery all slaves were placed itno slavery not by white people but other black tribes when captured in the first place so dont go blaming the white people for the enslavement of blacks here! Yes, it was the whites that kept them embonded but they also took great care fo them while doing so!
People, we have a part of history that si OUrs and maybe if you look back and there isnt a black sheep in your family then be very careful as thne you just may be it!
I dont look at a perosn and judge thme by their skin color but what they hold in their hearts!
To some this will be offensive and in advance I apologize but reading this I think of my heritage as Miss Charlotte on the veranda with her Mint Julip or the wonderful privilege of a Mans hand shake to seal a deal and knwo it was as good as gold! I also think of the times when each and every home didnt have to have a lock on the door because if a neighbor needed something they woudl just walk in and get it and pay it back at a later time because they knew you didnt mind and might even do the same thing! Do I know all abotu history? Noo , I dont and wont ever but deep in MYheart I love my heritage and will also say I love my fellow man (dang I didnt say white man did I)!
And for those that wish to go back and do some research even on the KKK, if you will do so the KKK was nto formed to oppress the black man and keep him in slavery! In fact the KKK was formed as part of it to take care of its neighbors and a for instance is say if every week end I , a white man, took my pay check and went off drinking and partyining and my family suffered from it sooner or later the members of that community of the KKK woudl pay Me a little business call and once they were through with me Id think wisely about what I did with the next weeks pay check! Im sure most dont knwo these facts about the KKK as most only know the hatred it has shown to the black people and those who supported them!
I thank all of you for reading My ramblings because I suppose I am just another uneducated redneck that lets My thoughts stray and I put them to text!

[books_24]

I don't get upset when I see the flag. I simply know that I view things a little bit differently than that person. If something like a flag upsets me, then I have no other problems to worry about! I just would not use the flag for myself.

[TinkerBell]

I just don't get it the flag represented the southern conf. and the war wasn't just about slavery. There was a lot more politics to it, we didn't just fight over one thing. It had to do more with we didn't want the north telling us what we could and couldn't do on everything not just keeping slavery. We Fought for freedom against the north and true we lost thank God. But still it was not just about slavery. Like some one eles posted earlier, black people where not the only slaves either.

[demopolite]

Okay...before we go any further:

Either someone find me one verified account of white slavery in the United States or stop with this whole thing. Indentured servitude IS NOT slavery.

I'm sorry I haven't been posting...very busy right now...but I just couldn't let this particular abortion of historical fact go on any longer.

[2lib4dem]

Papa2, you have every right to fly your flag and be proud of your southern heritage. I also have the right to think that flyers of the rebel flag harbor racist feelings. For blacks in the south there were no good old days of siping mint julips on the porch. We were enslaved. It does not matter wheter Africans were put into slavery by other tribes, the bottom line they were enslaved in the UNITED STATES. I don't know the origins of the KKK. Quite frankly, I don't need to know. All I need to know is that they presecuted and continue to persecute blacks. If they were so proud and helpful they would not have had to hide behind white sheets. The bottom line slavery happened it was awful and there are still reprecussions of it today. Like it or not.

[Sweet Pea]

Originally Posted by 2lib4dem

Papa2, you have every right to fly your flag and be proud of your southern heritage. I also have the right to think that flyers of the rebel flag harbor racist feelings. For blacks in the south there were no good old days of siping mint julips on the porch. We were enslaved. It does not matter wheter Africans were put into slavery by other tribes, the bottom line they were enslaved in the UNITED STATES. I don't know the origins of the KKK. Quite frankly, I don't need to know. All I need to know is that they presecuted and continue to persecute blacks. If they were so proud and helpful they would not have had to hide behind white sheets. The bottom line slavery happened it was awful and there are still reprecussions of it today. Like it or not.

"I also have the right to think that flyers of the rebel flag have racist feelings" You sure do have that right, but I can tell you something right now, I am not racist. I like the rebel flag. When I look at that battle flag I don't see the KKK or Crow or black people. I see my ancesters that fought the fight, wheather good or bad. I don't judge people by the flag they fly or not fly, by the color of their skin, by the clothes they wear or by the words they speak. Maybe I should, but I don't. I wont walk in front of you or behind you, but I will walk beside you. This is just my opinion, make of it what you wish.

[Papa2]

I never once said anythign abotu slavery being right or wrong and that ZI condoned it in the least! I said look at the origions of it and take notice it wasnt white people that put you into slavery it was your Own color and yes I did say that white people kept you there! Im not hiding behind anything and if you think iM a racist then you are very very worng!

[2lib4dem]

When I look at the flag, I see my ancestors who had no say in whether or not to support the war. Wheter you are racist or not is not for me to say. Wheter you like it or not, the rebel flag for blacks is a symbol of opression and slavery. If you are comfortable projecting that image, so be it. History for my ancestors and your ancestors were two different experiences. My ancestors definitely got the worst end of it. On that I am sure we can agree.

[2lib4dem]

I never said that you approved or disapproved of slavery. I stated the results of slavery. It does not matter who put blacks into slavery. Should blacks feel better since supposedly other blacks sold them into slavery? What is your point? The end result was catastrophic. I don't know whetehr you are racist or not. All I know is what my reaction. and I would dare say the reactions of other blacks, to the rebel flag is. It is a symbol of oppression and hate.

[Mystic_Rhythms]

On the topic of slavery and "who" did "what"...a little light reading:

In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. In 1820 the king of the African kingdom of Ashanti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade slaves with him anymore, since they worshipped the same god as the Muslims and the Muslims were continuing the trade like before.

The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplicistic scenario that hardly reflects the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slave trading.
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances, no violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and Hollywood movies, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own kins.
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Emperors and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course, they retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how the stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on an ancestral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the only ones selling slaves, and they were selling their own kins. (To be precise, Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war, and Muslims were selling Christian slaves captured in war, but neither the Christians of Europe nor the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East were selling their own kins).
Then the Muslim trade of African slaves came to a stop when Arab domination was reduced by the Crusades. (Note: Arabs continued to capture and sell slaves, but only in the Mediterranean. In fact, Robert Davis estimates that 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by the "barbary states" of northern Africa. The USA bombed Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli in 1801 precisely to stop that Arab slave trade of Christians. The rate of mortality of those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was roughly the same as the mortality rate in the Atlantic slave trade of the same period.)
Christians took over in black Africa, though. The first ones were the Portuguese, who, applying an idea that originally developed in Italian seatrading cities, and often using Italian venture capital, started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves in the 1440s to support the economy of the sugar plantations (mainly for their own African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America, but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America because the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's in the U.S. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery, contrary to the indifference that Muslims and most Europeans showed for it).
Even after Europeans began transporting black slaves to America, most trade was just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any force to get those slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (black) owners. Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't yet born) and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs. The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the rule. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply purchased people.
As an African-American scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity" of black Africans is largely a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to different tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the distinctions of race.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, millions of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became so strong that the southern states of the United States opposed repealing it. But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass exploitation: the industrial revolution was exported to the USA by enterpreuners exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities (which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps). It is not a coincidence that slavery was abolished at a time when millions of European and Chinese immigrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.
It is also fair to say that, while everybody tolerated it, very few whites practiced slavery: in 1860 there were 385,000 USA citizens who owned slaves, or about 1.4% of the white population (there were 27 million whites in the USA). That percentage was zero in the states that did not allow slavery (only 8 million of the 27 million whites lived in states that allowed slavery). Incidentally, in 1830 about 25% of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves: that is a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number of white slave owners. Thus slave owners were a tiny minority (1.4%) and it was not only whites: it was just about anybody who could, including blacks themselves.
Moral opposition to slavery was widespread even before Lincoln, and throughout Europe. On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never particularly strong in Africa itself, where slavery is slowly being eradicated only in our time. One can suspect that slavery would have remained common in most African kingdoms until this day: what crushed slavery in Africa was that all those African kingdoms became colonies of western European countries that (for one reason or another) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. When, in the 1960s, those African colonies regained their independence, numerous cases of slavery resurfaced. And countless African dictators behaved in a way that makes a slave owner look like a saint. Given the evidence that this kind of slavery was practiced by some Africans before it was practiced by some Americans, that it was abolished by all whites and not by some Africans, and that some Africans resumed it the moment they could, why would one keep blaming the USA but never blame, say, Ghana or the Congo?
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave trade with black Africa: it was pioneered by the Arabs, its economic mechanism was invented by the Italians and the Portuguese, it was mostly run by western Europeans, and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. The USA fostered free criticism of the phenomenon: no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started selling their own people (and, even today, no such criticism is allowed within the Arab world).
Today it is politically correct to blame some European empires and the USA for slavery (forgetting that it was practiced by everybody since prehistoric times). But I rarely read the other side of the story: that the nations who were the first to develop a repulsion for slavery and eventually abolish slavery were precisely those countries (especially Britain and the USA). As Dinesh D'Souza wrote, "What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish slavery".
(To be completely fair, what was also unique about the western slave trade is the scale (the millions shipped to another continent in a relatively short period of time), and, of course, that it eventually became a racist affair, discriminating blacks, whereas previous slave trades had not discriminated based on the color of the skin. What is unique about the USA, in particular, is the treatment that blacks received AFTER emancipation, which is, after all, the real source of the whole controversy, because, otherwise, just about everybody on this planet could claim to be the descendant of an ancient slave).
(That does not mean that western slave traders were justified in what they did, but placing all the blame on them is a way to absolve all the others).
To this day, too many Africans, Arabs and Europeans believe that the African slave trade was an USA aberration, not their own invention. By the time the slave trade was abolished in the West, there were many more slaves in Africa (black slaves of black owners) than in the Americas.

So I ask this: does THIS flag offend anyone???...anyone?

[2lib4dem]

What is the point of this? As I stated earlier, who sold Africans into salvery does not matter as much as the current remnants of slavery in AMERICA? Should African Americans feel less slighted because they were originally sold into slavery by Africans? Africans could not have sold slaves if there were not purchasers. This article is just justification as to why the UNITED STATES should not be held accountable for the atrocities perpetuated on blacks during and after slavery. The whole thing in offensive.

[bilmo]

I agree with 2Lib. Why are we seeing all of this history about slavery. I know the history of slavery and anyone that can pick up a book knows the history. This would be the same as 20,000,000 Germans saying "We did not know that they were killing Jews in the camps" The answer is so what? It happened.
I was not around during the period when slaves were bought owned and sold. But, I was around in the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's and 1970,s and the European and Muslims had nothing to do with the treatment of a race of people at that time even in Demopolis nor the rest of the states where this went on. And discrimination did not only happen in South. It was prevalent in All of the USA. Maybe it was not so overt as the South but it was happening all over. So if someone wants to be proud of the Confederate flag, then do so. But dont try to hide behind Southern Pride. I was not a slave and you were not a confederate soldier.

[2lib4dem]

Great point!!

[Mystic_Rhythms]

Originally Posted by 2lib4dem

What is the point of this? As I stated earlier, who sold Africans into salvery does not matter as much as the current remnants of slavery in AMERICA? Should African Americans feel less slighted because they were originally sold into slavery by Africans? Africans could not have sold slaves if there were not purchasers. This article is just justification as to why the UNITED STATES should not be held accountable for the atrocities perpetuated on blacks during and after slavery. The whole thing in offensive.

Oh c'mon! Now an article is offensive?! It's not justification for the US it's more along the lines of accountability. True the US is accountable for it's actions and what you said about not being sold if there were not purchasers is true as well. BUT, we weren't the first ones to purchase! I have probably my best friend in the world who is a black guy that I served with in the USAF and he is from London, England (moved back there after his tour with the USAF). He told me one more than one occasion that he would be so glad to get back to England because he couldn't stand the blame games that people in the US liked to play. We discussed this very subject on several occasions with him knowing almost 100% that his family was bought and sold as slaves back before the US was even born. From his own mouth came, "you just gotta let it GO at some point!". He harboured no ill feelings towards the Union Jack (the flag under which his family was sold), or towards the gov't of the land in which he was born and raised. We talked on this subject for many hours while we were roomates and I gained alot of knowledge from him. He and I fought together in WWPG and rest assured that he knows as well as I that we would've taken a bullet for each other. Our friendship wasn't based on what color we are or what branch of the military we served in, it was based on how we TRULY treated each other...with respect and equallity. But in 1995 he moved back to London and I lost all contact with him until March of this year when I found him again. He still tells me that the US is a great place to visit but he can't see himself living here anymore and again, from his own mouth it was because, "not because of the way blacks were or are treated but because everyone wants to blame someone else for their own problems. Things happened hundreds of years ago, time to let it go." He's still one of the best friends I've ever had or ever will have.