Bizarre Tribute. Coretta Scott King died today. In the coverage of her death, CNN Headline News showed the national and state flags in Atlanta flying at half staff. The flag was plainly different from the one I grew up with. Instead of being based on the Confederate Battle Flag, it is now based on the governmental flag of the Confederacy! Big change. So we have the oddity that Georgia, supposedly concerned about negative views of its treasonous past being boasted in a racist symbol, exchanged one symbol of racist treason for another. And to honor a black civil-rights leader, the State of Georgia (temporarily) lowered the Confederate flag!
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This is the "Stars and Bars", the official "national" flag of the "Confederate States of America", the failed attempt at creating a federal union devoted to slavery.

This is the current flag of Georgia.

It is described thus by the website of the Secretary of State of Georgia:

Georgia's new state flag is based on the first national flag of the Confederacy (the "Stars and Bars") and consists of a field of three horizontal bars of equal width, two red separated by a white bar in the center. In the upper left corner is a square blue canton the width of two bars. In the center of the canton is a circle of 13 white stars, symbolizing Georgia and the other 12 original states that formed the United States of America. Within the circle of stars is Georgia's coat of arms (the central design on the state seal) immediately above the words "In God We Trust" -- both in gold.

So not only does the Georgia state flag celebrate high treason; it also entrenches religion and tells everyone who is not religious that they are not genuine Georgians. Moreover, the attribution of the 13 stars to the original 13 states is less than candid. As you can see from the picture of the pure Stars and Bars above and Confederate Battle Flag below, both of those had 13 stars too! which stood for the 11 states that attempted secession plus Kentucky and Missouri, border states that were slave states but did not attempt to secede. God (you should pardon the expression, I hate the South!
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The current banner is one of several that have flown over Georgia. All of them since the Great Rebellion have been based on either the Stars and Bars of the Confederate Battle Flag, except for a brief period, 2001-2003, when controversy over a Confederate Battle Flag flying over the state capitol produced a flag that reduced the size of those Confederate symbols but left them as official symbols of the 'great' State of Georgia. This is that flag:

The flag I grew up with flew from 1956 to 2001:

It replaced a flag that had been based on but did not exactly match the Stars and Bars. You can see it in miniature at the bottom of the 2001-2003 flag. Georgian segregationists thought the old flag too subtle, so adopted a more flagrant Confederate symbol.

"An overwhelming amount of evidence indicates that those who introduced the [1956] flag change and those legislators who voted for it were not motivated by a desire to offer a memorial to Confederate soldiers, but were influenced by the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings and by the fear that the Court would find Georgia's county-unit system unconstitutional. Indeed, the flag change was a symbolic representation of "massive resistance" in Georgia-a change that reflected Georgia legislators' unwillingness to change." [John Walker Davis: "An Air of Defiance: Georgia's State Flag Change of 1956," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, 1998, p. 307-308, as found at http://fotw.vexillum.com/flags/us-ga3.html#1956]

The county-unit system, a variation at the state level of the Electoral College system, was indeed ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1963 for violating the "one man, one vote" rule required of states by the Federal Constitution.
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In the late 1990s, indignant blacks and other loyal Americans resident in Georgia forced the legislature to reduce the Battle Flag to one of several miniatures across the bottom of a new flag. But that wasn't defiant enuf, not treasonous enuf, so the legislature submitted a new design, with a full-sized Stars and Bars, to a referendum. The moronic, disloyal voters of Georgia approved the current design, showing again that white trash, despite their frequent bellicose jingoism for 'Amurika', are at heart really traitors.
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The Confederacy was established for one reason, and one reason only: to preserve the enslavement of black people. In its war of insurrection, the Confederacy caused a minimum of 558,000 and perhaps as many as 700,000 deaths, at a time when the total population of the United States (including the Confederate states) was only 31 million. The bulk of those deaths were of the poor and middle class. Abolitionists and other Union soldiers at least fought for their enlightened self-interest and for morality. The Southern poor who died, however, were cynically used by the rich against their self-interest. Consider the proportions of slaveholders to nonslaveholders in the Confederacy:

5,140,000 Non-slave-holding population of the slave states
3,500,000 Number of slaves in the slave states
310,000 Slave holding population in the slave states

[And earlier on that page] The ... slave-holders may not have been the majority of the population, but they amounted to one in four southern families. Of the slave-holding population, half owned fewer than four slaves. One-thousand-eight-hundred owned more than 100 slaves and counted as planters.

Though this was a proportionally small fraction of the South's population, its members presided over a great deal of political and economic power.

Slavery depressed wages for Southern whites, yet the rich were able somehow to persuade the poor shmoes they were abusing to fite for slavery! Amazing. And appalling.
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That the poor white trash of Georgia, of all places, should choose a Confederate symbol for their state is especially astonishing. After all, the Civil War that their ancestors' treason produced resulted in the burning of Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea! People who had no slaves and whose wages were severely undercut by competition from slaves actually fought for slavery and saw a large part of their state reduced to ruins for that privilege!
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It's the same now: the rich Southern elite are using the votes of white trash firmly held in debt slavery to keep poor people, poor and in debt — including the very people who vote for them! Southern white trash step proudly up to bat for their abusers. "We ain't gonna let them damned fairies marry [as tho gay marriage has anything to do with the real problems of Southern whites], and if to keep faggots down we have to elect people who hate us as much as we hate fairies, well, then, we'll just keep electing the bastards. Because they're our bastards. They own us and we like being owned." Are Southern whites brain-dead?
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The South has been an albatross around our neck for our entire national history (since independence). The only time the South was more boon than bane was the end of the Revolutionary War, when the South bore the brunt of British fury. But that's a long time ago, and the harm the South has done us, endlessly, far outweighs its contributions of every type, in every era since. It's a pity that we did not utterly destroy the South at the end of the Civil War, kill every traitor, and replace them with immigrants. Had that been done, the United States today would be unrecognizable from its current benited self. There would be no Trent Lotts, Tom Delays, or the rest of the neo-Confederate, Southern Mafia that controls the Nation thru control of — of all things — the Republican Party: the Party of Lincoln, the President who freed the slaves only by defeating the Confederacy! History does have a sense of humor.
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But there's nothing funny about the bizarre gesture of respect for Coretta Scott King. It would be far more fitting if the Georgia legislature were to adopt a new state flag that removes all visual references to Georgia's self-destructive defense of slavery. Attachment to an evil past keeps the South backward, and backward-looking. Where is the "New South"? Let a genuine New South arise, and let it arise in Georgia.
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(All flags courtesy of Flags of the World website.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,243.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:23 PM