What do I think about the Confederate flag flap?

By K. Steven Monk

I think that very few people today even know what that flag stood for. No, it did not stand as a racist symbol for the KKK as that group did not even exist when countless thousands of Southern men laid down their lives for it. Nor did it stand for Nazi-inspired white supremacy, as the man who brought that German political group to power had not even been born at the time that countless thousands of young, Southern boys spilled their blood on the fields of Gettysburg. And no! They did not spill their blood on that field of battle and innumerable other fields for the right to own slaves, as 95% of them couldn't even afford the common necessities of life, let alone slaves. It was only the other 5% of the Southern population, the rich Southern planters, that could afford that as well as the luxuries they enjoyed. At the time of this great conflict, slavery, as an institution, was on its way out in the South.

So why did so many poor, common, white (and even black) working boys lay down their lives for a tattered red, white and blue cross of stars? The answer to that becomes rather obvious when you consider what the war they fought and died in was all about. And no! It was not a Civil War. There was nothing civil about the carnage of hundreds of thousands of American men blowing the guts out of each other. It was a war of aggression: the aggression of a omnipotent, Washington-based political power who had as its agenda the subversion of a group of states who had decided to rescind their ratification of that power's right to rule, an act which, under the constitution that they ratified, they had the right to do. In other words, Southern Americans, in this most Uncivil War, were fighting for the same thing that Americans fought for at Valley Forge: they were fighting for their freedom. That's what the stars and bars meant to them. That's why so many of them went to their graves defending it. That's why all this talk about Confederate flag flap is just that..... just so much flap. And by people who don't even know what they're talking about.

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