South Carolina's Confederate Flag.

Yesterday (22/6/15) South Carolina Governor Nikki Hayley joined with the throng of protesters calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from the South Carolina Capitol building in Charleston. My main problem with this is that there isn't a Confederate flag being flown over the Capitol building and there hasn't been since the year 2000.

What there is though is a memorial to those who died in the American civil war in the grounds of the Capitol building. Part of this memorial is a staff which technically isn't a flag pole because it lacks the pulley system needed to raise and lower a flag. Locked in place at the top of this staff is a banner that is similar in design to the Confederate flag but incorporates some crucial differences.

The main of these is that while the Confederate flag is rectangular the banner on the war memorial is square. Also the design is upside down which is an internationally recognised distress signal - in short the people flying the flag need help. The war memorial banner also differs from the Confederate flag because it has a white border which is sometimes referred to as a fringe. This could be interpreted as a reference to the small white minority that supported the Confederacy. It could also be interpreted as a reference to the white flag which is internationally recognised as an order to soldiers in the field that they should lay down their arms.

So while I appreciate that everyone is still very much in shock over last Thursday's (18/6/15) shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME Church I'm a bit worried that once the dust has settled the people of South Carolina may find they've done away with a very clever historical monument to the civil war. I see it as being particularly useful for getting children on school field trips thinking and talking about the history of the civil war.

It is of course vitally important that each new generation continues to learn about the civil war because second only to the war of independence it is probably the most important event in America's shot history. For starters roughly 2 in every 10 people alive in America at the time were killed during the civil war. Also at the time the United States only stretched as far west as Texas. Beyond that the south-west of the continent (New Mexico, Nevada California etc) was considered part of Mexico and the Pacific north-west was the largely uncharted home to Native American Indians.

Going off on a bit of a tangent Native Americans (Amerindians) aren't actually that native and are members of the Caucasian ethnic group having migrated from Russia roughly 15,000 years ago.

The reason why the US expanded so dramatically after the end of the civil war was many of those in the confederate states headed west to escape the newly freed slaves and the Union in the hope of setting up a separate nation. The alleged Charleston shooter actually references this migration to the north-west referring to it as; "The North-West Front." Although you notice that he actually rejects the idea. In fact most of his manifesto shows him rejecting as too extreme the ideas of what is considered the white supremacist mainstream.*

Teaching of the history of the civil war is of course a contentious subject particularly for American liberals and members of the Democrat Party. Discussing it actually reminds me of a scene from "The Simpsons" where, as part of a citizenship test the "Apu" character is asked to explain the causes of the civil war. Having studied the subject he launches into a complex and detailed explanation of all the economic and political differences between the north and the south. The examiner stops him and says; "Just blame slavery."

The main cause of tension though was that the north was heavily industrialised relying on construction and manufacturing. Although everything in the 19th century was labour intensive this sort of work required a smaller pool of highly skilled workers. By contrast the south was dependent of agriculture which required much higher numbers of non-skilled workers. So in short people in the south owned lots of slaves while people in the north didn't really own slaves at all.

This created tension when it came to allocating seats in the Federal government and allocating Federal funding which are all based on population distribution. The people in the north didn't want slaves to be counted as part of the population but the slaves owners in the south did so they could vote on their slaves behalf. This led to the odd compromise whereby a slave was considered to be 3/5ths of a man. However shortly after that compromise was reached the north went further by trying to eradicate slavery entirely and war began.

The big problem for the Democrat Party is that the north was led by the abolitionist Abraham Lincoln who was leader of the Republican Party. The south was led by Jefferson Davis who was leader of the Democrat Party and the Democrats commitment to racist policies in the south continued for almost a hundred years after the end of the war.

In fact the Confederate flag was only raised over the South Carolina Capitol building by Democrat Governor Ernest "Fritz" Hollings in protest a the end of racial segregation under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.



*Although I'm not sure I want to be recommending it for a true comparison you will also have to consider the views expressed in places like "Blood & Honour" and "Stormfront."

10:35 on (23/6/15)