Texas school board bans confederate flag

Similarly, had you contracted with me to build a house and given me a deposit, I suppose my taking it and heading for parts unknown could be considered "peaceful".

No, I merely point out that a symbol may have different meanings in different cultural contexts, so that it is disingenuous to cast the Confederate as benign in an American context merely because it is benign in a non-American context.

Do you also believe the DoI is insufficient by itself as a recital of justifications for secession from Britain? And if not, why are the documents I mentioned, plus the Confederate Constitution which explicitly protected the institution of slavery, insufficient as a basis for the conclusion that the desire to maintain that institution along with its attendant racism were the primary political motivations of the seceding states?

And why exactly would racist/pro-slavery propaganda be effective on a populace which didn't have a racist proclivity to begin with?

 

That does not preclude the fact that the South was intent on waging war. Despite being allowed to keep the institution of slavery intact, South Carolina so hated Lincoln that they declared that they would secede if he were elected. They knew full well what they were getting into when they made good on the promise. Instead of keeping their slavery and maintaining the status quo, they seceded. When the Union refused to give up Ft Sumter, they attacked it. The assertion that they were intent on waging war is well supported by facts. To say that the North was intent on waging war does not change that fact. Two opponents in a struggle can be anxious to fight simultaneously.

 

And that is not a testimony to the loveliness of the institution of slavery in the South, but rather a testimony to it's disgusting nature. You take a human being and make him believe that he is happy being regarded as, by nature, inferior to another man and therefore only worthy of being his slave. That's not happiness. That is a form of the most disgusting ignorance.

 

Crazy that anyone still flies this flag, but it should not be flow at a public school or state house for sure

 

Whether Texans want to wave a flag that symbolized treason against the United States or represents losers in a nineteenth century war is entirely their decision.

Let's just hope they don't start shooting one another over it.

 

A lot of blacks fought for the South. The Army wanted more but the politicians were against it. They didn't want 200,000 armed slaves getting used to the practice of killing whites, even if the whites were Yankees. And if they won they didn't think that such a large force would willingly give up their guns and go back to being slaves in the sugar cane and cotton fields. So the South lost the war.

 

It only has more stars but it is the "stars and stripes". But if you want to get more precise then it's the same flag that flew over Japanese internment camps, and it's the same one that flies every time a drone kills a child in Pakistan.

 

If the civil war was about slavery, why did it take Lincoln 2 years to sign an executive order superseding Congress to end slavery in states that opposed the Union? Why did he need an executive order as opposed to an amendment by Congress, when Congress has to approve of war in the first place? Why did Lincoln allow Delaware and Maryland to keep there slaves up to the day of his death and even after the war ended?

 

Fighting to be a slave. WOW!!!

 

That's exceptional marginalization. Should I marginalize blacks in today's society in the same manner concerning criminal behavior given the statistics of their infractions compared to other races? Especially when they are only a small percentage of the population.

 

If the civil war were not about slavery why didn't they just admit the Confederate states back in as slave states? If slavery wasn't an issue in the war, the Confederate states could have come back into the Union as slave states.

 

Most flags in the world have allowed such atrocities to exist at one point in time. Colonists used to burn people alive, because of silly superstition.

 

The Confederate nation chose a flag to symbolize it. It's leaders regarded the institution of black slavery as sacred, God ordained. As such the flag that they chose to symbolize their nation has become synonymous with that principle. Blacks have not chosen criminals to represent and symbolize what they are about. The Confederate nation chose the flag.

 

I know, but I'm pretty proud of the American flag. We've come a long way. The cross that ordained the atrocities has come a long way too.

 

It's not clear to me which cross you are referring to.

 

The Confederate nation never renounced the slavery of blacks, even in principle. The US has done so, at least in principle.

 

The worry was more about slave expansion and complete dominance by Southern states in Congress than about actual slavery. The Confederates were more concerned about unfair tariffs imposed on Southerners. People think that slaves were part of a majority of Southern homes, when it couldn't be further from the truth. Slaves were not only exorbitantly expensive, they required daily upkeep. (food, shelter, clothes, etc)

 

Not even remotely analogous.

The flag in question is nothing more than a Confederate battle standard. It represents the Scots-Irish heritage of Southern soldiers, the vast majority of whom did not own slaves.

What percentage of colonists signed the DOI? Did they assigned a quantitative weight or measurement to each justification contained in these documents such that we could ordinally rank their motivations as you have just done?

They were worried about potential slave revolts and the violence that would result.

 

The South wanted to peacefully withdraw from a contract, the North refused and invaded. The South had no intention of waging war, they simply wanted to be left alone.

 

I will repeat the question, why didn't the Confederate states come back into the Union as slave states?

 

The South could have peacefully stayed in the Union and kept their slavery. They refused and seceded. They fired the first shot as Ft Sumter.

 

The flag you are referring to, was the battle flag. It was not used until later in the war. The National Flag of the Confederacy looks quite similar the American one.

Popular black culture is robbing, pimping, and thugging. It's mainstream on the radio. Are you really going to try and argue that blacks don't idolize criminal and derogatory behavior in their entertainment giving credence to marginalizing blacks given their propensity for committing crimes if one were to choose to do so?

 

I am not saying slavery is lovely, I am just trying to convey accurate historical data. The fact of the matter is that slavery was a human institution for thousands of years before the Confederacy even existed and, like most human institutions, was more nuanced than most would like to admit.

 

It took another year after the war ended to abolish slavery entirely. U. Grant was our last president to own slaves. The Confederacy lost. Who can denounce slavery that represents slavery?

 

The causes of the Civil War were complex. However the main issue was slavery. The North wanted to limit it. The South wanted to expand. The North would have been happy to deport all blacks. The South wanted to import more. Consequently both sides had different economic concerns. Both sides were racist to the bone. The North didn't like free blacks in their midst. The South, especially Texas, wouldn't allow free blacks to live in their States.

The South had been plotting for a way to leave the Union since the 1830s. When the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party was formed the South became even more intent on leaving. They vowed war if a Republican became President. That's because the Repubs wanted the western territories to be free States so that the Northern whites could settle there and create an economy not based on slavery.

The South wanted the western States to become slave States so that they could export its plantation system. They also wanted to take over Cuba if they could secede.

The shooting started when the Rebs fired on Ft. Sumter. Then it became an armed insurrection. The Constitution gave Lincoln the power to put down an armed insurrection. That was the Rebs fatal mistake. They had no plan to win the war and they didn't have to manpower and infrastructure necessary to win. So the North swooped in like an avenging angel of death. It lost some battles but it never lost its willpower to defeat the insurrection.

If the South had used diplomacy instead of bullets I think it could have seceded but it would have been limited to its own territory. The North would have never given up the Western territories. But the North would have gladly deported all of the black to the South as part of a settlement with the South.