The Chris Moeller Archives

"We can't wait any longer"

A flag can be a very untrivial item. If a large enough number of people project deep meaning onto that flag, this inanimate object becomes an item of terrific importance, one that ignites deep passions, just as a painting in a museum might.

The flag of the Confederate States of America is just such a powerful emblem. It’s one that represents the longest-lasting terrorist threat to the United States. Its precise role in the Civil War is muddy to me. Whether it belongs to the Southern states in general or the Army of Northern Virginia or whatever doesn’t matter. What does is its ongoing use of the battle flag as a symbol of a culture that has fed terror to black families for more than a century and a half. In the United States, Nelson Mandela is formally declared a terrorist while the Confederate flag flies above the state capitols of South Carolina and Louisiana. It is protected by law from desecration or defilement in five states. In Germany, neo-Nazis wave the flag as a proxy because it’s a crime in that country to fly the swastika.

As an exercise in political activism, Bree Newsome’s climb to the top of the flag pole in Columbia, South Carolina last week is being compared to the historic stand taken by Rosa Parks. It was also some John Brown shit—aggressive, divisive, and taken of strong moral character. The greatest American of the twentieth century was Martin Luther King, Jr. The greatest of the nineteenth was Brown. It causes me distress that I have to un-“friend” people from Facebook for posting dumb “Heritage, Not Hate” GIFs even though those people have lived in the state of Iowa their entire lives. These are people that do not know their own proud history.

The North held—and still holds—all of the high moral ground in respect to the United States Civil War Over Slavery. The war was about the economic empowerment of the Southern region of the country only so far as the entire economic engine of the South was driven by human chattel. It’s incomplete to talk about slavery as only the forced servitude of black-skin peoples. It was also about babies being ripped away from mothers and sold away for life. It was about a dehumanization effort so powerful that it blossomed again soon after the war had formally ended, then flourished through decade upon decade of public lynchings, systematic rape and emasculation, and survives even up to a cowardly act of arson at a predominately-black church in the South probably again sometime within the last couple hours.

The war began not then, as we’ve been told, with cannon fire at Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861, by rebel soldiers against Union forces, but the moment that slavery began on the continent. That act of terror was returned when Northerners of conscience, like Brown, at long last declared all-out war against it. It’s critically important to understand that slaveholders went to war because of their fear of more retaliatory strikes against their contaminated and loathsome system by interracial bands of freedom fighters like Brown’s.

To know the story of the great man, Brown, is to begin to understand the Southern mindset that would eventually declare the elevated conflict beginning in '61 “the War of Northern Aggression.” They’re damn right it was. A small handful of Northerners, and a smaller handful still of Southerners, had had enough. Slavery even confined to the South indicted everybody in the United States. In the North, legislative and judicial acts of cowardice, such as the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision, and the Missouri Compromise, infected all Americans with the cancerous tumor of white supremacy. There would be no more compromises.

The heinous flag of the Confederacy memorializes America’s great unforgivable sin. It should exist in museums for as long as the Republic stands, but Bree Newsome did an effective job of showing us one place where it doesn’t belong.

posted by CM @ 10:43 AM