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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAgreeing to remove the Confederate flag isn't courageous. It's just politics
Jeb Lund
The Guardian
For all the congratulation Haley will doubtless garner, she still tooted the whistle of southern Lost Cause rhetoric loud and hard enough to send a few terriers home with burst eardrums. After meaningless puffery about South Carolina being voted the friendliest state, Haley said:
For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble. Traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry.
Ah, the traditions of heritage. The legacy of inheritance. The folkways of culture.
For a single word, heritage does a lot of heavy lifting with the racist crowd, since HERITAGE NOT HATE has been a decades-long weasel explanation for venerating a flag carried by armies that kidnapped free blacks and burned their homes while waging war against the US government, which was carried by Klansmen who bombed churches and killed civil rights volunteers to prevent blacks from exercising the franchise, and most recently was carried about town for selfies by Dylann Roof before allegedly emptying five magazines of tradition into a number of pious, African American churchgoers.
These meanest of congratulatory gestures befit a gesture this shallow. The balance of optics the ratio of the two obvious responses to the flag finally tipped against the Republican Party enough that something had to be done, and that is why something was done. This is neither empathy nor responsible historiography; this is math.
One symbol is gone; the statues and street names and school names and county names paying homage to the Confederacy and its slavery-defending politicians and generals remain. And in the absence of this one symbol is left everything that it spoke to, and so much of what the modern Republican Party cynically invokes, having long since wedded its small government, zero-entitlement message to the Lost Cause rhetoric of anti-Washington posturing and anti-entitlement resentment and all the wrong folks who might cash those checks. The flag doesnt need to speak symbolically for the heritage of South Carolina when Nikki Haley and a dozen candidates policy platforms and defense of heritage will do just that. The flag can come down has to, even, to keep up the lie that flying it was neither a defense of racism nor a way to signal, both to the racists and those who would profit politically from their support, that the principles for which the Civil War was fought need never permanently be discarded.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/nikki-haley-remove-confederate-flag-courageous-just-politics
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Yes, taking down that flag - in the larger scheme of things - in and of itself isn't going to solve racism. No more than taking down a statue or changing a street name will. But it is a change for the better. We'll work on the other things tomorrow, and enjoy this little win today.
We're not done.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)is reacting to Nikki Haley and the Republican party patting themselves on the back over this and using it for political gain as they keep on using using the same old dog whistle rhetoric. The flag coming down is a good thing but he's saying don't be fooled by this gesture.
Adrahil
(13,340 posts)Take your victories as they come and accept them with magnanimity. Our goal is change minds. You can't do that being smug.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)I do applaud her for telling the rubes in SC it's time to move the flag.
It's only symbolic - rubes are still racists - but it's better than doing nothing.
The Blue Flower
(5,451 posts)I'm just happy to see that the politics is shifting enough to bring about this one small step.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)It may play well nationally to a more liberal demographic but it will cost her support in her home state.
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)Other places with great historic wrongs to account for do so in part by created public spaces dedicated to the memories of those who were so very wronged.
Berlin
https://www.google.com/search?q=germany+holocaust+memorial&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=1l2JVZPoMIW6ogT-rp-YCA&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=611
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)think
(11,641 posts)malaise
(269,328 posts)and the fact that Reince Priebus was present is all the proof you need to know that they had to do something and quick since so many ReTHUGs willingly took money from the racist CCC.
The discovery of Roofs website changed everything - they can run but they can't hide this time - they are collectively responsible for this massacre...and they know that we know.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)reaction to all those Republicans accepting donations from a racist hate group . They're trying to cover their asses. Will it really change things? We'll see.
Charles Pierce:
Already, we have people justifiably tracking how many "mainstream" Republicans have taken money from the CCC. (Not my new friend, Joni Ernst! Oh, noes.) I suspect that, in the next few days, we're going to be seeing a lot of folks engaging in public moral burlesques of sending the money back. These will be almost as disgusting as having taken the money in the first place. Be prepared.
It's too goddamn late, and that is what I decline to forgive. There was a point at which the Republican partyand the conservative "movement" that is its only life force could have turned from this path, but it declined to do so, and now the racial and political backlash against the civil rights movement is too deeply embedded in the conservative mind ever to be excised easily. For example, the political philosophy of the Koch Brothers, while not explicitly racist, is based in the same political reaction that produced the CCC. The difference between the John Birch Society, which birthed the Kochs, and the White Citizens Councils, was not vast during the time when both organizations were born. The Birchers were just marginally more subtle. http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35880/things-we-shouldnt-forgive/
malaise
(269,328 posts)but the flag must come down and a lot more than that must change
onenote
(42,852 posts)I wouldn't describe it as courageous, but its not a completely self-interested move either.
handmade34
(22,759 posts)Haley is merely playing the game...
"...the Confederate flag was birthed in oppression and bathed in blood, and it was first raised atop the Charleston state house...to demonstrate opposition to the federal government and racial integration. Thats why it was still up last week: not because of heritage (because thats bunk), but because genuflecting to racists is good politics
"
"...Its (merely) a message of healing for the Running for President as a Republican community
"
too little too late
we need serious actions
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)I doubt that flag means anything to Haley herself but, as others have observed in this thread, she's now in a completely new time where she is no longer required to defend the flag, but now required to condemn it. And that is something to celebrate-- at least a little. The tragedy is that it took a tragedy to get us here.
Racism still exists, and it will for a while in its new form, but that tiny light at the end of the tunnel is getting a little bit brighter.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)It belongs to the people who banded together to successfully apply pressure to achieve this.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)Orsino
(37,428 posts)...on the part of politicians whose careers are built on having it both ways. Taking a stand in Haley's case meant putting a stake through the heart of supporters who must already have been questioning her gender and ethnicity.
The gov stuck her neck out, a bit, but took her time doing so. Courageous, maybe, but certainly calculated.