Reply #17: The "Stars and Bars" was not a battle flag but [View All]

the national flag of the Confederate States of America.

You are probably talking about the flag often called the Rebel flag, which is actually a St. Andrew's cross, which looks like an X stretched to fit a rectangle, with stars representing the states of the CSA along the arms of the X. The "Stars and Bars" is quite different.

Since the Confederates did not commit acts of genocide as the Nazis did, it is insulting to suggest a comparison between the Rebel battle flag and the swastika. The Confederates fought to defend their homes against an invading army; the Germans invaded Austria and Poland, the Netherlands, France, and Italy.

Besides invading the CSA and destroying its economy, the US has fought wars of imperialism in the Philippines and now in Iraq, so the "Stars and Stripes" have dirt on them, too. Slave ships flew the US flag, too, never the Confederate one, because the system was that Yankee slavetraders sold slaves in the South (and in the West Indies and South America) and Southern planters used slave labor to produce cotton for mills in the North. The U.S. Constitution did not consider blacks to be fully human and there were not that many abolitionists, the USA just wanted to subjugate the Southern states and slavery was a handy excuse.

It is a fact that the swastika and the St. Andrew's cross have religous origins and the swastika is found in many cultures. Designs resembling the St. Andrew's cross are probably common as well. Designs using stars and stripes or bars are also common, as can be seen from the US flag and many others.

The swastika never killed anyone. We can see it as a Nazi symbol or we can see it as a symbol that's used by Hindus, Native Americans, and surely others. It shows up in quilts that predate Nazis by a hundred years or more. We should oppose hatred, and unacceptable behavior, not symbols.

If we fixate on symbols, we could end up with a world in which no symbols are permissible because some group somewhere has used them to indicate hate.