Two weeks ago in Mississippi, the population of the state decided not to join the 20th century. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, voters chose to retain a state flag they have flown since 1894, which incorporated in a prominent spot the old “Stars and Bars” — the blue St. Andrew’s Cross on a red field that was the military banner for the Confederate States of America. Debate raged about whether to change the banner, with Southern-heritage groups vowing not to respect the new flag if adopted. They claim that the “Stars and Bars” is an integral symbol of the South and the paramount symbol of Southern pride.
Let’s get real here, folks. There is little about the Confederate battle flag to be proud of. The banner has a history of secession, treason, assassination, murder and race hatred. It was the South that seceded from the United States in 1861 after finding it couldn’t get its way on slavery. It was the South, under the name of the Confederate States of America, that enshrined in its constitution the “inalienable right” to own another human being as property.
It was the Confederacy, under the “Stars and Bars,” that launched the war by attacking Fort Sumter. It was the Confederacy, its “Stars and Bars” flying, that operated the Andersonville “concentration camp,” where 30,000 Union POWs were held in appalling and deadly conditions that ultimately killed half the prison’s population. It was the Confederacy, under the “Stars and Bars,” that employed the murderous Quantrill’s Raiders, a group of mercenaries who attempted to eradicate the town of Lawrence, Kan., in 1862. It was John Wilkes Booth, a former soldier for the Confederacy and a Southern partisan, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

After the war, the Ku Klux Klan, a group of former Confederate troops, led by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, murdered blacks, Catholics and immigrants trying to exercise their franchise or even just live peacefully. The Klan flew — and still flies — the “Stars and Bars.” During the civil rights battles in the ’50s and ’60s, a number of Southern states either began to fly the Confederate battle flag from prominent state buildings or incorporate it into their state flags. It’s obvious to anyone except die-hard fans of the Confederacy why they did this at that particular time: It was to show defiance to the civil rights movement, as if to say, “The Confederacy is here — y’all go away.” Today, other than by legitimate Civil War re-enactors (most of whom, as a precondition to membership, demand that their comrades have absolutely no pro-Klan or racist views), the flag is flown mostly by groups espousing race hatred, including the Klan, Nazi groups and the former “Aryan nations.”
The fact is, flying the “Stars and Bars” and calling it Southern pride is about the same as saying that only the “hakenkreuz,” the swastika banner of Nazi Germany, can properly depict German pride. Or that the old Imperial Japanese Army banner (a rising sun with rays) is a more representative banner than the current hinomaru, a red disc on a white field, for the new democratic Japan. Or perhaps that to show proper pride in their country, the people of South Africa should display the pre-1993 Afrikaner, apartheid-era flag.
In all these cases, the governments represented by the flags no longer exist. There is no longer a Confederacy, just as there is no longer a Third Reich, or a Japanese Empire or apartheid in South Africa. To believe otherwise by flying the flag of an extinct government is self-delusion.
If the people of the South want to show pride in their region, more power to them. They can drink mint juleps and Kentucky Bourbon until their livers turn green and their blood’s 100 proof. They can go ahead and pretend they’re all Scarlett O’Haras and Rhett Butlers. But put the “Stars and Bars” away. That flag should be seen as a complete embarrassment to anyone from the South and an insult to the country in which the Southerners now live.