Originally posted by MJOILNIR
No need to say your sorry. Your more than welcome to your opinion. I respect peoples opinions whether I agree with them or not. 😉 I do want to point out that there were a lot more good moral people in the south at the time than immoral.
But the flag is not the people. The flag represents an ideal, and that ideal is permanently and inextricably linked with slavery.
This is not a matter of ignorance. It is very much a matter of historical record that the war started as a result of trade and the issue of State's rights, not a crusade over slavery. It is true that nearly all of the soldiers that fought for the South were no more racist than the ones from the North (as in, pretty racist, but not much to choose between them), that almost none had slaves, and this was mainly because major slaveholders were exempt from the draft. It is true that Confederate soldiers went to war not to keep slavery, but to defend what they saw as their homeland from unjustified attack.
All this is true. But it does not change the fundamental issue here. The war might not have started out about slavery, but it definitely became about slavery. Slavery became the fundamental drive of the war, and it became the ultimate aspiration of the war. It became the political and ideological centre of the war after all the earlier reasons had evaporated. The war gained a cause, because after time it became clear it could only be sensibly fought for a cause.
The Confederacy was ther last major power that supported slavery, one of the great fundamental wrongs of history. Even the Russians abolished serfdomn before the Confederacy was compelled to abolish slavery. We all now see slavery as evil and wrong, and no matter why the Confederate soldiers fought, they were fighting for a state that was imposing this great evil, and not covertly- supporting it openly and proudly, taking it as a basic right.
When the Noirth became anti-slavery, it became morally superior in the eys of the world, and justifably so. Now the war would not be just about union and trade. It would be about bringing something better to the world.
And it did so, and the world is a better place because the North won and destroyed this final bastion of slavery.
And so no matter how brave the Confederate soldiers were, and how remote their sturggle was compared to the political one around them... no matter how great and interesting the Generals were, or the spirit displayed was... none of this changes the fact that the Confederacy was supporting a fundamental evil. That flag represents that evil. And so it will always be looked down upon.
It is forever tainted.