Sunday-Wednesday Feb.04-07,2001

Faust, a magician, alchemist, and tragic hero of several classic poetic and dramatic works, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge. The Georgia Legislator's who recently passed House Bill 16, represented as a "compromise" change to the Georgia Flag, have struck a Faustian bargain for impotence and ignorance.

The House Bill 16 "compromise" is hailed by media pundits of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a great act of statesmanship. The "House" Black legislators who willfully fronted for and voted for this bill are being anointed as modern day "credits to their race". Their stupefying capitulation proves that a subconscious plantation mentality permeates the mind set of many of our present day black Georgia legislators.

The appeal to statesmanship by the mainstream media is a con, the bill is a fraud, the "Coalition to Change the Georgia Flag" has been had, and the Georgia public (especially Georgia's blacks) are being played for fools. Under the guise of a compromise, Georgia legislators have now codified the preservation of all Confederate memorials throughout the entire state for all time.

The House Bill 16 "compromise" stipulates that "The memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died for their cause". That cause, by the consensus of credible historians as taught in our public schools, was for the preservation of slavery and the establishment of a nation predicated upon white supremacy.

The "compromise" Bill also makes provision for publicly owned monuments and memorials on public property honoring Confederate military figures to not be "relocated, removed, concealed, obscured or altered in any fashion."

All of this, in exchange for a symbolic cosmetic face-lift to the Georgia state flag that now replaces one Confederate flag with four, on an equal "historical" par with a patch of the flag of the United States of America.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, who had offered the bill to change the state flag, promised from the well of the House to never participate in, or encourage any effort to remove or alter Confederate monuments or symbols.

So if in the near future Georgia society should ever evolve to a maturity that rejects their present state of denial of the confederacy white supremacist legacy, and seek changes on the Georgia landscape to honor that revelation in truth, Rep. Tyrone Brooks has pledged to preserve forever the present public lies sanctioned by State law.

As reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1/25/2001) an interfaith group of Atlanta clergymen voiced support for the newly proposed Georgia flag and urged the state Senate to approve the banner. "The religious groups will give voice, praise and support for the visionary legislators, ... We feel that those who have voted for this are generally speaking with a prophetic voice ... We see this flag as being the epitome of what compromise is all about. " said Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, who hosted a meeting with a half-dozen ministers. I seriously doubt that this generosity of sprit would be as forthcoming from these "clergymen" if that symbol had been a swastika, but in fact "the Southern Cross" is this nations swastika of white supremacy. (See, "Confederate Battle Flag Link To White Supremacy Well Documented", Heritage, Atlanta Daily World, Dec.3, 2000).

It is now clear that the purported moral and ethical outrage of many of the leaders of the "Coalition to Change the Georgia Flag" was even more symbolic than the odious symbol it once represented as having no place as a symbol with even the "appearance" of state sponsorship.

In my guest editorial "South Carolina's Faustian Compromise with the Confederate Flag" (Viewpoints, Atlanta Daily World, May 25, 2000) I forewarned that "Once South Carolina's so-called 'compromise' bill becomes law, it will be touted as a model of reasoned 'compromise' to be emulated by 'statesmen' in states that similarly memorialize the Confederacy in their state flags, states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi. This will ensure the permanent preservation of memorial 'lies across America' propagated by Confederate monuments under the protection of law."

Georgia now joins South Carolina in passing its own version of The Confederate Civil Religion Protection Act (CCRPA). The memorialization of treason and white supremacy is now enshrined as a state civil religion protected by state law. The Confederate cult of denial and eternal memorials to the "lost cause" of white supremacy has now gained official state sanction in Georgia, with the aid of the leadership of the "Coalition to Change the Georgia Flag" and the senior "House" Rep. Calvin Smyre, chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee, who is apparently totally clueless to having broken a Faustian bargain that will insure an even more destructive debate in the future.

At least thirty historical markers in Georgia libel Sherman's soldiers as having engaged in wanton destruction. But well in advance of Sherman's march to the sea , the editor of a Savannah newspaper reported in October 1864, that "it is notorious that our own army, while falling back from Dalton [in northwest Georgia], was even more dreaded by the inhabitants than was the army of Sherman. The soldiers, and even the officers, took everything that came in their way, giving the excuse that if they did not, the enemy would." In fact, the actions of Confederate cavalrymen under Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler is more responsible for the destruction attributed to Sherman in Georgia's historical markers. Or perhaps the ultimate blame should fall on Gen. John Bell Hood whose orders to Gen. Weeler were explicit: "If Sherman advances to the South or East destroy all things in his front that might be useful to him."

Such broad misinformation as the libel of General Sherman is now to be protected by force of state law.

Thus, Georgia's "compromise" legislation renders impotent any future effort by an enlightened Georgia government official or citizen to redress what Georgia historic sites get wrong and perpetuates a permanent ignorance within its citizenry.

On Dec. 1, 1870, Frederick Douglass warned: "Every monument built in memory of the Confederacy will perpetuate that which it would be more creditable in the actors to desire to have forgotten. .... If it is not to reawaken the conflict, by cultivating hatred against the Government, that these monuments are built, there is little or no purpose in their erection. Monuments to the ‘lost cause' will prove monuments of folly, both in the memories of wicked rebellion which they must necessarily perpetuate, and in the failure to accomplish the particular purpose had in view by those who build them. It is a needless record of stupidity and wrong."

Thus, the battle over our national memory is not new. In the aftermath of the Civil War we lost that battle, and, for the same reason, we are losing it now. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his work on Black Reconstruction, lamented: "We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future."

More information on this issue can be accessed online at the Douglass Institute of Goverment's Jubilee website.