May 25 2000
Viewpoints
Carolina's Faustian Compromise
With The Confederate Flag
By Asa Gordon (Unedited)
www.atlantadailyworld.com
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 South Carolina bill S1266, recently passed by the
state's Senate and House, is being represented as a "compromise"
to remove the Confederate Flag from the statehouse, but it is a
Faustian bargain for impotence and ignorance.
Many media pundits as a great act of statesmanship are hailing S1266.
Blacks who support it are being anointed as modern day "credits
to their race." Continued resistance to the bill by the NAACP is
portrayed as lacking a "generosity of spirit" and "alienating
supporters with hard-line stances."
The appeals to statesmanship by the mainstream media are a con, and the
bill is a fraud. Under the guise of a compromise, South Carolinian
legislators have now codified the preservation of all other
Confederate memorials throughout the entire state for all time.
This in exchange for the symbolic removal of one Confederate
Battle flag from the statehouse.
S1266 Sec.3 (A) stipulates in pertinent part that "No...War Between the
States [read Confederate] ... history monuments or memorials
erected on public property of the State or any of its political
subdivisions may be relocated, removed, disturbed, or altered."
(My emphasis). Thus, any future effort to correct the fraudulent
history represented by any existing South Carolina Confederate
monument is subject to penalty under law.
Dr. James W. Loewen, American Book Award winner for "Lies My Teacher
Told Me," includes the following account on page 281 of his new book
"Lies Across America, What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong." "An
exhibit titled 'The Burning of Columbia' in Columbia's 'Confederate
Relic Room and Museum' claims, 'With no CSA troops to resist, General
Sherman's men burned 80 percent of the city.' The Relic Room, a state
agency started in 1895 owing to pressure from (and with curatorial
assistance by) the United Daughters of the Confederacy, may be the
least accurate museum operated by a state government anywhere in the
United States." Any effort to correct such inaccuracy would be in
violation of Sec. 3(A).
Recently, the Richmond (Va.) City Council voted to rename two of its
city bridges that honor Confederate generals after prominent
civil rights leaders. The "compromise" flag bill ensures that such an
act could never be duplicated in South Carolina. Any South Carolina
official who finds memorials to Confederate icons in the state to be a
bit excessive and attempts to replicate the action taken in Richmond
will be in violation of the nefarious Sec. 3(A). In fact, The Virginia
Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is now pursuing legal
action to retain the bridge names after being advised by legal counsel
that the Richmond City Council action may very well violate a Virginia
stature that protects Confederate memorials.
S1266 Sec.3(A) also stipulates in pertinent part that "No street,
bridge, structure, park, preserve, reserve, or other public area of the
State or any of its political subdivisions dedicated in memory of or
named for any historic figure or historic event may be renamed or
rededicated." These outrageous provisions, contemptuous of history and
totally devoid of balance, are a slap in the face of local municipal
rights, yet they remain generally unexposed in media reports.
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.
Several different state historical markers in Columbia, S.C., libel
William T. Sherman's soldiers as arsonists when, in fact, documented
studies drawn from primary sources place substantial blame for the
burning of the capital on Confederate soldiers. 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 are 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 will be
protected by force of state law in exchange for the symbolic
removal of a single symbol of the Confederacy.
Thus, South Carolina's "compromise" legislation renders impotent any
effort by a South Carolina government official to redress what South
Carolina's historic sites get wrong and perpetuates a permanent
ignorance within its citizenry. In fact, by this act, the
memorialization of treason and white supremacy is enshrined as a state
civil religion protected by state law. Accordingly, an honest and
appropriate title for this legislation would be The Confederate
Civil Religion Protection Act (CCRPA). The Confederate cult of denial
and eternal memorials to the "lost cause" has now gained official state
sanction in South Carolina.
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
in danger of 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."
Asa Gordon is Exe. Dir. of the Douglass Institute of Government.and
Sec. Gen. Sons & Daughters United States Colored Troops
