Tuesday, October 20, 2015

How is the Palm Beach Post editorial board going to explain away this one! They want to save the wrong 'Confederate' flag!

I'll have more on this later. The ivory tower editors think the 'Confederate' flag should stay on the Senate seal. But they got the flags confused! The Post's John Kennedy correctly identifies the flag in question as the 'battle' flag. The editors got the Confederate battle flag (the Southern Cross) mixed up with the "Stars and Bars". Not kidding. Read more about the difference below from a blog post in July when the "save" the 'Confederate' flag was at its fever pitch:

The Post's Eliot Kleinberg posted this on June 23rd. It's a lengthy article about the Confederate flag and what is causing so much confusion. Two flags are in question (both images below are from Wikipedia):
This is the official flag of the Confederacy, the "stars and bars".
This is the flag that so many confuse as the Confederate flag, the "Southern Cross", also called the Confederate Battle flag.
Here is a long excerpt from Eliot Kleinberg's article:
     The first casualty of any war, it often has been said, is the truth.
     First, this [the "Southern Cross"] is not the official flag of the Confederate States of America. That flag, the real “stars and bars,” had a circle of stripes on a blue bed in the upper left corner, with two half-stripes alongside, red and white, and a full red stripe along the bottom. [emphasis added]
     The flag that’s drawn all the attention, the “Southern Cross,” is a square banner showing diagonal blue bars and white stars on a sea of red. It started as a battle flag.
     In the last two years of the Confederacy, it created what later was called “the Stainless Banner.” It placed the “cross” in the upper left corner of a white flag. In the closing weeks of the war, to avoid the appearance of surrender, the Confederacy added a vertical red stripe on the far right.
     The “Southern Cross” spent 100 years in obscurity, then sprang to prominence in the 1950s. It was part of a movement scholars say had nothing to do with heritage and was instead an act of defiance to federal civil rights efforts.
     A big part of the problem is ignorance of the complexity of the Civil War and its causes, said Irvin Winsboro, a professor of history at Florida Gulf Coast University and author of “Florida’s Civil War: Explorations into Conflict, Interpretations, and Memory.”
     “The event is fact,” Winsboro said of the Civil War. “The causation is open to interpretation.”
     Many Floridians now are Northern transplants. But Florida in the 1860s had more black slaves than white people and was the third state to secede from the Union. And brutal Jim Crow practices continued for decades.
The "Southern Cross" is an act of defiance, not against 'Northern aggression' but against the civil rights movement in the 1950's. Period. End of story.

At a 'Confederate flag' rally in Loxahatchee on July 11th the attendees rallied around the wrong flag: the "stars and bars". Here is a picture from the rally taken by Bruce Bennett (including caption) from The Palm Beach Post:
"If the south would've won, we would've had it made". Who exactly is 'we'?