Corporate censorship and the CSA Battle Flag

[Wokko]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141339/Hundreds-rally-Confederate-Pride-parade-displaying-controversial-battle-flag-amid-national-outcry-Civil-War-symbol.html

Check out the pictures, personally I love it, your mileage may vary.

[pietillidie]

^Crikey! As I say, it's mostly self vilification!

[Tannin]

[Mugwump]

[Wokko]

My Army of Northern Virginia Battle Flag avatar has fallen foul of political correctness and has been replaced by the General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard (before IT gets book burned too).

[Tannin]

Do we need to mention that the actual Army of Northern Virginia has - one factor excepted, which I'll come to in a moment - nothing decent to be said for it that couldn't equally be said for Hitler's stormtroopers? Like Hitler's mob, it fought a very nasty, brutal, and ultimately unsuccessful war with the appalling aim of enslaving and/or murdering an entire race of people who had done nothing wrong bar make the terrible mistake of being born under the rule of an evil, shortsighted and horribly selfish regime.

The exception - and he's not such an exception as at first he seems to be - is General Robert E Lee, who would have bee horrified and disgusted at the use made of his name. Lee was a good general - not a great one by any stretch of the imagination but a good one - and a decent if misguided man who served a regime far inferior in moral terms to himself. He has been built up into a saint by his admirers in the South. This hasn't been helped by the attitude of the North, which has generally bent over backwards to be fair to its most distinguished opponent in an over-generous way.

Lee seems to stand head and shoulders above all other generals on the Southern side not because he was (in a manner of speaking) so tall (he was good but not a great as military commanders go) but because the rest of them were so short. Most senior commanders of the South were very poor.

The North too had a lot of spectacular duds in high command, but these tended to be replaced by more able men as the war went on. In the South, the duds were replaced by other duds who were then replaced by the original duds again, round and round until they ran out of generals and footsoldiers both. The South never had any real hope of victory: the rebellion was astonishingly ill-thought-out in the first place, but the repeated failures of the Southern generals and the government's comprehensive failure to find better military leaders contributed significantly to the eventual collapse. Weak leadership at the political level, in other words, entrenched poor leadership on the battlefields. Contrast with the North, where senior military appointments were every bit as constrained by political considerations to begin with, but slow, patient, determined work by Lincoln and his top advisors gradually weeded out the incompetents and the self-serving blowhards and created a formidable and generally well-led force.

[Wokko]

Lee's main issue was initially not having command of strategy, and then getting it too late. The Confederacy's military problems stemmed almost entirely from Jefferson Davis and the rest of the politicians.

Lee was a brilliant tactician, he stands amongst the greats on that side of the ledger but the strategy of the war, both Grand strategy and theatre level was pretty shithouse.

I also think you're selling short Stonewall Jackson and the many brave men who fought and died for a cause they believed in. (Which wasn't simply slavery, Lincoln didn't give two shits about the slaves and the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederacy, not in the North). I think lumping in the CSA with Nazi Germany is at best overly simplistic and more likely completely erroneous.

[Tannin]

Lee's main issue was initially not having command of strategy, and then getting it too late.

A fair point, though it wouldn't do to make too much of it. For the South to win, they had to do everything right and get a good slice of luck many times over. The North had all four of history, morality, geography and economics on its side. For the North to win, they just had to keep going and not give in to either despondency or lack of moral courage. They managed both, but only just.

The Confederacy's military problems stemmed almost entirely from Jefferson Davis and the rest of the politicians.

Yes and no. No because the South never had any long-term hope of getting their huge logistic problems sorted, nor much hope of fixing the economic disaster they were in unless they could control the seas and thus export cotton to Europe, which was pretty much their only major source of the income they needed to buy the arms and transportation they had little hope of manufacturing for themselves because they had neither factories nor skilled workers to staff them. Yes because Davis and crew did little or nothing to overcome the senseless rigidities of their command structure, meaning that the generals they had (good or bad, mostly bad) remained in place right up until the end.

Lee was a brilliant tactician, he stands amongst the greats on that side of the ledger but the strategy of the war, both Grand strategy and theatre level was pretty shithouse.

Agreed. Mind you, although his strategy was poor he didn't have much else in the way of options. Mark his mistakes down to desperation more than miscalculation.

I also think you're selling short Stonewall Jackson and the many brave men who fought and died for a cause they believed in.
No real argument there. Jackson was very good. Joseph E. Johnston is generally regarded as pretty useless, which is unfair. He was much better than his reputation suggests, and fought a hopeless war out as well as could reasonably have been expected.

(Which wasn't simply slavery, Lincoln didn't give two shits about the slaves and the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederacy, not in the North).
Now you are oversimplifing. First, slavery was the one and only issue that couldn't be resolved. There were others, but the South's mindless determination to enslave people was the one overwhelming sticking point between the sides. Second, Lincoln was a complex man who changed his mind about slavery little by little over the years, and advanced his government's policy towards emancipation in many small steps and a few big, brave ones, each time taking the policy as far as he could without wrecking the fragile coalition government and destroying all the work which had gone before. The Emancipation Proclimation was only one step among many, though obviously the most famous. Slavery in the North was already well and truly on the way out before it was issued, and indeed before the war even started.

I think lumping in the CSA with Nazi Germany is at best overly simplistic and more likely completely erroneous.
Here you are simply wrong. Nazi Germany fought for the right to enslave people, so did the Confederacy. Same aim, same methods. Nazi Germany had many brave and competent soldiers, so did the Confederacy. Nazi Germany abandoned morality and human decency in the name of greed and terror and torture, so did the Confederacy. The parallel is exact.

[pietillidie]

Wokko, aren't flags an effort collectivise people and stake claims beyond what many members of the collective deserve?