Corporate censorship and the CSA Battle Flag

[Wokko]

With Amazon, Apple and Google all jumping on the 'ban the Confederate flag' bandwagon, I shudder to think what's next. I know that the understanding of the American Civil War is limited in Australia, so here's a link from a self described 'liberal' (American version of liberal) who is also against all this and explains it better than I can.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/26/im-a-liberal-and-i-almost-put-a-confederate-flag-on-my-twitter-profile/

Vive la liberté!

[Tannin]

There are two ways to look at this, Wokko.

(a): The unfettered power of corporate America to make shallow or self-interested blanket decisions that impact on all citizens is downright scary. This is essentially the view you linked to, and indeed my own view. This is an obvious but relatively trivial example to hang it on, Apple and Google and Facebook do far worse things as routine but they are often subtle and hard to spot.

(b) Companies are entitled to make commercial decisions about what they do and sell to protect themselves against public anger and their bottom lines against public backlash. I agree with this view too. And yes, I recognise that the two views conflict.

PS: But why are you bringing this up? You are notoriously prone to deny the significance of wealth and market power when it comes to deciding what companies and individuals can and cannot do. Why have you backflipped on this one? You don't strike me as a racist. Are you especially fond of the Confederate flag for some reason?

PPS: about your location. Shouldn't it read something like "Ballarat (freezing)" now. Or possibly "Ballarat (bored)"?

[Wokko]

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, I do have sincere reservations about corporate overreach and even more so crony capitalism. This reeks of partisan politics rather than business. The Battle Flag of Northern Virginia means different things to different people and this bizarre historical revisionism of removing it and various other CSA memorials, statues, flags etc is something I find pretty troubling.

As for fondness for the Confederate flag or cause, maybe I've watched too much Gone with the Wind and Gettysburg

[Tannin]

[David]

Honestly, it's such a specifically American issue that I don't feel I possibly have enough information or cultural context to have an informed opinion on the matter.

Otherwise, all I know is that it is a flag that has deep cultural meaning for some whilst being a symbol of oppression and disenfranchisement for others. Not unlike the Australian flag, then...

[Wokko]

I studied the Civil War and the South quite a lot in my early 20s, devouring every book, movie and magazine article I could find, I've probably forgotten more than you know from what you've said, but it's well worth looking into. It's an amazing story, and I would hate to see it all destroyed in a modern day virtual 'book burning'.

Have you seen "Gone with the Wind" David? Amazing film, right up your alley I would've thought.

[HAL]

No I have not seen Gone with the Wind David . What's it like?

[pietillidie]

Yes, it looks like typically dumb overreach by companies, made all the more farcical by the serious breaches of public trust they engage in elsewhere, such as not paying taxes.

Yes, it's partisan nonsense, while the buffoons flying such an outmoded symbol are vilifying themselves as much as anyone, already being cast as dunces clinging to a failed, violent era.

At the same time, we're not part of the racial tensions and on the wrong end of present brutality and historical misery, so our distant view lacks lived context and pertinence. For many black people, it might be the equivalent of waving a brown triangle in the face of Roma folk.

On another note, Wokko, you do have a penchant for trading in very local American triviana. This topic has come up in much broader contexts many times before, mostly concerning the influence of corporations on politics, the overreach of companies into the personal lives of their employees, and public pressure placed on corporations through boycotts. It's a good topic, but the US history wars element is distracting.

[Wokko]

We all have our blind spots. American, particularly Civil War and Revolutionary history is mine.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Southern_Historical_Society_Papers/Volume_01/February/Maury%27s_Vindication_of_the_South

If you're of a mind, that's a spirited defence of the South from a contemporary source. It's a nuanced issue far removed from the stereotypical mulletted pickup truck driver with a CSA flag painted on the bonnet. It's a flag of rebellion, one of State's rights to self determination, one of anger towards the federal government that ignores the will of a large portion of the country, and yes, also one of white racists, but also of pride in the South. I'd also add it's a story of a lost cause, and that rings true throughout history.

[David]

Having read that article, I concede that I posted a little too quickly – this is a troubling phenomenon and actually one I've spent a fair bit of time arguing against.

This is exactly why entrusting our moral standards to the corporate sector – which is what people do when they use social media campaigns for supposed social change, say by calling up sponsors and demanding something be taken off air – is such a bad thing.

These companies are opportunists and hypocrites. Case in point: Google won't let you search for how to buy a confederate flag, but it will let you search for guns. Given the tragedy that kicked off this latest round of frenzied bannings and disassociations, that's some irony. Of course, no matter how many serious faces the CEO makes, they don't really care about race on any other level than its usefulness in showing how non-racist they are, meanwhile giving America a collective pat on the back for how non-racist it is now that the Bad Thing has been taken away.

By the way, Wokko, I did finally get around to seeing Gone with the Wind for the first time last year, at the Astor Theatre no less. I had mixed feelings about it (there's a disconcerting artificiality about it that is partially a function of its time, and in some ways very much not), but perhaps that's a discussion for another thread! In any case, that brings us to this pathetic attempt at an opinion piece from the New York Murdoch rag:

http://nypost.com/2015/06/24/gone-with-the-wind-should-go-the-way-of-the-confederate-flag/

[pietillidie]

Wokko, that's great then if it's a topic you have a keen interest in. I didn't know that and thought you had gotten trapped in the very narrow concerns of US cable debates, which admittedly is hard for all of us to avoid, but has a particularly bizarre grip on conservative Australia.

That document is a classic and still an excellent read, even if no doubt strongly disputed. It reminds me a bit of the provincial wars in Korea between the Southeast (Yong-nam) and the Southwest (Ho-nam), which go way back in history. In Korea's case, Ho-nam would be the equivalent of Virginia and the south, except it moved to the communist left (probably during the Japanese occupation with earlier roots, at a guess), and even after the Korean war continued to be a thorn in the flesh of conservative power as consolidated in Seoul under various dictators (see the Gwangju Massacre).

Even today, Ho-nam is far poorer, more rural, and despised by many as a home of communists, gangsters and thugs.

So, in one case you have the less powerful, least-favourably located group becoming far right, and in the other becoming far left. Both, agreed, are forms of protest. Both areas are still poorer, and to my knowledge both receive a greater share of welfare transfers.

If I find nationalism backward, you can imagine what I think of regionalism. It needs to be smashed down by those within it in a hurry, because it's a millstone around their necks.

[Mugwump]

It's a flag. A symbol. So it has collected many associations across its history. Some of those associations are good, many very bad, and some merely tragic (eg the hundreds of thousands of boys who died for it, fighting for their families, and birthplace, and things that they loved as boys have too often had to do). Which associations you carry, depends on who and what you are. Most have some truth.

What seems to me odd, is that the actions of one psychopathic loser who appropriated this flag for teh sake of its worst meaning shoudl suddenly make it an issue when it was not so before. We should not give deranged hate-mongers like Dylan Roof so much power.

I suspect the underlying purpose of making the Confederate flag the issue, here. is to deflect political energy from the real issue, namely the excessive role of guns in American life. It's a displacement activity. Do I care if the CSA flag goes away ? Not greatly - it is not my symbol, and it carries too much freight of African American suffering and denial. And yet - if it is banned from any place of semi-respectability, I'll feel that it's an act of historical forgetting, and the suppression of many meanings for the sake of one. Such is our need for spurious, cost-free demonstrations of virtue in this post-religious age, we regard history itself as just another ground for shallow posturing.

[pietillidie]

^Nice post. That's not a hint of postmodernism I detect there

[stui magpie]

Don't make them repaint the General Lee.

[David]