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4/07/2003 04:49:00 AM | Timothy Patriotism and a tale of two flags I am not of the De Genova school of thought on U.S. patriotism, that says patriotism is inseparable from white supremacy, imperialism and the like. But I suddenly wondered if there was not a giant inconsistency on the part of patriots on the left who do not deny the terrible things that have been done by the U.S.: what do they say about the confederate flag? Why, generally pretty similar things to what 'hard-core' leftists might say about U.S. patriotism and the U.S. flag. So why do many people view one form of patriotism (or pride) as acceptable but the other is not? (This obviously is not a problem for people who fly both flags on the back of their ride). I remember in high school when I went to a Youth in Government national conference (which happened to always be held in North Carolina), there was a bill proposed to ban the confederate emblem from state flags or some other similar thing (what exactly, I forget). There was this one con speaker who got up and impassionately listed all the atrocities of the U.S., saying under what flag were the Native Americans killed? He would point to the American flag and say This flag! He'd go on, saying under what flag were the Japanese interned, what flag were the Tuskigee experiments conducted under, and so on. His point was that with all that had been done under the U.S. flag, how can you condemn the confederate flag? That speaker made a point that each flag has stains. Yet surely we do not want indulge in extreme patriotic relativism and say that the Nazi flag can be divorced from the history of Nazi Germany or such nonsense. The speaker gave a pretty powerful speech, and I am thinking what I would say against him today. For now I'll note that some symbols and concepts are worth trying to retake and define the meaning of, while others have been filled with such bile and venom so as to be largely irretrievable. Can one maintain that one flag is so stained and irredeemable and the other may be sullied but still washable? Part of the problem with the confederate flag is that while I have met earnest southerners expressing pride without seeing themselves as racist; yet at the same time a lot of people (in the North and South) do use the flag as a racist symbol, and it is seen that way by most African Americans. So it's important to look at both how people use the symbol and how it is perceived. I'm not sure how the U.S. flag and U.S. patriotism is seen in the eyes of the world and its victims, but from where should we look when assessing the meaning of the flag and worthiness of a concept like patriotism? How do we judge if a history ever becomes too bad to show pride in? perma link |
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