They Risk Upsetting The Bulk of Their Customer Base

[The Grand Nudger]

This is a battle flag that american soldiers fought and died under.

Nonsense. They were Confederate soldiers, not American.  Simply because they were born in America doesn't make them American soldiers.

You're equivocating.

This is the battle flag of armies that fought for a nation which mandated slavery to be legal throughout its purview. It was written into the Confederate constitution that no state could restrict the right to own another human being, so the "state's rights" argument is bunk. Those rebel soldiers -- they were rebel soldiers, not American soldiers -- they fought to defend a Constitution which mandated the recognition of slavery throughout its jurisdiction.

I have no doubt they were brave men, and no doubt that inside their limited moral horizon they were doing what they thought was right ... but that flag represents a nation that in its Constitution mandated chattel slavery.

They were Americans, and rebels......like a certain group of Americans before them, and they were fighting because they were told the Union soldiers were coming to take their land and rape their women (and that they would win glory, and honor, and all the things we tell our soldiers -today-), not for states rights, not for a constitution, not even to defend the institution of slavery.   That's what they were -used- for.  I'm under no illusions about the morality of the south in that time -or this time-...but I;m also under no illusions about the morality of the north in that time or this time.  Again, that was not the flag of a nation, but the battle flag of a combat unit.

That I have to explain that over and over only goes to show the totality of our mythmaking about that flag, those men, and even their opponents. No one asks me to justify my POW flag, or my unit flag, or my stars and stripes. The conversation has been -poisoned- before it began, and rather than lay that at the feet of those who poisoned it...I have to defend it against the story they concocted. That those who did this just so happen to be the KKK -and- those against their bigotry and idiocy, that this was a joint operation between them, I'm asked to ignore...in favor of closing the book -as written- by both of those groups together. The people who flew that flag simply were not the bad men we have made them out to be, but, history being written by the victor - it's understandable that many see them that way (and of course we don't see our soldiers today as villains, despite being used as thugs for the oil industry and equally shitty moneyed interests as those present in the institution of slavery). The north had no particular interest in the lives of african americans, and freeing the slaves was a token gesture, just words, really. They were free to do exactly as they had always done -where they had always done it-...and for the same people as before, who still regarded them as subhuman regardless of which side of the mason dixon they happened to be on. This is the uncomfortable truth about our history that we hope to hide by telling such a story in the first place, about the valiant north fighting a war to end slavery against the villainous south.

There was no confederate army standing between us and making good on the promise we made between 1864 and 1964....and yet...........