The Art of Apology

Why the Confederacy is back in fashion amongst the alt-right

News of the mob of Trump supporters who besieged the Capitol building on the 6th January has certainly been well-covered — and rightly provoked outrage nationally. But in the midst of this anti-democratic stunt, the sight of a confederate flag amongst the chaos was a harrowing sight. For these so-called ‘patriots’, the endorsement of the Confederacy is a contradictory blow to the very fabric of the Union.

It is nothing new — anyone who has spent any time in the rural south will be familiar with the strange sentimentality that many Southerners hold in relation to America’s long deceased, pro-slavery cousin. The alt-right who embrace this fondness are often fervent confederate apologists. So-called ‘flaggers’ have conducted attacks (see below)

Almost a month after Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners at Charleston’s Mother Emmanuel AME church, a convoy of pickup trucks drove by a young African American child’s birthday party hurling racial epithets and pointing firearms. On February 27, 2017, several among the group of “flaggers” were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for aggravated assault, making terroristic threats and violating a state gang act.

Fundamentally, the conflict lies at the differing interpretation of the remarkably polarising war-banner. Many white Americans in 1991 (70%) insisted that it is a symbol of southern pride. 63% of Americans were opposed to the removal of confederate iconography from the state flags of Mississippi. Amongst black Americans, the interpretation could not be more diametrically different.

But the Confederate flag and values are not compatible with America. The Confederacy branded itself as a safe haven for slavery. No American, white nor black, can endorse a nation that violated the principle ‘all men are created equal’ so openly. Sure, the Union took a while to fully recognise those values, and it is still by all means a work in progress, but it is rooted in the pursuit of freedom and equality in a way the Confederacy never was.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote, “It’s not even past.” The divisions among Americans over a war a century and a half old certainly attest to that truth.