As a Southerner, I have learned that, to some, the Confederate Flag is truly about heritage. To others, it is about racism. And to some who wave the flag, it is about both, and they use the heritage argument in polite company to mask their latent racism.

Here's what I wonder--could there be an alternative symbol for those who wish to commemorate the lives and efforts of the CSA against "Northern aggression"? I really don't see one, as the CSA existed for ~4 years, so not a lot of history to go with that.

But unless and until we find a viable substitute symbol, we'll be stuck with this debate.

I think an image of Eric Cartman with his little Robert E. Lee beard, holding a bottle of s'mores schnapps ought to be sufficient.

I suppose they could try any of the three national flags of the confederacy. On a sidenote, I find it hilarious that they didn't get their national flag right until the final month of the war. The first one was too easily confused with the US flag, and the second one looked like a flag of surrender.

Your's is the mainstream argument I grew up with, so refined, so tricky! But now I think you are not so clever as we are stupid.

You morph a war for slavery and slavery's extension into the West, a slave empire, which is EXACTLY what your "heritage" is all about, into some kind of just struggle for state's rights vs. the "evil" free farming, free labor "north"!

Are you kidding? WHAT heritage other than slavery and treachery!

You all promised to end slavery within 20 years at the First Continental Congress, and you LIED, you found it inconvenient to keep your promise back in 1806!!

Then you fomented a Civil War which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Americans because you wanted to extend slavery into the Western Territories.

Then after the Civil War, after all the hell you brought down on us, including making my family lose everything they had, you made a deal that you would stop fomenting rebellion and tying down federal troops if you could be left alone to have Jim Crow Fuedalism while the rest of the nation had free farming and free labor, which kept the PEOPLE of the South poor as could be for 100 years!

And as if that were not enough, you at the same time enforced a brutal racist Apartied on the entire nation for 100 years, and murderously resisted change in the 1960s!

Now have formed in an effort to take the USA down entirely, to turn it into a religious state.

You have no heritage to be proud of, and you still do not. If you all would renounce what you did, then you'd have something to be truly proud of, and our nation might truly be great.

But you continually try to paper over it, to make it seem like someone else was to blame for what YOU did, and what Huckabee said was appealing to every scum bellied racist in the territory -- it was saying to them, "Don't worry, I'm a racist just like you."

I'm so sick of it.

Thanks, Hitchens...for this I will now forgive you for your other sins.

Racism IS the heritage! The only heritage!! There is no other heritage on which to speak.

<<On a sidenote, I find it hilarious that they didn't get their national flag right until the final month of the war. The first one was too easily confused with the US flag, and the second one looked like a flag of surrender.>>

You are right about the flag, however, do you think that the Stars and Stripes flew over the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Most flags take a while to work out. Many Rev War soldiers fought under just state flags, or even Franklin's "Don't Tread on Me" flag. I can't recall the exact birth date of the original Betsy Ross flag, but I seem to recall it took a few years to come up with it too.

And many people who are into Civil War history display one of the Confederate National flags. You just don't realize it unless you know what they look like. For whatever reason, they're not seen as evil. Which makes you wonder what people are trying to supress when they say don't fly the battle flag?

I'm not always on the side of Christopher Hitchens...but I'm always happy when I AM on the side of Christopher Hitchens...and this time I'm REALLY on the side of Christopher Hitchens.

As an evangelical christian and a Huckabee supporter, I am disturbed by his pandering in South Carolina. The truth is that Mr. Huckabee is not a racist as was demonstrated by the fact that as governer he appointed over 300 blacks to state positions and received 47% of the black vote the last time that he ran for office. He appointed far more blacks to positions than any Arkansas governor before him. I do agree with Mr. Hitchens about the significance and the real meaning of the flag, but it does not mean that Mr. Huckabee is guilty of racism as is indicated by his record as governor. He is guilty of pandering however and that is disturbing. Equally disturbing is the bigotry that Mr. Hitchens continues to propogate toward people of faith.

Equally disturbing ? Hypocricy is the most unforgivable sin. Hitchens is exactly what he claims to be regardless of what anyone says or thinks. No matter what else you may say about him you cannot, with a straght face, accuse him of pandering. He has consistently supported the most unpopular war in the history of the nation, waged by an administration that he is politically at odds with, (alienating a good portion of his paying "audience" in the process), while Huckabee seems only too willing to get down on all fours and "pander" to the basest prejudice of the lowest common denominator in order to garner a few more votes. Every Christian Evangelical should be outraged and insulted by Huckabee's pandering, (as you correctly describe it). Nothing would do more to convince me of their sincerity and to indeed prove Mr. Hitchens wrong in this regard than to see them up in arms over it. I won't hold my breath.

That entire heritage argument rests on the assumption that there is a heritage worth honoring. I would dispute that there is anything worthy of honor in the Confederacy. It was an army of traitors to their country, in rebellion to prolong and continue slavery. What is honorable about that? The treason or the slavery?

In fact, the South has never fully rejoined the Union and remains more Southern than American to this day. The rest of us are expected to vote for southerners because these traitors won't vote for any American, just southerners. Even in the reality shows we see no-talent southerns carried along for weeks because of southern parochialism.

Personally, I would just as soon let "y'all" secede and become the 3rd rate agricultural dependent state that the South deserves and free the rest of us from the Southern anchor that drags us down and retards progress.

Sigh. You know, Hitchens almost had me until the end of his column when he says we're unable to see the Confederate flag as anything but "offensive" to blacks. Well, let me rephrase that. I agree with his larger points but I really hate how he put "offensive" in quotation marks, like Black people are somehow wrong for thinking this, that we're mistaken about what the flag represents and that we should be offended by the Confederate flag for something else besides that.

And I really get tired of seeing other people try to defend the confederate flag as being more about "heritage" than anything else. Stop insulting everyone's intelligence with that crap. We all know what that flag represents: slavery, generations of racial and ethnic intimidation, and let's not forget secession and four chaotic years of a divided America...let's stop pretending we don't know what the flag means. I would say Huckabee should know better but he's smart in pandering to those kinds of Southerners (I'm not lumping all Southerners together, don't jump on my case) who think it's okay to wave that thing around and try to whitewash the history behind it.

Imagine if a well dressed gentleman and his lovely family were to visit a National Cemetery on Veterans Day to lay a wreath for a dead son and they all wore Swastika armbands because Grandfather was a brave, loyal and dedicated soldier of the SS. They might feel they were merely honoring the heritage of military service, paying tribute to the memory of his sacrifice, and still believing in the sovereignty of the Reich and all the "good" things it meant to the German people at the time. Do you doubt that there are still Germans who would feel such things and want to honor them?Ronald Reagan did. Yet what is wrong with this picture? Yes, history may depict the struggle of Northern aggression as something to which "loyal" southerners felt they had to respond to, irregardless of their position on the institutions of the South. But the reality is that people get used, lied to, and tricked into believing that their interests are irrevocably tied to the interests of the "state", be it the South or Nazi Germany or George Bush's Amerika. So hold dear that symbol of your 'honor", your bereavement, and believe in the things that never were, and never will be. Until you're ready to let go of what you don't need, you'll have to go down with the Gray.again and again.....

Yes, racism is the heritage; but racism was invented to justify modern slavery and then fuedal JIm Crow sharecropping...there is something WORSE that racism, there is what gives rise to racism. That some greedy, selfish, pornographic psychopath can deamonize an entire people so that he can profit from them is where the devil lies, if you ask me.

Mike Huckabee, Christopher Hitchens and the Confederate Flag

From time to time, some political hack or other self-righteous individual feels compelled to trash the Confederate flag and unfailingly equates it with the promotion of slavery and other forms of bigotry. Christopher Hitchens is just the latest to weigh in on this topic. Mr. Hitchens is an amazing individual as he seemingly has a modicum of intelligence but has the uncanny ability to be wrong on just about every issue upon which he expounds. His smarmy “coolest guy in the room” attitude displayed in his recent posting is vintage Hitchens. His contempt for those “lesser” indivuduals, especially Christians and Southerners, is painfully obvious. God forbid that someone is BOTH a Christian and a Southern. Oh wait, I mentioned God so I probably offended the esteemed Mr. Hitchens.

Those, like Mr. Hitchens and his ilk, that insist on equating the Confederate flag with pro-slavery, bigotry, racism and the like are either historically illiterate or have another agenda, or both. In order to put the Confederate flag topic in proper context, it is necessary to briefly discuss what the Civil War was all about. Actually, there are those who think “Civil War” is something of a misnomer. Typically, a civil war is when one faction in a nation tries to seize power and take over from the “ruling” faction. This wasn’t what happened in 1861. The Southern states decided that they had enough discrimination and unfairness from the Northern states and voted to secede from the Union. Each state voluntarily joined the Union and felt they had the right to voluntarily withdraw from the Union. The South did not ever intend to “take over” the United States but simply wanted to withdraw and form a new country. The Northern states felt otherwise and we all know what happened next. One can argue the rightness of the South’s cause, but there was never any intent to “take over” the United States from the North. Perhaps the “War Between the States” is a better description of the subsequent events although the term “War of Northern Aggression” is sometime bandied about!

Mr. Hitchens is obviously blindly following those individuals, including some “prominent historians,” by maintaining that the Civil War (or whatever you choose to call it) was fought over slavery. This ridiculous notion is present in virtually all history text books. The war was most assuredly NOT fought over slavery. Slavery, at best, was a peripheral issue that both sides exploited for emotional purposes. The North, in particular, exploited the issue in order to give a patina of “righteousness” or “moral high ground” to their reasons for going to war with the South. Surely no reasonable person today can claim that slavery is anything but a morally reprehensible institution. The fact that virtually all of our founding fathers were slave holders does not, in any way, justify or mitigate the practice. Also, the agrarian nature of the South’s economy from pre-Colonial days resulted in the widespread use of slaves to work the large farms and plantations. However, by the time of the 1860s, slavery was becoming economically untenable and it was only a matter of time before economics, if not morality, would have resulted in an end to the horrid practice. Even sainted (in the eyes of many) Abraham Lincoln was not above making political “compromises” that resulted in slavery remaining intact in certain states. While Lincoln could never have been accused of being pro-slavery, it was not until the Civil War began to drag on and started to become unpopular in the North that ole Abe resorted to the slavery “card” and became something of a born-again Abolitionist.

The average Confederate soldier was a poor farm boy whose family couldn’t afford to have a slave if they wanted one and who surely wasn’t keen on suffering and dying to protect the rights of the rich plantation owners to keep their human chattel. Likewise, the average Union soldier wouldn’t have been overjoyed about bleeding and dying to protect the Northeast industrial cartels or the right of the more privileged states to continue to impose unjust tariffs and other restrictions on the less well-heeled Southern states. It was much easier to persuade “Billy Yank” to fight “Johnny Reb” if the struggle could be couched in moral terms rather than economic and political terms (which is what the war was actually about). Anyone who believes that the war was fought over slavery is historically illiterate and has fallen for almost 1 ½ centuries of distortion. Remember, the winners write the history books!

The Confederate flag is NOT a symbol of racism, pro-slavery, anti-Americanism or anything of the sort. It is a symbol of the principles that the United States was originally founded upon…the rights of each state to be equal to each other and for the Federal government to be secondary, with only a very few exceptions. Unfortunately, the situation has reversed today and the Federal government is a behemoth with an insatiable appetite for our tax dollars and the rights of the individual states are all but nonexistent. Like the old saying goes, I love my country but I don’t always like my government!

I will close by stating that I am proud to be an American and I am proud to be a Southerner…in that order. I am tired of hearing historically illiterate morons, such as Christopher Hitchens, with some sort of political ax to grind spout inanities about the “racism” and “evil” of the Confederate flag. Such individuals need to be more concerned about the state of our woeful public school system and the egregious abuses that those legislators of the “liberal persuasion” are constantly trying to impose on the hard-working taxpayers of this great nation.

Mr. Huckabee can be rightly criticized for a number of things, but his stand on the Confederate flag isn’t among them. Mr. Hitchens needs to go back to his impassioned defense of atheism and leave American history to those who know what they’re talking about.

Ah yes, the south was racist and the north was pure. Truth is, free blacks in the North prior to and after the "Civil" War were treated quite the sub-human. Read Tocqueville, who said it was ironic that the races actually co-existed better in places where slavery existed than where it did not.

This was not an American Southerner, this was a foreigner with no biases either way.

I find it amusing that our esteemed author here balls about the south's cruel invasion of the north. This is akin to bemoaning France's invasion of Germany in 1945. It was Lincoln who raised an army to invade the south, not the other way around. (By the way, when the shots were fired at Fort Sumter, there were more slaves in the Union than in the Confederacy -- I know this is rather inconvenient fact for many to digest, but it does shine light as to the real reasons for the war).

The Confederate army always paid for what it requisitioned (even though in dollars that would become worthless upon their defeat) and although it burned down the city of Chambersbourg, Pa., this was one city in retaliation for the hundreds of southern cities and towns that were treated like Dresden before and after Lee's incursion into the north. So where did honor sit?

The "westward expansion of slavery" argument is also precious. Anyone who can read on at least a third-grade level should know that Lincoln's opposition to slavery in the territories was to hold it secure for WHITE labor. Lincoln hated blacks and was a leader in the colonization movement to remove blacks from this country. Ever heard of Liberia?

History is written by the winners of conflicts and unfortunately the spin over the last 140 years has drowned out any reasonable discussion of facts about those days. Facts and days which have not been forgotten by many southerners generation after generation.

If people would read books other than by the academic shills and protectors of the federal empire status quo, there would not be so many posts on blogs dripping with embarassing ignorance.