Dixie

When the controversy erupted over the symbolism of the public display of the Confederate flag at the time of the tragic murder of the black churchgoers by that white supremacist lunatic, I was surprised that no one brought up the possibility that the flag of the Old South might best be equated with flying a flag with the Nazi swastika.  After all when one thinks of the Confederate states, at least when I do, thoughts turn immediately to the horror and brutality and human sacrifice of the enslaved African.  It took me a long time to get to that understanding.  When I was a student in school no one ever mentioned slavery except in the most general terms.  In 1939 I saw Gone With The Wind when it first came out, and it formed my notion of life in the antebellum south,  It wasn't until I read Bullwhip Days as a mature man that I had any idea at all about the truth of the South.  The book is a compilation of testimony taken from elderly men and women who had once been enslaved in which a wide range of attitudes is explored, but among them is the reminiscence of the cruelest of tortures, whippings, and the maltreatment of human beings that made me cringe.  It was roughly the same time that the newsreel films about the concentration camps were coming out with the same sickening attention to human depravity. Recently I read The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which is a detailed account of what the civilian population in Germany were up to from 1939 to 1945 in which among other things the author describes the mood of 1943 after the defeats at Stalingrad, Tunisia, the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and the intense bombing of Berlin.  Everywhere the people were talking of retribution, how the dreadful bombings were their retribution for the killing of the Jews; everybody knew perfectly well what had happened to the Jews.  In none of their lamentations, I might note, was there any suggestion of guilt.  In the American South white persons were able to see enslaved persons in the fields, enslaved people chained together on roads being moved from one place to another often hundreds of miles a constant visual reminder of cruelty, torture, and intimidation.  After the civil war the aggressive repression of the newly freed black people, the constant reduction of them to poverty, the rapes, the lynchings, made the entire southern countryside one giant concentration camp for black people. One constant both in the South and in Germany was the constant attempts to humiliate Jews and blacks, to make them feel less than persons. Despite some amelioration of their condition, nothing has ever been done to redress the basic wrong, no sums of money have been paid out to the black population of this country as Germany has paid reparations to the few surviving Jews in this world; no consideration of the fact of their immense contribution of their slave labor to the growth and prosperity of this country in the early centuries for which they were paid nothing.  No testimony has been put in place as for instance one finds throughout Europe, I am thinking of the plaques marking places where partisans were shot or hanged.  One could imagine the same where lynchings took place over the south.  How ironic it is that members of the Walton family have erected a museum of American art at Bentonville Arkansas, ironic because what has been the contribution to American culture from the former slave states? or why is Walton money used to build this entity when their major money making enterprise, Walmarts, is notorious for paying such low wages that workers must look to food stamps for a supplement to their wages, one might almost say slave wages.