Posted By: Ric Savage  on Monday, March 10, 2008

I am a Civil War enthusiast and a Civil War relic collector and sometimes dealer. I have been studying the war since I was eleven years old and I had six ancestors that fought for the Confederacy.  One died in prison at Camp Douglas, Illinois in 1864. Now all that aside, I take offense at the comparisons of the Confederate flag to the Nazi flag, and I take exception with the idea that the Confederacy was an evil institution.  You cannot look back nearly 150 years in American history with the mindset and concepts of 2008.  Slavery was A cause of the Civil War but it was not the ONLY cause.  There were many interwoven issues of tariffs, taxes, and the distribution of Federal dollars to the states. Slavery was the divide and the balance of power.  To call the people in that era racists in the context you call a person a racist today is disingenious at best.  Lincoln did not feel that blacks were equal to whites and at one point flirted with sending the blacks to South America.  Lincoln also did not wish to end slavery in the states in which it then existed.  The people then saw slavery as the status quo and while many felt is was wrong, they did not view those holding slaves as "racists" in today's context.  The Nazis, on the other hand, believed in genocide and mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, Jehova's Witnesses, retarded people, people with birth defects, slavs, and anyone else not Aryan.  To compare the Holocaust to the American Civil War is assonine at best and ignorant of history at worst.  Anyone making such a foolish comparison needs to stop jerking the knees and actually read and study history.  As to kids wearing Confederate flags on their shirts in school...context is the key.  If they wear it as a symbol of their heritage, leave them alone.  If they wear it with the intent to intimidate as your "Redneck Nation" kids, then they need to be disciplined just as the black youth that wear gang colors.  They are one in the same in this instance.  Tolerance means that I can appreciate my Southern heritage and it means you can appreciate your African heritage and both can co-exist.  By perpetuating this race war over a flag, no one is fairly served.  The current flag of the United States permitted slavery for the first 90 years of it's existance.  The Washington monument is dedicated to a slaveowner and the nation's capital is named after a slaveowner.  Slavery is a part of our past as is the Confederacy.  You cannot erase it, and you should not make those of us that take pride in our Southern heritage feel as if we are somehow all racist Nazis.  That is as much a stereotype as thinking all black youth are gang-bangers.  Tolerance is a two-way street.

Posted By: Dale O.  on Monday, March 10, 2008

I am a history teacher in NJ, which hardly makes me a member of "Redneck Nation." History has not always been kind to many people, but it is just that history, and in the past. Hopefully, we haved learned something from our mistakes. For you to compare the brave men of the Confederacy, who fought to defend their homeland and not the institution of slavery with the Nazis, is just plain dumb. Maybe your efforts would be better served fighting slavery where it exists today. Perhaps you should start with Haiti.