Protests at the flying of the Confederate flag on government buildings in the American South are spreading. The angry calls come in the wake of the gunning down of nine black parishioners in a Charleston Church by a sinister young white supremacist, Dylann Roof who photographed himself posing in front of the flag. The flag is associated with racism because between 1861 and 1864, a confederation of ultimately 13 southern American states fought the federal forces for the right to secede from the Union. However, the original trigger came from seven southern states that relied upon black slavery to work their plantations. Thus the flag of the Confederacy became synonymous with the oppression of blacks, even though there were other pressing issues of states' rights that also drove the conflict. The defeat of the Confederacy, the widespread destruction in southern states in what ultimately became a war of attrition and the economic colonization by "carpetbaggers" from the North caused scars which took generations to heal. The flag of the former Confederacy was used by the odious Ku Klux Klan in their campaigns of racist hatred as, even into the 1960s, some southern states resisted the granting of equal rights to blacks. Yet it is only now that this banner of a failed political project is being damned as a symbol of racist hatred. For tourists to the southern states looking for romantic echoes of "Gone with the Wind" and the old plantations, the Confederate flag is an attractive memento. This said, it is distinctly odd that any state government buildings in the South should choose to fly the colors of rebellion, even for the amusement of tourists. The United States has moved on. The Confederacy and its flag are history. Unfortunately, racist bigots like the Charleston mass murderer choose to flaunt themselves in front of the old flag, in the same was that neo-Nazis in Europe parade with clearly recognizable adaptions of the Nazi German swastika, which itself is banned in many countries, not least Germany itself. Is the next step for protestors in the US to call for the banning of the Confederate flag entirely? In the wake of the Charleston massacre, the far more important outcry has been against America's gun culture and the right, enshrined in the US Constitution, for citizens to arm themselves, to the teeth if they wish, with weapons of awesome destructive power. There has been massacre after massacre by demented individuals who have slaughtered school children, students, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics or just anyone who happened to come within their range. With each lunatic act of savagery, the cry has gone up for gun-control. But the National Rifle Association with its powerful lobby machine in Washington has resisted and continues to resist any attempt to remove guns from the most heavily-armed society in the world. Their argument is that it is not the gun that kills people but the person holding it. Would the NRA also argue that it is not the Confederate flag that causes murderous racism, but the bigots who wrap it around themselves? Nine people died last week in Charleston because some stupid parents were able to go out and buy a gun for their weird son. How can that process be in the least bit defensible?
