Do you have any respect for anyone involved in the Confederacy?

[Mechaman]

The slaves on the plantations?

[Mechaman]

Okay, let's pretend like the Confederates were the only slave owning evil bastards. Let's ignore the fact that slavery was still legal  in the border states of the Union after the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Union didn't fight to free the slaves, they fought to preserve the Union. Get your facts straight and get off your moral high horse.

Don't even get me started on the war crimes of one William Tecumseh Sherman.

I am not a Confederate sympathsizer, but I hate it when people act like they have the morally higher ground just because they were the winners.

And like other people have noted, the Union wasn't without racist leaders:

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[Mechaman]

Having owned and/or read hundreds, possibily thousands by now, of letters written by Union and Confederate soldiers (and a modest number of diaries), I can assure you that...

 --  there was no shortage of northern soldiers who hated and detested blacks, slaves and Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln's "n*gger" war, many of them called it.

--  there were many Confederate soldiers who were basically ambivalent about slavery and who had a deep sense of affection for the slaves.  I do not presume to comment on the peculiar nature of the white-black relationship in the South.  I merely report it.

It should also be noted that...

-- Slavery was hardly a southern institution in this country.  The north benefitted for many years from human slavery.  You may rightly credit us Yankees with "seeing the light" first.  But let's not get too haughty.  The British "saw the light" before any of us.

-- Conditions for blacks in the Union north were only marginally better than for slaves.  This does not excuse the diabolical institution of slavery.  But it should prod us to greater humility in our criticism of our Southern cousins.

-- While I regard the Confederacy as a rebel state that instigated hostilities with us, it would be exceedinly dishonest of me to pretend that all Confederates were brutes, war criminals or monsters.  Likewise, to pretend that Union soldiers and officers were all humane is obscene. You can point to "war crimes" committed by each side.

--  In a related vein, and I have addressed this before here, perhaps the greatest travesty of this period is how prisoners of war were treated.  One always hears of the inhumane and brutal treatment of Union POWs at Andersonville.  Fair enough.  Andersonville was a hell hole of shocking proportions -- and even though the Confederacy lacked the resources to feed these brave men -- arrangements for exchange or even a simple handover of prisoners could have been made.  In the name of humanity.  But before I strut around like a morally superior peacock, I must point out that my beloved Union had the means and the goods to care for the needs to Confederate POWs.  In some places, such as Point Lookout, captured Rebs were treated very well.  In others, conditions were almost as vile as in Andersonville.  Elmira was a pit of despair.  Johnson's Island saw the preventable deaths of many a Confederate officer.  And most disgusting of all -- Camp Douglas in Chicago -- was a swamp where positively nothing was done to stem disease and death.  Little was done to ease the hunger of our Southern brethren.  And perhaps the greatest offense -- Chicago gentry often gathered around the prison on higher ground to gawk at, insult and throw objects at the Confederates there. 

I won't buy one minute's worth of Southern Heritage tripe about how the slaves were well-treated, better off and lucky. I don't, for a second, subscribe to the notion that a state has the right to say "screw you" to the rest of America and simply secede.  But it's categorically wrong to behave as though there were all white hats on the northern side and all black hats on the Southern one.

If the Civil War were only beginning today, I am sure I would fight for the Union and against the institution of slavery.  Not because my Southern neighbors are evil...but because I refuse to live in an America without them.

This post is by far the most goddamn honest post I've read on this subject.

[Mechaman]

I hate the confederacy, would like to see their flag made illegal, and what not. But I hold respect for Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the confederate soldiers.

So much for freedom of speech.

In my mind as long as it's legal for people to have flags of Soviet Russia, People's Republic of China, and Nazi Germany, nations that made the word "genocide" popular, people should have the right to wave the Confederate or any damn flag they want too!

[Mechaman]

No but it's not exactly "socially acceptable" to publicly fly. The Confederate flag should be treated the same way.

I'm all for society looking down on people who fly these flags as retards and what not. Laws that ban such flags though suck.

[Mechaman]

Given that slavery existed for 89 years in the United States, and that the USA has a history of racism towards blacks, Japanese, Chinese, Native Americans, among other ethnic groups, should it be morally unacceptable to fly the American flag in public?

The flag ban brigade just got owned!

[Mechaman]

The Confederacy was certainly more moral and noble than the Union as a whole

Slavery is moral?

In libertarian-land, it is.

Wow, your anti-libertarian hackery is outrageous.
Just because libertarians liked Jefferson and just because he owned slaves doesn't mean we like slavery. BTW, who the hell are you to say what libertarians approve of? Let us, the libertarians, tell you about the libertarian view of slavery.

From a libertarian view (ie not the misrepresented view of libertarianism that Xahar always bashes), slavery is unethical and immoral because the institution of slavery requires that one individual have authority and ownership of the rights of another human being. That is unlibertarian. How the hell you equate libertarianism with slavery is beyond me.

BTW, I don't agree with the Confederacy, way to attach a broad closedminded label on a bunch of people.

[Mechaman]

Given that slavery existed for 89 years in the United States, and that the USA has a history of racism towards blacks, Japanese, Chinese, Native Americans, among other ethnic groups, should it be morally unacceptable to fly the American flag in public?

The flag ban brigade just got owned!

I think the flag waving "patriotic" brigade just got owned worse.

That too my friend. Muricah: the land of the free and the Nativist.