The confederate flag is worse than the apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia flags.
When everyone saw those flags on this terrorist's jacket, the response was "whoa, this guy is a racist nut". And they were right. But the confederacy was a far worse place for black people than either of those white-ruled African nations. And yet the confederate flag flies at the South Carolina capitol.
To add to this, there is the sick irony that the Emanuel AME Church is located on Calhoun St. As in John C Calhoun, a man who is famous for passionately advocating for the right of white people to enslave black people. And he isn't the only confederate "hero" that still has streets, schools, and plazas named after him.
At risk of offending Godwin, this is tantamount to a German province flying the Nazi flag and having streets named Hitler and Eichmann. Lindsey Graham was right when he said that this is part of who we are, and a reminder of a war that we fought. But the fact that there are horrific episodes in our history doesn't mean that we have to glorify them. The confederacy existed for one reason: they wanted to preserve slavery. It wasn't a morally ambiguous war. The confederacy was wrong, period.
There is something seriously wrong in South Carolina. And in the South generally. And in the entire United States. This isn't an indictment of South Carolinians, any more than pointing out that China still clings to the Chairman Mao cult of personality is an indictment of the Chinese people. But that is an indictment as China as a nation.
Many nations have committed atrocities in the past. But the way they recall those periods in their histories says a lot about where they are in the present. South Carolina, and by extension the United States, is failing miserably in this regard.
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South African apartheid, as it developed, became a scheme for relocating the designated underclass to barren patches of land that were proclaimed to be independent countries: then, to work, you needed a pass to get into South Africa, and overwise you sat, slowly starving, in your little fictitiously-independent "homeland." Lots of "instructive violence" (including murder) was needed to impose that regime
