#BURNING CONFEDERATE FLAGS

[ausetkmt]

THIS BURNS IN DETROIT EVERY MEMORIAL DAY

It’s Memorial Day on Monday. Some Michiganders will be visiting cemeteries, others will attend parades, and many will be lighting up the grill.

One person will be burning flags.

Not the United States flag. The flag that’s often a symbol of the Confederacy, the Stars and Bars Confederate battle flag.

John Sims, a multimedia artist and a Detroit native, who currently lives in the South, joined Stateside to explain why he burns Confederate flags every Memorial Day. 

"I'm not doing this to change pro-Confederate folks' minds," Sims said. "I'm doing this for people who have felt and are connected to the trauma and pain of the Confederate Flag and all that it represents. I'm doing this for me. I'm doing this for people who are looking for ways and rituals and processes and art performances as a vehicle to heal and to reflect and to gain energy and to stay in reflection about this historical legacy of American racism and segregation and division."

Sims has burned and buried the Confederate Flag all over the country, but he's bringing what he calls his "multimedia memorial" of the Confederate Flag to his hometown of Detroit. The event will have eulogies, remembrances, and a symbolic cremation where attendees will have a chance to pause and reflect.

Events like his have stirred up quite a bit of controversy wherever he has gone, and he is likely to do the same for the "Burn and Bury Memorial: Detroit 2017".   

The irony, of course, is that roughly 90,000 men from Michigan served in the Union Forces during the Civil War, including 1,600 black soldiers. Nearly 15,000 Michigan men died fighting the Confederacy. Yet, if you drive around the state today, Confederate battle flags can be seen flying at homes, and as decal stickers on vehicles.

Waving the flag in Michigan at the time of the Civil War would have been seen as traitorous by people in this state.

Listen to the full interview to hear details about the event in Detroit on Memorial Day and why Sims thinks the Confederate Flag is still popular in his home state of Michigan.

(Subscribe to the Stateside podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or with this RSS link)

[kropotkindersurprise]

May 1, 2023 - Some antifascists used May Day to collect and dispose of some roadside trash from their area in Georgia, USA. [video]

[stormclawponyrises]

played gartic phone with the comic creators the other day, thought id share some of my pieces im proud of

(longish post)

"Did you get the update?"

"Jimmy Fallon: What inspires you?"

I can't remember what the prompts were for these two but it made a lot more sense in context:

[shadowcat222]

Well maybe seeing as I broke down into a sobbing fit my mom will stop talking me well into midnight

[unsuresoul]

So a little while back a coworker was trying to get a mutual acquaintance to come to our restaurant while we were slow by telling them I was working. I told him that they already knew I was working because I saw them earlier and talked to them, and he just looked at me and said 'let me cook'. I replied with the first thing that popped into my head and that was ' You know I'm pretty sure I heard my neighbor tell his wife that before their house mysteriously burned down'

[geckomilks]

Louisiana we could've had gary chambers

[interviewwiththewerepire]

manifesting that gary chambers is going to kick kennedy out of the senate tomorrow 🙏🙏🙏

[utilitycaster]

Hot take: with the way the campaign is going, Ashton is getting dangerously close to turning into someone who has a "don't tread on me" flag. Fully "the reason I am upset by people getting stepped on by the boots of those in power is because the 'little guy' (me) doesn't have the opportunity to be the boot". Which makes all of the people at the beginning of the campaign acting like Ashton was a 'true leftist' punk instead of a bitter and angry person with no direction in life and next to no principles hilarious in retrospect. People love to forget that sometimes the ones rebelling against those in power have a busted view of what power is, does, and who is currently wielding it.

Hi anon!

So I'm broadly in agreement. I don't think this is a terribly hot take not because it's wrong but because I've just reblogged like 5 pretty popular posts that are all saying "Ashton's teetering on the edge of full manifest destiny/blood and soil/humans are the virus ideologies" which all go rather further than just a shitty libertarian flag*.

I have a post in queue somewhere to this effect but there's a weird very Tumblr/Twitter/otherwise terminally online belief that anyone who's experienced systemic oppression is automatically going to have Good Politics from it when that's simply not true. Plenty of people look for someone else to blame, and they blame another oppressed group they don't happen to belong to, or something utterly unrelated. Like, I think a lot of punks are genuinely trying to live in a world that is unkind to them, but a lot of punks do so by taking a fuckload of drugs and kicking the shit out of someone who looks weird. I made this post YEARS ago, literally, very early in the campaign; it is ahistoric to act like punk automatically equals leftist when it started as an aesthetic to sell clothes at a London boutique and when homophobic, misogynistic, and racist subcultures were rampant within it. We remember and uplift the punks who weren't like that, but something that really gets me is like. I know some metalheads and a lot of them are REALLY open about having to learn to spot the metalheads who are here to talk about Norse Superiority vs. the people who just want to scream about Satan for fun. For some reason a lot of people in the CR fandom acted like punks were exempted from this and that's a fast track to being very easily swayed into these ideologies; it's literally "you are not immune to propaganda, but I am" and like. bud. you're not.

It feels related to the weird way people treat Liliana. I am still, to be honest, low-key furious that several white southerners are like nooooooo you should be sympathetic to people in cults, because it could happen to anyone and it's like. well. you see. I am Jewish. I am not hanging around anyone who is white and southern and in a cult long enough to find out if they want to kill me, and it's appalling and indicative of how sheltered and ignorant you are of other perspectives that you would have the gall to demand this. They're entitled people who demand that people most at risk from violence do the work of dismantling it - not them, oh certainly no, they're too busy playing Elden Ring or some shit. There's a certain kind of Tumblr user that claims to be leftist and yet extends a thousand times more sympathy and understanding to their neighbor down the road who openly flies a Confederate flag and definitely voted to deny them medical care, than to people who have a cringe "childless cat lady" bumper sticker and voted to reinstate said care and will bad-faith cherrypick why this is actually very radical of them (if not outright lie) and they have rather transparently claimed Ashton as one of their own.

As I said during Downfall, some of it is people who love the taste of the boot as long as they think it might end up on their foot one day but some of it is just people who are so nihilist they'll let the world burn and ignore that perhaps other people are also living there. Like, a big reason why, even when Dorian was angry at the gods, I never felt the same way about him as I did for Ashton is because Dorian was angry about what happened to Opal and Cyrus. Dorian wanted an option that would hurt the fewest people, and his main experience was seeing a god overtake Opal and hurt people! And as he saw new perspectives and heard from others he incorporated that, and I don't agree with everything he says but he really has been thinking about people other than himself, and increasingly I can't say the same for Ashton. The moment at the end, where they say that apologizing would be for them, was promising; but it also feels like Ashton learned this lesson with the shard and completely forgot it and was like "THE GODS WILL KILL US SPECIFICALLY" and the fact that the gods they literally met in person didn't do so seems to have failed to sink in. This is a character obsessed with their own highly specific experiences, insistent that there is someone ALIVE to blame and not their shitty dead parents, and defined by refusing to hear anything that will conflict with what they already believe, and that's REALLY fucking bad for a hero and a fast track to right-wing reactionary politics.

*ngl the Don't Tread on Me flag is darkly hilarious to me because it's available as a vanity Virginia license plate, which means there's a LOT of people who are like "I shall express my distaste for the government by paying the government 25 unnecessary dollars per year solely to have a customized license plate." Deeply indicative, frankly, of this mentality. I mean I don't hang around anyone who has one because they're probably fucking shitty, but I am going to laugh about it in private.

[ausetkmt]

[deusluxuria]

if i had money i would commission an elaborate painting of johnny and gyro making out while a confederate flag burns to smithereens in the background

[keehomania]

Wait. For context, who is Zico and what did he do?

hello ml!! zico is a famous producer and rapper. he debuted in 2011 as the leader of “block b” and eventually grew as a solo artist around 2014-15 but block b disbanded around 2018. he was also a judge on i-land and basically formed the groups “boynextdoor” and “enhypen”. you might've heard some of his solo songs because they're catchy, unfortunately. he has a song with jennie (blackpink) called “spot!”, another one called “okey dokey” with mino (winner, mobb). aside from him embarrassing seolhyun (AOA) (his ex-girlfriend; they were caught dating by dispatch and he denied it all to save his reputation which led to embarrassing her), his blatan racism (wearing a confederate flag jacket, said the n-word in his 2010 track “if i ain't got jjanggae”, said one of his talents is “talking like a black person”) and homophobia (saying the f slur), zico appeared on a show around 2016 with JJY aka jung joonyoung, the ringleader of the burning sun scandal. to make a long story short, zico and jjy were very good friends (he was good friends with a lot of the cunts involved in that scandal). to make a long story even shorter, he said he had seen/was looking at jjy's “golden phone” which is what jjy ultimately had been using to distribute videos and photos of women being drugged and raped. zico denies seeing any of the footage, which i and anybody with 2 brain cells find hard to believe because they were close, and the phone was deemed golden for a reason. jjy literally confirmed that zico scrolled through the phone hours and hours on end, just to say he didn't see any of what was happening. i loved block b back in 2015 and listened to them with my dad, and some of zico's songs stood out to me but it's very important to not trust idols, especially the male ones, just because they portray themselves a certain way. zico has always been known for lying to save his own ass no matter who pays the price for it, just like the situation with his ex i previously mentioned. as you may know, goo hara, (KARA) may her beautiful soul rest in peace, had her house broken into not too long ago. she played a vital part in helping a journalist uncover the horrors of the burning sun scandal. not too long after, she ended her life. she died a hero and the entirety of korea failed her miserably. her house was broken into just a while back and, what do you know? zico is the prime suspect

[zvaigzdelasas]

It’s odd nowadays to imagine the liberal city of San Francisco officially flying a Confederate flag for any reason, but sure enough, there it was, officially flying over San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. The city’s Black population, including Richard Bradley, was not happy about it.

The flag was actually part of a historical effort. It was flying with 18 other flags from American history, detailing how the country had changed over its 200-plus years. [...] [S]upporters of the local Spartacist League, Spartacus Youth League and Labor Black League for Social Defense [were uneasy] with seeing it raised in a public square. In 1984, the groups descended on Civic Center Plaza to protest its inclusion in the historical project.

One of those protesters was Richard Bradley, originally from South Carolina, who grew up with a personal view of what that flag meant. He came dressed as a Union soldier and would make history by climbing the flagpole and tearing the Confederate banner down. Some 37 years after the event, San Francisco’s ABC7 affiliate aired a story about a local school, Dianne Feinstein Elementary, voting to change its name. The reason it was dropping Senator Feinstein’s name was because she was Mayor of San Francisco at the time, and after the rebel flag was torn down, she ordered a new one put in its place in an attempt to curry favor with the pro-South Dixiecrats coming to the city.

With news of the school renaming, photos of Bradley tearing down the flag resurfaced on the internet. ABC reporter Lyanne Melendez reached out to find Richard Bradley via a broadcast in January 2021. Bradley, it turned out, was alive and well at age 70, and was once again living in his native South Carolina. He told the reporters that even at age 70, he would climb any pole once again to take down a Confederate flag, saying it represents the ugliness of the world we live in. He also thought dropping Feinstein’s name from the elementary school was a good idea.[...]

Feinstein finally gave in to the protestors in 1984 after replacing the flag the first time. The second time it was torn down, a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 6 burned the flag. As it burned, the crowd cheered and broke into a rendition of “John Brown’s Body,” an abolitionist song sung by Union troops during the war.

[tf2heritageposts]

guys i’m too burnt out to draw anything but can someone please draw engineer BURNING a confederate flag. please

[petervintonjr]

"I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood? For two hundred years we had toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever freed from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, 'Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless?' In this 'land of the free' we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro-hating white man. There is no redress for us from a government which promised to protect all under its flag. It seems a mystery to me. They say, 'One flag, one nation, one country indivisible.' Is this true? Can we say this truthfully, when one race is allowed to burn, hang, and inflict the most horrible torture weekly, monthly, on another?"

Everybody raise a glass to the memory of Susie King Taylor (neé Baker), teacher, author, field nurse, and Civil War hero. Susie holds the singular distinction of being the first Black woman to write and publish a memoir of her wartime experiences. Born enslaved in 1848 Savannah, Georgia, Susie was fortunate enough to be able to attend secret schools taught by Black women --despite the state's harsh literacy laws regarding slaves. Her principal teacher was a free woman of color who is only ever named as "Mrs. Woodhouse," a friend of Susie's grandmother, Dolly Reed, and over the years Susie would herself surreptitiously educate other enslaved persons. At the age of 14 she became free when her uncle led her out to a Union gunboat patrolling near Fort Pulaski (in Confederate hands at the time). Along with many other formerly-enslaved Black refugees in the aftermath of the Battle of Port Royal, Susie sought safety behind Union lines on the South Carolina Sea Islands.

Expediency led Susie to attach herself to the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, later known as the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops --the very first Black regiment in the U.S. Army. Formed in 1862, this unit boasted a large number of Gullah recruits. Having originally signed on as a regimental laundress and cook, Taylor's literacy quickly elevated her to the role of reading and writing instructor for many of the black Union soldiers during their off-duty hours. She also served as a field nurse. Military governor Rufus Saxton took notice of Taylor's talents and entrusted her with munitions and equipment responsibilities far beyond the scope of a laundress. She married a Sergeant Edward King of Company E in 1864, and the 33rd Regiment itself ultimately dissolved in 1866. The Kings settled in Savannah and established a school for Black children; unfortunately Edward died in a dockside accident only a few months after the birth of their son. Susie moved to Boston in 1870 and joined the Women's Relief Corps (of which she would eventually become president).

By 1879 Susie had remarried a Russell Taylor of Boston, and while she continued her work with the Women's Relief Corps, had also begun work on a memoir of her time with the regiment --originally intended for her son, she instead opted to publish the essays in 1902 as Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33D United States Colored Troops, Late 1St S. C. Volunteers.

So... yeah. Go pick that one up and give it your undivided attention. And then pour one out for Susie, who died on this date (October 6), 1912, in Boston. She is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery.

[mrreed]

answering this for @cherubgore and totally using it as an excuse to elaborate more on Otis’s political views from what we see in HO1000C specifically

to be completely straight forward, i 100% think the burn this flag thing is meaning he’s in favor of the confederacy.

it does also have the angle of believing in total anarchy; Otis definitely does think the united states as a whole is a joke, the way society operates is fucked and it should be burned to the ground. in fact humanity as a whole should cease to exist and he wants to have a part in it but that’s besides the point.

however Rob’s characterization of the Fireflys specifically in HO1000C was an over the top caricature of themselves (and I’m glad they got a lot more depth and actual lore with rejects onwards). and what is the first things you can stereotype about a southern backwoods serial killer creep; something along the lines of him raping women and thinking the south should rise again, right?

Otis calls the victims yankees as an insult, and he’s sporting the confederate flag on his hat

while it wasn’t too elaborated on in the movie, I think since Otis strives to be as bad as possible, he wouldn’t be above it. He’s totally fucking insane, and he loves to go out of his way to make himself the worst of them all, so you know. why not?