Quote Originally Posted by The Lurker Below View Post
...While I absolutely agree with you re: the reason for secession, I think you are wrong about the current use of the rebel flag as a symbol of racism. I believe for the majority of users today it stands for a symbol of dissent with the current government in Washington. We aren't a country of passionate historians. Average blokes do not care why the South seceded.
I disagree, at least in part. The current program of US public school education teaches rather little in the way of history -- a subject many of its students loathe anyway -- but the one theme that is hammered home almost literally ad nauseum from 3rd grade through high school is that slavery was evil and that the South had to be defeated to finally end slavery. They get most of the details wrong, the students rarely remember the particulars and have almost no sense of context, but that single theme is hammered home almost as though no other history aside from the revolution itself mattered -- and even the revolution is taught as having been incomplete in that it did not immediately live up to the "all men are created equal" and did not immediately anathematize slavery.

No other issue of history is so thoroughly drummed into their heads. The Confederate battle flag -- it isn't even the flag of the Confederacy but they seldom remember that -- has been taught as THE symbol of racism for most of the time since they were furled at Appamatox.