Why All The Talk Of Taking Down The Treason Flag Is Complete Horse-Shit

After I posted on Friday that there is no way South Carolina would take down the confederate flag currently flying in front of its statehouse, I noticed a lot of movement on the issue.  One Republican assemblyman even stated that he would introduce a bill in December to take the flag down.

Well, it's easy to engage in such talk when last week's massacre is still fresh in everyone's memory.  But I guarantee you that once the shock of the neo-confederate terrorist act starts to wear off, so will the fervor surrounding the flag.  Why do I say this?  Because it's South Carolina we are talking about.

One need look no further than a few feet away from where that flag currently waves. Right next to that fucking flag pole is a monument honoring terrorist Ben Tillman.  As Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly recently noted, an inscription on that monument honors Tillman's “life of service and achievement … In the home loving and loyal, to the state steadfast and true for the nation.” But as Will Moredock notes here, Tillman was an evil, hate-filled asshole:

Ben Tillman’s long and bloody public career began in 1876 at what would ultimately be called the Hamburg Massacre.

The then 29-year-old Tillman led the members of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a.k.a. the Edgefield Redshits, against a local militia group, all black. Several African-American militia men were killed in a pitched battle with red-shirt-wearing white terrorists. After the militia surrendered, five of them were called out by name and executed. A few weeks later, when vigilantes captured a black state senator named Simon Coker, Tillman was present when two of his men executed the prisoner while he was on his knees praying.

Later, the terrorist leader Tillman explained his intentions on that fateful July 8 day: “It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men of Edgefield to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from Negro and carpetbag rule.” In a 1909 speech at a Red Shirt reunion in Anderson, Tillman reiterated this point, noting that he believed in “terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”

He added, “That we have good government now is due entirely to the fact that Red Shirt men of 1876 did all and dared all that was necessary to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes.”

If this guy is so beloved in South Carolina that they gave him a monument in front of the state house, does anyone think the state will make any legitimate effort to remove the confederate flag from the premises? Not bloody likely, particularly given that President Obama said the other day that the flag should be taken down and put in a museum.  I suspect most Republicans in the South Carolina General Assembly will opposed the flag's removal on that basis alone -- they are sure the hell not going to let a some uppity Black man tell them what to do.

Indeed, I expect to soon see at least one bill in front of the General Assembly requiring that the height of the flag pole be increased and the monument honoring Terrorist Tillman be made larger. And why do I think that will happen? Because it's South Carolina!