This interview was supposed to be about a British spy in the south during the Civil War. It turned into something else.
“I think people totally misunderstood, and misunderstand, what that battle flag has come to represent. When Robert E. Lee, whose battle flag it was, surrendered at Appomattox, that battle flag was furled and the war was over for him. That flag came out again with a vengeance as a reaction to the civil rights movement, starting in the ’40s and building through the ’50s and ’60s. That was not a flag honoring the Civil War dead. That was a flag to say ‘no’ to civil rights. That was held up in defiance by white people for white people in memory of people who didn’t die for the most part defending slavery. They were sucked into the war by the elite slave owners. But once the war was started, they were dying to protect their homes and families, they thought. That’s what they were dying for. But the flag – that flag – that’s all about racism.”
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“We do have to understand that hundreds of thousands of men and women died in the South in that war because they were led into it by an elite that was protecting its own very narrow interests using its money, its power over the press, its power over the courts and its power of propaganda generally to do that. And then we have to say, were those people complete fools? No, they were deluded like people who are led into war all the time – many wars, even wars that have been fought in the last few years. So I think we just have to say, ‘Look, they fought bravely, they died bravely, in many cases. They died for the wrong cause, but we shouldn’t insult their memories just because some racists in the 1950s and ’60s wanted to wave one of their flags.”
https://hereandnow.wbur.org/...