Know the enemy and know yourself

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 In this week's installment of history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, Mango Mussolini's Squadristi descended on the capital and metaphorically, if not quite literally, tasered themselves in the balls.

In common with most far-right rallies/insurrections, there were flags. Lots of flags. So many flags.

America's Swastika, AKA the Confederate Flag was a popular choice among the flag-shagging Trumpist ultras because of course it was:

Image credit Reuters.

Now the thing about this "Confederate Flag", as  quite a few people know, is that it wasn't the national flag of the Confederacy. The reason that this now-established and instantly recognisable symbol of white supremacy differs from the national flag(s) of the Confederacy is an interesting one. It's all to do with identity, and not just in the obvious, ideological sense of political identity, but in the direct, practical sense of distinguishing friend from foe.

 When the Confederate States seceded, like every new state, they wanted a flag of their own, and this was what they came up with:

As you can see, it's inspired by the flag of the USA, but with fewer stripes and a Betsy Ross-style circle of seven white stars in the blue canton, representing the original seven breakaway states (more stars were added to the original design as the number of rebel states joining the Confederacy increased). 

Can you see what's wrong with this picture? Well, if you were a Confederate soldier, going into battle under this banner, you soon would have. It looked way too much like the opposition's flag, especially in the heat of battle, or when the wind dropped so the design of the flag wasn't clearly discernible.

By the end of 1861, the Army of Northern Virginia had come up with a solution. A flag (based on a previously rejected proposal for a Confederate national flag) which looked nothing like the ones the Yankees were carrying in to battle. It was a square battle flag with a dark blue saltire on a red background, outlined in white, and bearing the Confederate states' stars on the arms of the saltire:

The rectangular variant of this flag, as carried by the Trumpist in the first picture started life as another  battle flag inspired by the North Virginian version, namely the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee.

As for the original national flag, the unfortunate symbolism of it looking like the other sides' flag, plus all those friendly fire incidents, made it unpopular and the Confederates decided to go for a rebrand.

And, boy, was this one a doozy. 

One part of the redesign actually made rational sense. The new flag design took the USA-like stars-on-a-blue background design out of the canton & replaced it  with the dissimilar Confederate battle flag. 

But the background colour of the flag was pure ideology, with zero concessions to common sense. Out went the red and white stripes of the previous versions, replaced by a pure white background. 

 

And, just in case you were in any doubt what that white background was all about, on April 23, 1863, Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson and William Ross Postell, published an editorial championing a design of a battle flag on a white background, later called 'The White Man's Flag:'

"Our idea is simply to combine the present battle-flag with a pure white standard sheet; our Southern Cross, blue on a red field, to take the place on the white flag that is occupied by the blue union in the old United States flag, or the St. George’s cross in the British flag. As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."

So the ideology was there, right in your face. Something you couldn't say about the practicality of the redesign. OK, you couldn't mistake the bearer for a damn Yankee on the battlefield. What you could easily mistake his flag for was a white flag of truce, with hilariously tragic consequences.

White supremacists, folks. Shooting themselves in the balls since 1863.

The mainly-white flag (AKA the "Stainless Banner") was such a tactical self-own that a third major redesign of the Confederate national flag was inevitable from day one. By 1865 the Confederates had got their shit together sufficiently to design a national flag that didn't signal surrender to the enemy, by adding a vertical red identification stripe to the design (this iteration was nicknamed the "Blood-Stained Banner"):

Unfortunately for the Confederates, by this stage time was running out for both the Confederacy and for recognition of the final version of its national flag to become embedded. Which is why the only flags of the insurrectionist South that are widely recognised today are variants of its distinctive battle flag.

I'm indebted to the folks at Snopes for the straight dope on the flags of the Confederacy.

 So now that we're all up to speed with Confederate vexillology, we're also better equipped to engage in the battle of ideas with those inevitable apologists who claim, falsely that Confederate iconography has nothing to do with white supremacy and racism, and that the Civil War wasn't a war to defend slavery and white supremacy, but "States' rights" or some such nonsense.

So, if you're some alt-right wannabe edgelord hanging around waiting to "destroy" me with BS talking points like this, come at me, bro. I'm so ready for you.

I know the enemy.

Update: Rebecca Watson gave a great summary of the probably apocryphal auto-tasered testicles story: