Words, Truth,
and the Confederate Flag
By Alice Bernstein
As an American and a person passionately
against racism, I say the vote by Georgia’s Senate to keep the Confederate
battle flag within the state flag–reducing its size from two-thirds of
the banner to one-twentieth–is a contemptuous compromise and utterly wrong.
And it is abominable that South Carolina, in another compromise vote, removed
the Confederate flag from its statehouse, only to fly it at the capitol’s
entrance on a flagpole raised 30 feet and illuminated at night.
At the heart of this matter is what
I am grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism, the education founded
by the great American poet and historian Eli Siegel, about the fight in
people between respect for the world and contempt for it.
"The deepest desire of every person,"
Mr. Siegel explained, "is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis."
This desire is the source of art, kindness, truth, good sense in life and
economics. He also explained the ugliest thing in people, causing every
injustice from a sarcastic insult, a "little lie," to the deadly forms
of crime, racism, war. It is contempt, "the addition to self through the
lessening of something else."
There is nothing more urgent for
everyone than to learn from Aesthetic Realism how to honestly like the
world and be fair to people, and to criticize contempt, including in ourselves.
This study can end racism, and is the knowledge that enables marriages
to be kind, children to learn, violence on streets, in schools and homes,
to end.
From what in the self does the flying
of the Confederate flag arise? In the international periodical The Right
of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of
Aesthetic Realism, writes definitively about this and I want everyone to
know it. She says:
| "If there had not been the desire
to maintain slavery, there would have been no Confederacy and no Confederate
flag at all. The Confederacy arose from something completely hideous: the
feeling in persons that other human beings should be their property....The
reason the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861 was to be able
to preserve slavery.... South Carolina might just as well display a bullwhip
and auction block at its statehouse, because these and the Confederate
flag stand for the same thing." |
And Ms. Reiss continues, "I heard
Mr. Siegel on more than one occasion speak with passion about those words
used so poignantly by Southerners: ‘the Lost Cause,' [which] he said, was
slavery, and ‘the only good thing about the cause is that it was lost.'"
Commenting on words used in behalf
of flying that banner, including honor, heritage, sacrifice, sentiment,
she writes:
"You cannot fight ‘honorably' in
behalf of something that is entirely dishonorable. To say one can is like
saying Germans fought honorably in the cause of Hitler. And some German
soldiers likely ‘fought bravely' — but the bravery was in behalf of subjugating
and annihilating human
beings; it was bravery in behalf
of gas chambers. And the bravery of the Confederate soldier was bravery
in behalf of a black child's being torn from her mother and sold." |
Referring to a Washington Post article
stating that Southerners fought out of loyalty to their home states, Ellen
Reiss writes with critical exactitude:
| "It was like a German soldier's
fighting out of loyalty to the Fatherland when the Fatherland was Nazi....If
our first loyalty is not to truth, justice, and humanity, we may act ‘sentimental'
as anything, but there is something sleazy about us." |
About a sign carried by protestors,
"Your heritage is my slavery," Ellen Reiss said that "heritage is a word
that can be used to make an ugly thing look somehow noble. If your grandfather
was an embezzler, you can try to make him look like Robin Hood and call
it your heritage."
And about sentiment and sacrifice,
she says: "Some people in Germany feel sentimental about how important
Hitler made them. Their sentiment does not justify the flying of the Nazi
flag. Sentiment can be contempt with moisture around its eyes. As to sacrifice:
if you sacrifice your life in behalf of something filthy, it is very sad;
but one shouldn't honor the symbol of the filthy cause."
The way Ellen Reiss uses words is
sincere and true and I love her and Aesthetic Realism for this. Every day
people learn in classes at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation,
and in consultations there and by telephone, how to see other people fairly
and to express ourselves in a way that is true to the facts and true to
ourselves. The Aesthetic Realism
Foundation is at 141 Greene Street, New York City 10012, (212) 777-4490.
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