FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Recently, a controversy has arisen regarding the appropriateness of the name of a professional sports team. While this is a matter for others to sort out and one which the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) has no reason to comment upon, we do feel compelled to speak to a peripheral issue that has occurred. In attempting to offer his opinion and enter into the debate,
New York Daily News cartoonist Tom Stiglich has taken the opportunity to depict the logo of the team with a Nazi flag and the Confederate Battle Flag.
Again, the primary debate is one that we have no interest in entering, but the implied similarity of the two flags is ridiculous and unconscionable. The outrageous social ideologies of Hitler and the well-known horrors of the Nazi regime, mass exterminations of ethnic groups and human eugenics, are completely incompatible with the foundations of the Confederacy and the South of 1861-1865.
This is not the first time this contorted comparison has been offered, but it needs to be the last. Men of goodwill can often disagree and have healthy debates, but to simply superimpose "Nazi" and everything that goes with it over someone, some group or some philosophy with which you disagree is childish and beneath the dignity of Americans.
The Confederacy did not practice "ethnic cleansing"; in fact, it attempted to practice political cleansing by reestablishing a Constitutional Republic. Judah P. Benjamin served as Secretary of War and then as Secretary of State. It would be almost a half-century until a US President would appoint a Jewish Cabinet member, when, in 1906 Theodore Roosevelt appointed Oscar S. Straus to the post of Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Additionally, untold numbers of blacks, many of them free, served in Confederate units. Also worthy of note is the record of General Stand Watie of the Cherokee Braves; he was the last Confederate general to surrender his troops.
Mr. Stiglich owes the myriad Confederate descendants an apology. Shame on him and "Hail to the Cherokee Braves."
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Contact:
Michael Givens, Commander-in-chief (931) 442-1831
Givens.scv@gmail.com
