This issue is part of the larger culture war that Republicans are fighting, which means that their civilian leadership, i.e. their respective state governors, likely have their back.
This is an important point. As Guard units, they’re primarily under the authority of their state executive, not the DoD. Even if they are subject to Federal regulations and orders, their ultimate chain of command runs to the governor’s mansion, not the White House, so there’s ample opportunity for resistance.
Nationalize those units and the rules change, temporarily, but they have to revert to state command eventually.
Apologies to all, I am/was fully aware of how the state vs. federal issues run through these units, but was trying to make a point that our military and paramilitary forces (the whole gamut of our law enforcement services) have become a breeding ground of “mah authoritah” with a heaping helping of seeing anyone who is not in complete deference to it as the enemy.
While not complete, it’s become self-selecting and self-supporting, and is fully being used as a political weapon, with ongoing and increasing threats of using it as such. Thus my comments on how far the rot has spread, with this issue being the tiniest of examples. And my heartfelt wish that this be stomped on hard.
True, but this is not about Confederate flags being flown by private citizens; this is about Confederate battle honors, being flown by official National Guard units. It just seems weird on the face of it for a military unit from West Virginia - a Union state - to have earned a Confederate Army guidon. As @Dissonance pointed out, those units descend from Rebel regiments from the counties that became West Virginia in 1863; but it still seems a little odd.
Amazing, all this 21st-century hatred toward 19th-century people to whom loyalty to their state (which no doubt played a much bigger role in their lives) was more important than loyalty to the federation.
The federation that was not in favor of slavery, he glosses over.
Everything about Army campaign or battle streamers and unit awards is “odd” to me. None of these “units” as they exist today even fought in the Civil War, in the sense that no single living individual within any unit fought in the war. But in some cases it’s even more ridiculous than that, in that these aren’t always “ship of Theseus” situations where the supposed “unit” has an unbroken history going back over a hundred and fifty years, just with with people changing out over time, but rather that the units are often retired/inactivated for years or decades, and then brought back as a new creation, and the decision to give the, the lineage of an older, no longer extant unit, is purely administrative.
You’re a fucking idiot at best and a racist piece of shit at worst. Fuck off.
Amazing, all these 21st-century people thinking they are those 19th-century people.
Are you on crack? We don’t hate them but we certainly don’t want to honor them. They fought for an evil entity.
I’ll save my hate for the racist assholes who want to honor their cause.
The folks who became West Virginia were loyal to their state. The traitors, however, were just as much traitors to their individual states as they were to the United States as a whole. What they were loyal to was neither their nation nor their state, but to the principle that people are property.
The Confederate flag stands for so many things; states rights, heritage, opposition to excessive tariffs, hatred of black people.
No, it’s hatred towards the 20th century white supremacists who revived a dead set of symbols to signify opposition to Civil Rights. That’s what modern usage of the Confederate flag (along with all the monuments) descends from.
That makes it much worse. The Confederates attacked the United States. So any Confederate battle honors are celebrating the deaths of American soldiers.
It’s September 11 as I write this. Are any National Guard units celebrating this anniversary by flying Al Qaeda battle honors?
Hey now. Al Qaeda wasn’t really about terrorism, they were really about nation rights. There were good people on both sides, and the Daughters of Al Qaeda have every right to put up statues in American town squares honoring falling Al Qaeda soldiers.
Yeah, otherwise, we have no way to remember that history. You don’t want to erase history, do you??
[Edits actual history textbooks to make slavery seem like a good thing…]
I assume when SCOTUS ruled in Virginia v West Virgina that WV had legally become its own state.
Well, yes. That’s the point of the thread, that Army units have been ordered to get rid of their treason streamers. Some now are dragging their feet, which ought to be stamped down, hard.
More or less. The case settled the procedural questions around the vote to create West Virginia out of Virginia, not the validity of the state itself. But by endorsing that West Virginia had been formed by the proper legislative consent of all parties involved, it upheld the creation of the state in accordance with the Admissions Clause of the Constitution.
In principal, true. But practically difficult to implement without completing disrupting the balance of authority set up in the legislation about the National Guard. The states have a say, and the feds have relatively little direct recourse when the states are in command of their own Guard formations, which is most of the time.
I wonder if this is going to require some lawsuits, DoD versus the troublemaker states.