It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states' rights or a way of life or a tradition - and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the selective interpretation of symbols and their histories, particularly regarding the Confederate flag.
Richard Cohen's quote addresses how some white Southerners view the Confederate battle flag through a lens of states' rights and tradition, deliberately overlooking its connections to slavery and oppression. This willful ignorance of the historical context allows them to maintain a narrative that sanitizes their past, ignoring the suffering and brutality that the flag represents for many others.
In practice
In a lecture on American history, this quote can be used to discuss the symbolism of the Confederate flag.
Republicans and others who are in anguish over the possibility of socialized medicine ought to have to explain their ideology to a mother with a sick newborn. They ought to have to explain how this nation can debate health care and not mention how abysmal ours is.
If we trace the history of any nation backwards into the past, we come at last to a period of myths and traditions which eventually fade away into impenetrable darkness.
One has to confront history honestly.
The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.
The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.
Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
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