“Heritage Not Hate”: A Lie With Any Flag

The American state, like every other state in history, serves the interests of the class coalition that controls it. The ideological myths of patriotism, of a “national interest” uniting exploiters and exploited, serve a powerful legitimizing function for class exploitation. And they are insidious, because we absorb them unconsciously from our earliest years. But if this is true of all states and flags, it’s even more true of the Confederacy than of most.