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Wikipedia:No Confederates

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Racist ideology is inherently incompatible with Wikipedia, and use or display of racist symbols and iconography on the project is disruptive.
Flag of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with the Confederate battle flag in the canton.
Members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement marching, carrying a neo-Confederate flag among others. Knoxville, Tennessee, 14 August 2010.
The Unite the Right rally participants, carrying neo-Confederate flags among others. Charlottesville, Virginia, 12 August 2017.

Neo-Confederates are groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy) and its actions during the American Civil War in a positive light.

The Confederacy was formed by eleven slave-holding, planter-dominated U.S. states (nicknamed Dixie) that seceded from the United States in 1860 and 1861, in the aftermath of the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. The secession primarily occurred over the issue of slavery, and directly resulted in the Civil War. Claims that the secession had some other fundamental cause (or cornerstone) than slavery are a historical whitewash.

Various neo-Confederate organizations are designated as hate groups by the SPLC, while the Confederate battle flag is designated as a hate symbol by the ADL.

Neo-Confederate beliefs

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The main (but not only) aspects of the neo-Confederate worldview are:

Neo-Confederates and Wikipedia

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In Wikipedia, neo-Confederate editors overtly display symbols of the Confederacy, typically portraying it as the "noble Lost Cause". They push pro-Confederate POV in editing and discussions. The Wikipedia community should have no place for neo-Confederates, for the same reasons that there is no place for Nazis or neo-Nazis. Most of what is said in the No Nazis and No racists essays is directly applicable also to neo-Confederates. The display of Confederate symbols in Wikipedia, like the display of Nazi symbols such as the swastika, is incompatible with the core Wikipedia policy WP:NPOV, because it asserts a racist ideology of white supremacy.

Confederate symbols in Wikipedia should be treated in the same manner as Nazi symbols. They should be condemned and rejected by the community. They should be kept only for use in related articles, and used for educational purposes only. There is no more place in Wikipedia for neo-Confederate views than for neo-Nazi views.

Neo-Confederates (and other inappropriate discriminatory groups) are disruptive to the community, and not only unwelcome here on Wikipedia; they are usually indefinitely blocked on sight if they express their racist ideas on-wiki.

Neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis

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Two great atrocities of modern European history were the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust. Neo-Confederates are denying or whitewashing the horror of the Atlantic slave trade and of Western Hemisphere slavery, just as neo-Nazis are denying or whitewashing the horror of the Holocaust.

There are many similarities between the Confederacy and Nazi Germany in terms of their ideological foundations as racist ethnostates and their war aims, as well as neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi narratives of the Lost Cause and the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, respectively. We should not honor those defeated causes in any way.

See also

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Related pages

Background information

Essays

Notes

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  1. ^ This revisionist narrative from the Jim Crow era completely disregards the fact that the Confederacy started the war by initiating combat at Fort Sumter.[1]
  2. ^ The theory of nullification is essentially rejected under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,[2] while any secession would be unconstitutional and an open defiance of the 1869 Texas v. White ruling of the United States Supreme Court.[3]

References

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  1. ^ James M. McPherson (January 19, 1989). "The War of Southern Aggression". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on March 17, 2016. Retrieved October 26, 2022. [T]he South took the initiative by seceding in defiance of an election of a president by a constitutional majority. Never mind that the Confederacy started the war by firing on the American flag.
  2. ^ "Supremacy Clause". Legal Information Institute. Cornell University Law School. Retrieved June 4, 2023.
  3. ^ "Texas v. White 74 U.S. 700 {1868}". Legal Information Institute. Cornell University Law School. Retrieved October 26, 2022.