A leader of Georgia’s Civil War Commission has drawn a line in the sand over the recently renewed debate about Confederate war emblems.
The commission also faced a request for an investigation after a link on its Facebook page was tied by a left-leaning group to a website that has posted racist and anti-Semitic messages.
The commission’s vice chairman, Charles Kelly Barrow, said in a dispatch linked to his Twitter account that current efforts to remove the Rebel flag will lead to the elimination of all cultural references to the Confederacy.
Barrow, who is also head of the national Sons of Confederate Veterans, said that “we are facing the greatest threat to our heritage in modern times.”
The state commission is charged with planning and preserving the state’s Civil War battlefields and monuments, while the Sons of Confederate Veterans has been an outspoken group in defense of Rebel emblems amid new scrutiny into the symbols of the Old South.
In the post, Barrow also wrote: “The forces arrayed against us are formidable. Their first declared goal is to remove the Confederate Battle flag which flies beside the Confederate Soldier’s monument in Columbia, South Carolina. It was put there in 2000 as part of a political compromise. But do not be fooled into thinking they will stop there. The radical leftists who are driving this crisis are committed to the complete eradication of all things Confederate.”
Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for removal of the Rebel battle flag from the grounds of the state Capitol after nine black worshippers were gunned down at a Charleston, S.C., church. The man charged in the killings is a white supremacist who displayed the Confederate war emblem in posts on social media. The state’s Senate voted Monday to remove the flag.
Barrow also tweeted a link to his Facebook account on Saturday that urged supporters to contribute to a new campaign he is spearheading. The dispatch’s headline stated, “We are in a war to save American culture.”
On Monday, the Civil War Commission came under criticism from Better Georgia, a left-leaning pressure group. The group’s leader, Bryan Long, called for a full investigation into the commission. He cited a link from the group’s Facebook page to a website called “Murderbymedia” with racist and anti-Semitic posts.
“Even one link between the commission and white supremacist ideology is one link too many,” Long said. “We expect Governor (Nathan) Deal and Lt. Gov. (Casey) Cagle to have zero tolerance for racist, revisionist history. With the links that we’ve discovered already, it appears GCWC may be nothing more than a state-supported neo-Confederate propaganda organization.”
Cagle reappointed Barrow to the state’s Civil War Commission in 2012.
Barrow did not respond to further requests for comment from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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