Canadian Retailers Destroying Confederate Flag Merchandise As American Manufacturers Stop Production: General Lee Debates Rage On
New sanctions against profiting on the display of the Confederate flag have been announced in Canada. Retailer Carl Neary of Windco Flags on Portugal Cove Road, St. John’s, Newfoundland, said the store had been selling the flags as novelty items only.
Neary explained to the CBC that sales at his store have been stopped, and remaining Confederate flag merchandise will be destroyed.
“I don’t know if people in Newfoundland really see it as the Confederate flag or the Dukes of Hazard [sic] flag. I’ve always felt that the Confederate was a novelty flag around Canada. They haven’t really given much reason for buying it, but I haven’t been asking many questions.”
As PBS Newshour notes, it is actually against the law to destroy or desecrate the Confederate flag in several American states.
As previously reported by Inquisitr, retailers with international markets, including Walmart, Etsy, Google, and Amazon, have already removed Confederate flag merchandise from their online stores.
Many additional Canadian flag retailers have already removed the Confederate flag from store shelves in Vancouver, Ontario, and Alberta.
These are only some of the latest in a series of motions to stop the promotion of a flag that has become associated with such violent extremist groups as the KKK, as mass grief is responded to by an increasing number of North Americans.
Since the murder of nine people in a South Carolina church last week by an 18-year-old shooter, apparently radicalized to insanity by a North American extremist group, calls to remove the Confederate flag from state capitals and state flags have been echoing across the United States of America.
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has called for the removal of the flag from the South Carolina capital. Alabama governor Robert Bentley has already removed the Confederate flag from the Alabama capital. There are also calls to remove the Confederate flag from more state license plates across America.
The debate about removing the Confederate flag from state capitals and from state flags and license plates is not a new one. Protests have increased since the South Carolina murders, partly from an increase in mass grief, and partly due to political motivation.
As CNN reported, the Confederate flag issue is now an election topic that will be difficult to avoid. Some believe that it will be deciding issue for many voters.
Many comments on social media indicate a troubled awareness on the part of grieving Americans that the problem is not the Confederate flag at all, but the lack of arrests or any type of justice for the recruiters, real men and real women that are still at large and who co-ordinate extreme crime with no consequences for their criminal behavior.
The shooter wasn’t radicalized overnight. It is clear fellow North Americans target our children from a young age, and their goals include murder.
The Confederate flag did not shoot nine people at a church service, an 18-year-old American did. One arrest for a crime acknowledged by so many Senators and the President of the United States to be a group crime is not adequate, nor is it just.
[Lead Image Photo Credit: Joe Raedie / Getty Images]
