The Confederate flag finally met its end the moment it did not observe the murder of nine South Carolinians as it stood on state ground. Nothing but the color of the victims, black, could explain this brazen indifference. And at that point, the flag and its meaning was too visible to all: It's not about Southern pride (whatever that may mean) but white pride.

So, now we learn that Walmart and Sears have been happily making a profit from white-pride wear, and would have continued doing so if it wasn't for the obstinacy of those black corpses in the church. It was impossible for the flag's reasoners and profiteers to say that those bodies and their blood and gore were just overreacting, being jumpy, reading it all wrong because they're so obsessed with race. It took that much violence for America to pull the clothes off the shelf and seriously consider taking down the flag. (Amazon, however, is still making money from white pride.) [UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that Amazon has decided it has had enough of making loads of money from a known symbol of the oppression of black Americans.]

The Confederate flag is only about the oppression of black people for the purpose of extracting free labor from their bodies. This economy made a lot of white people enormously wealthy, and there was and still is great pride in that achievement. This talk of the flag rising again can only mean the restoration of the economy that made many Southerners rich and many, many more blacks miserable beyond belief.

The flag is not some spiritual thing. There is no need for mumbo jumbo here. It's basically about a mode of production that many fought and lost their lives for. You can read all about it in Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

The South wanted free trade with Europe; the North wanted to protect its infant industries from strong competition (Britain's products were cheap). The South had lots of free labor, a racist ideology to justify the exploitation of this labor, and no interest at all in developing America's manufacturing sector. The North won the war, erected high tariffs on imports, and developed into an industrial power. The fall of that flag was the fall of a slave economy and its supporting institutions, laws, and trade policies.