Hypothetically, what would you say if you learned Bavaria proudly flew the nazi swastika over its capitol? And if they asserted the nazis were misunderstood, that World War II was fought for European unification, not racial supremacy and genocide?

Your reaction would be outrage, obviously.

Nazi flags do not fly over Munich because, after the war, Germans had to confront the sheer horror of what they had done and atone for it (unlike many Austrians who eluded this soul-searching with the convenient fiction that nazism was imposed militarily by Germany onto Austria). And the Germans do not fly nazi flags in their World War II military cemetaries either.

To this day the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia contain the “southern cross”, the battle flag of the Confederacy. And that flag still flies in a place of honor in the South Carolina capitol. Southern revisionists try and claim the Confederacy was about states’ rights, and that the Union was less than pure in its motives.

While it is certain the Union was less than ideal (the abolition of slavery was belated, and driven more by foreign policy than moral considerations), it is also equally clear the Confederacy’s motives were unambiguously evil. Unfortunately, the short-lived Reconstruction never forced the southerners to confront the true nature of slavery, which is why neo-confederates can deny slavery had anything to do with their cherished Confederacy, the same way too many Austrians unapologetically vote for Jörg Haider.