To some the Confederate flag is about heritage, not hate. Not saying they are right, but that is how some feel.
The heritage canard gets thrown around for more than just the Confederate flag.
Asked about the pin he was wearing during the interview, Fears said “it’s basically just like an SS thing.” Explaining the significance of the pin would require an extensive conversation about World War II, he said. “And it’s my heritage, I’m German.”
Yup, just heritage. Nothing to see here. The fact that they single out the most racist possible symbols of that heritage is just a coincidence I’m sure. The Nascar folks were evenly split between the Confederate flag and William Faulkner to represent Southern heritage, and just randomly picked the flag with a coin toss, I’m sure.
I see your point, but the Confederacy and Nazi Germany are a false equivalence.
There’s a difference between false equivalence and an imperfect analogy – otherwise you could say false equivalence for any analogy. If someone said a bird was as blue as the sky, you couldn’t really say “false equivalence, the sky is airy and the bird is all feathery”. You have to consider the quality for which they’re being compared – the blueness. As far as foundations firmly rooted in brutally racist ideologies, Nazis and Confederates are pretty close. But there were differences: the Confederacy was more focused on forced labor camps than extermination, the Confederacy was much more limited in the scale of its military ambitions to only attacking the United States, and Germany was a legitimate nation, to name a few.
Probably the closest modern analogue for the Confederacy I can think of is ISIS. A group of fanatics with delusions of statehood, trying to enforce a brutal medieval philosophy already abandoned by the rest of the world on the population unfortunate enough to live under their control, with surprisingly capable military commanders for an otherwise backward operation, but ultimately doomed to lose the fight they started. And even then there’s a few differences.