They claim the battle flag represents their Southern heritage, as if that heritage comprises an innocent history of mint juleps and church-going. The problem with that claim, as the history of the use of the flag demonstrates, is that the heritage it symbolises is also that of enslavement, inequality, violence and gross injustice.

These “Dixiecrats” adopted the Confederate battle flag as their party’s emblem. From that point, the flag was clearly associated with racist opposition to civil rights and with umbrage at perceived government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

The reembrace of white Southerners into the nation showed a desire to “heal” the nation by downplaying the horrors of enslavement and the struggle to end it.

Most Australians — aside from a few groups dedicated to reenacting American Civil War battles and history buffs including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley — were not familiar until recently with the charged history of the flag of the Confederate States of America.

The flag represents the Confederate States of America (CSA or Confederacy), created in 1861 when 11 states seceded from the 85-year-old nation. This rebellion was prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west. Southern enslavers feared slavery in their established states would be Lincoln’s next target.

Now the flag is in the Australian news with reports SAS military in Afghanistan in 2012 used the bold red, blue and white flag to guide in a US helicopter. Two SAS personnel also posed for a photograph with the flag.

In a polarised political and media environment, many white Southerners continue to defend their allegiance to the Confederate flag.

The state of Georgia, where resistance to desegregation was fierce, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag.

In 2000, after years of protest, South Carolina legislators moved the Confederate flag to the State House’s grounds. Then, after white supremacist Dylann Roof endorsed the Confederate flag and murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, activist Bree Newsome shimmied up the pole and removed it in a galvanising act of civil disobedience.

from the April 25, 2010 Newsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO; limestone bedrock, elevation ~39m (~128ft), ~N20.676°, ~W88.569° DARK KITE-SWALLOWTAILS Last week's unexpected rainstorm has engendered a whole new crop of butterflies. Maybe the most eye- catching are the ones who gather in groups of ten or so on the ground right outside my hut's door. That's where in the past the grounds people burned the big fronds that continually fall from our Royal Palms, so the soil there is black with ash, and maybe contains nutrients butterflies crave. A visitor is shown above.

Confederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. In the 1915 box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation, for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon.

from the June 13, 2010 Newsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO; limestone bedrock, elevation ~39m (~128ft), ~N20.676°, ~W88.569° SNAKY CATERPILLAR The rainy season's advent engenders lush greenness, and caterpillars to eat the greenness. The sheer numbers and kinds of caterpillars is mind boggling. From one day to the next leaves of every kind, from the ground to the forest's canopy, grow more tattered. A gentle shower of sandgrain-like caterpillar poop falls everywhere, all the time. Birds alight in random places and there's a juicy worm right there waiting for them.

Bea in Ontario pegs this is a Dark Kite-Swallowtail, EURYTIDES PHILOLAUS, found in deciduous and semideciduous tropical, lowland forests from southern Texas through here to Costa Rica. Even though it's considered a kite-swallowtail instead of just a plain swallowtail, it belongs to the Swallowtail Subfamily, the Papilioninae.

New narratives depicted the war as a righteous, though tragic, struggle over “states’ rights”. By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about — that is, enslavement — by the 1890s, they remade the meaning of the war.

Two weeks later, the flag in South Carolina’s house of government was finally removed for good. In the years since, hundreds of Confederate flags, statues and memorials have disappeared, including in the national Capitol.

The Northerner immediately thinks "Zebra Swallowtail" but if you'd see how this species flies so nervously and daintily, and how when it alights it quivers its wings as if it can hardly stand to touch the ground, you'd know that this species is more animated and "ethereal," like bubbly pixies, than the Northern Zebra.

Therefore, since I've not seen Mexican Kite Swallowtail butterflies here, but Dark Kite Swallowtails flit by every day, I'm guessing that the caterpillar in the picture is a Dark Kite Swallowtail.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the removal of Confederate symbols has accelerated. In recent months, Southern company Nascar has banned the flag and the Department of Defense has effectively done so, too.

The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy.

The great Butterflies and Moths of North America webpage on this species says that Dark Kite-Swallowtail caterpillars feed on members of the Anona Family. We have a few Anona trees here but it would seem not enough to support such large numbers of Dark Kite-Swallowtails. The site also says that the species is most numerous at the beginning of the rainy season, which is about now.

These two films buttressed a political economy that relied on a cheap labour force of disenfranchised Black Americans. But as African Americans began to make headway in the fight for civil rights, starting during World War II, symbols such as the Confederate flag became even more important to those who felt affronted by their gains.

The movie’s second half cemented the theme of reconciling white Southerners and white Northerners. As it stated in an intertitle, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright”. It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan.

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A few years later, in 1961, neighbouring state South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag above its state Capitol.

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When civil rights activism was at its most visible, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white Southerners became firmly attached to the flag.

In the late 1940s, a new political party of Southerners opposed Harry S. Truman and the Democratic Party’s relatively sympathetic stance on civil rights.

from the March 27, 2011 Newsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO; limestone bedrock, elevation ~39m (~128ft), ~N20.676°, ~W88.569° DARK KITE-SWALLOWTAILS AQUIVER Sometimes the Dark Kite-Swallowtails separate themselves from the butterfly cloud circulating before the hut, land very near one another on ground I've moistened that morning with the hose, and vigorously quiver their wings.

As Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) arrives at a makeshift hospital, the camera pans back to a field of hundreds of wounded and dead soldiers. The scene shifts only once those soldiers are framed by a Confederate flag, blowing majestically in the breeze.

Bea in Ontario writes, "That caterpillar looks like it might be a swallowtail caterpillar, because of its large 'shoulders' and the colors and pattern." On the Internet we can't find a photo of the Dark Kite Swallowtail's caterpillar, the Dark Kite being our most common swallowtail, but Bea did find caterpillar pictures for the closely related Mexican Kite Swallowtail, which are almost identical to those in the picture.

Why do these images of Australian soldiers posing with a flag from another country’s long-ago war provoke such strong reactions? Because the flag has long symbolised defiance, rebellion, an ideal of whiteness and the social and political exclusion of non-white people — in a word, racism.

After a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction, the US military withdrew its forces. White Southerners, who had retained their land, implemented unjust legal and labour systems, underpinned by violence and racist ideas about black people’s inferiority.

Who knows why they do this? One guess is that it's very hot there on the moistness-darkened soil, and the quivering keeps cool air circulating among them. Another is that predators might be confused by all the rippling images. However, elsewhere dense, similar sized clusters of other butterfly species often sit perfectly still, and it's just as hot with them, and they're just as vulnerable to predators.

In that picture the top inset shows a much smaller, younger instar (instar being a stage of development between five or so skin-molts a caterpillar goes through), camouflaged rather like a bird dropping. The larger caterpillar below, maybe in the last instar, has abandoned the bird-dropping look for a more threatening one. If you unfocus your eyes and look from a distance, and if the disturbed caterpillar raises its front end (lower right) and waves it back and forth, as it does in real life, the banded coloring on the caterpillar's top looks a good bit like a yellowish snake with a big head and black eye, almost like a hooded viper with his head curved forward.

In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For 155 years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.

The Confederate flag featured prominently in Gone with the Wind (1939), another immensely popular film that again glorified the way of life of white Southerners during and immediately after slavery. In this case, however, Hollywood used the more visually striking Confederate Battle Flag, which General Robert E. Lee had flown during the war, rather than any of the CSA’s national flags.

In the very next shot, however, the injured Cameron is rescued from the no-man’s land between trenches by his longtime family friend, Northerner and US Army commander, Phil Stoneman.

The ensuing four-year Civil War between the CSA and US was resolved in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the near-abolition of enslavement.