I grew up in East Germany. I'm not German, but Sorbian. Sorbians are a small, native, national minority in Saxony, Germany. In case you thought Germany is a monolinguistic country full of people of only one native nation, that couldn't be further from the truth. Germany is home to lots of minority nations with their own languages and customs.

You may be surprised to learn that communist East Germany had a Dixieland Jazz Festival. That's where I first saw the Confederate flag. One interesting thing to know about Dresden (the capital of Saxony) under communism is that this city was one of the most indocrinated parts of East Germany, since it's located in a huge valley, which made terrestial TV reception impossible. People living there were able to receive East German TV stations, but not West German ones, so they had no exposure to any kind of balanced news reporting, even if they had been brave enough to tune in. The man who founded the festival, Karlheinz Drechsel, also helped organize a tour through East Germany for Louis Armstrong, and gigs for Leo Wright and Dizzy Gillespie. He was surveilled by the Stasi and lost his job as a radio journalist because he loved American music.

On a purely emotional level, the confederate flag symbolizes New Orleans, music, and enjoying my own life without the state lecturing me what the correct way to think about music is. Watch the movie to learn more about what jazz meant to people behind the Iron Curtain.

If slavery means you have to work and you cannot chose what work you want to do or where you want to live, and if you try to run away you'll get shot in the back, then East Germans have experienced much more slavery than any black person in America today.

On a hike through certain parts of Saxony you might see quite a few Confederate flags, because for over 40 years, this flag symbolized freedom from government interference. Nobody gave a flying fuck about race, since we're all in this together.

This is probably changing as we speak since currently, Germany is flooded with 2 million third world people who hate everything but the money can rob from the German taxpayers. There are only 40.000 Sorbians on this planet; I may well be the only one in New York, and you may understand why I consider Merkel's policies as genocide against my people.

Two other funny things East Germans did to escape the constant ideology blast were nudist beaches, where everyone was equally naked (oh damn did I hate it when my parents took me there), and pretending to be Prairie Indians. Lots of East Germans liked dressing up as native Americans, spending their weekends in tepees, doing whatever Indians do (except for the hunting, killing, torturing parts). I was a big fan of everything Indian, and a big fan of , another great Saxon. I read all of his books, watched every movie that had Indians in it, and joined a youth club about Latin America because that was the closest to studying America I could get.

A few years ago, I sat in my favorite coffee shop, trying to wake up, when I saw a man in the confederate uniform walking by. Now, this is New York, and this man was most likely an actor, or tourist guide. I was still pretty fresh off the boat, knocked off my feet by just living in New York, and finding out that everything I had seen on TV for the last 25 years was complete and utter nonsense. And I was irritated and amused to watch one of the barristas go nuts. He was White and in his early 20s, and pointed the costumed man out to the older, more experienced, black barrista, who was utterly unimpressed, and just couldn't be manipulated into feeling oppressed by a man going about his business outside on the street.

I did not know what to make of this scene, until this summer, when suddenly a flag was blamed for the murder of nine churchgoers.

The confederate flag is to remind me that the one big goal is to restrict government interference with people's lives. These days, the correct way to look at East Germans' love for Dixieland and pretend-play of Indian lifestyle is racism and cultural appropiation, and I am just too old for this nonsense.

I'd always side with that old black barrista trying to do his job, and refusing to be propagandized at work by some kid who doesn't trust people to know what is good for them because he has no experience and no sense of history and who doesn't understand the Bill of Rights. As I said before, we're all in this together, and we should not allow anybody to split us up into worker vs capitalist, father vs mother, and East German vs Jazz musician.