Our Confederate culture is met globally

We the American Confederate people may meet ourselves criticized and sometimes even publicly beaten by those who hate our existence because of the racist narrative that has been engraved onto the cultural background of the Confederate States of America and the people that hold the culture dear because of groups of people like White Supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or independent racists like Dylan Roof who admire a sick ideal of the history of slavery. Nonetheless, our culture may be threatened here in the United States, but on a global scale thanks to many cultural bodies that flowed in from many countries in the time of the American Civil War to take part in our fight, our image lives on in many different countries around the world.

Even if America is successful in obliterating the image of the Confederate battle flag or any other of the flags tied to the original Confederate States of America, the image and the cultural message that it holds for most of the people relative will not disappear off the face of the Earth. That's because the American-born flag has found a home in several other places around the world — some of which are well aware of the negative connotation the flag holds.

Here are some of those places:

Italy

Italians in the south of Italy and Americans in the American South view the Confederate battle flag in a very similar way, according to the Washington Post. Southern Italians, inspired by the American Civil War, adopted the Confederate battle flag as a sign of rebellion around the time they were absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

"We too are a defeated people," an unnamed professor in Naples said, according to the Post. "Once we were a rich and independent country, and then they came from the North and conquered us and took our wealth and power away to Rome."

Brazil

Paulo Whitaker/ReutersDescendants of American Southerners wearing Confederate-era dresses and uniforms dance during a party to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War in Santa Barbara D'Oeste, Brazil, April 26, 2015. 

Roughly 150 years later, that mass emigration is evident in an annual Dixie-themed festival in Brazil's southeastern Sao Paulo state. The festival draws thousands of Brazilians who trace their ancestry back to the American South, according to the Guardian.

The Guardian said that the Brazilians, many of whom are of mixed race, do not view the Confederate flag in a negative way. 

“To me it’s a positive symbol of my heritage,” Keila Padovese Armelin, a festival attendee, told the Guardian. “For us, it doesn’t have a negative connotation at all.”

Sweden

Youtube/Drop0815A muscle car at a Swedish Raggare festival

As the Washington Post reported in 2013, in Dalarna "men strut around in cowboy hats and leather boots. American flags flutter outside family homes, and posters advertise hamburger bars and 1950s nostalgia markets." 

The Post says in Sweden — void of any political context — the Confederate battle flag represents another piece of Americana.

Northern Ireland

Youtube/AdiProd256The Red Hand Defenders, a Loyalist Ulster paramilitary group, march with Confederate flags in Newtownstewart in Northern Ireland in 2011

Ukraine

Reuters, a woman walks with a flag of Novorossiya (New Russia) during a rally on Lenin Square in the center of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, October 4, 2014. 

However, the founder of the flag asserts this similarity is purely coincidental. He told Slate he found the design for the flag "online somewhere".