COLUMBIA, Mo. – An adjunct journalism professor at the University of Missouri is comparing the Confederate flag debate to Germany’s Nazi past, arguing that Germans learned from their mistakes, while Americans did not.

“The Germans own their past. They accept how horrific the Holocaust was and how the memory of it all continues to burden those who lost family members. They haven’t forced Jews to embrace their hideous history. They haven’t allowed it to brew with symbols scattered across the land to prompt recollections of a madman named Hitler,” Carl Kenney, also a co-pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, wrote in his weekly column for the Missourian.

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“Americans could learn a lot from the Germans. They’re better at overcoming the humiliation of lives taken and assumptions made about people outside the Aryan race. Germans aren’t ensnared by a need to narrate the story to make the guilty innocent while forgetting it all was about hate.”

The column centers on the recent decision by Missouri’s Boone County Commission to remove a huge granite rock monument to Confederate soldiers that was placed in front of Columbia’s courthouse in 1935.

Commissioners voted unanimously to move the rock, initially gifted to the Missouri University by the Daughters of the Confederacy, to a Civil War battlefield. On the rock is a plaque that reads, “To honor the valor and patriotism of Confederate soldiers of Boone County,” Kenney wrote.

“The words on that plaque give us a clue about why we can’t just get along,” Kenney opined. “Those soldiers were not patriots. They fought for a government that performed treason. They formed a separate government that sullied the Constitution of the United States. It wasn’t enough to disagree with those fighting to free slaves. They wanted to discontinue all conversations regarding the humanity of slaves. Like the Germans, the members of the Confederacy believed in Aryan supremacy.

“They were not patriots,” he wrote.

Kenney insinuates that Confederate symbols convey the message that white southerners wish the Confederacy had won the war, that slavery was still alive, and they’re hiding their hatred for black people behind “Southern pride.”

Of course, there’s a lot of people who disagree with Kenney’s Nazi-Old South analogy.

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There’s a lot of black people that disagree.

One of them was killed Sunday when he was run off the road after attending a rally to save a Confederate Monument in Birmingham, Alabama.

City officials recently voted to remove the memorial from Lynn Park, and well-known black Confederate supporter Anthony Hervey, 49, attended the event with black U.S. Army veteran Arlene Barnum to oppose the decision, the McAlister News-Capital reports.

At the rally, Barnum burned her lifetime NAACP membership card, an image of which was posted online. Hervey, who earned a Purple Heart for his military service and was wearing it at the rally, is known for donning Confederate regalia to protest attempts to change the state flag.

“In an interview with the Associated Press in 2001 after a new state flag design was defeated, Hervey said Mississippians’ support of the flag with a Confederate battle emblem in the corner is akin to ‘standing up for home,’” CBS News reports.

“This is not racism. This is my heritage,” he said at the time.

Over 500 others at the Birmingham rally expressed the same sentiment.

Save Our South spokesman Jonathan Barbee told the Examiner about 500 people of all races attended.

“According to Barbee, there were several African-American guest speakers and dozens of African-Americans attended the event along with Confederate heritage organizations. The rally was intended to bring awareness to Southern culture and preserve history through reaching across racial lines, he added,” according to the Examiner.

After the peaceful event, as Barnum and Hervey carpooled home together in Barnum’s Ford Explorer when they were run off the road.

Barnum said she let Hervey drive when they got closer to his home, and a silver vehicle with four or five young black men pulled alongside them yelling. Hervey yelled back before the silver vehicle forced them into the ditch, Barnum told CBS News.

“It spun like crazy and we flipped, flipped, flipped. It was awful,” she said.

Barnum was injured, but survived.

So while it’s clear Kenney thinks Confederate symbolism is akin to Nazi white supremacy, there are a lot of black folks who don’t see it the same way, and view the Confederate past as part of their heritage.

The crash also highlights the fact that racial hate lives on, and it’s not limited to whites.

Relocating rocks and dismantling historic monuments is not going to change that.