Apparently it is because the flag is part of American 'heritage'.
But here is the story of how the Confederacy redeemed itself, and led to the JBS aligning itself with the Confederate Battle Flag and all it stands for.
During the American-Spanish war the Confederate states captured Cuba and other islands from Spain, and so to Americans they became respected heroes. The Stars and Bars was accepted in public, and all the original Stars and Bars flags captured by the Union Army during the US Civil War were returned to their Confederate states. Then came WW1, and then WW2, when America unified against engineered enemies.
And then came the Vietnam War, by which time the JBS had been founded.
Dixie in Danang
“We are fighting and dying in a war that is not very popular in the first place,” Lieutenant Eddie Kitchen, a 33-year-old African-American stationed in Vietnam, wrote his mother in Chicago in late February 1968, “and we still have some people who are still fighting the Civil War.” Kitchen, who had been in the military since 1955, reported a rapid proliferation of Confederate flags, mounted on jeeps and flying over some bases. “The Negroes here are afraid and cannot do anything,” Kitchen added. Two weeks later he was dead, officially listed as “killed in action.” His mother believed that he had been murdered by white soldiers in retaliation for objecting to the flag.
Kitchen’s was one of many such complaints, as the polarization tearing through domestic politics in the United States, along with the symbols of White Supremacy—not just the Confederate flag but the burning cross, the Klan robe and hood, and racist slurs—spilled into Vietnam. As early as Christmas Day 1965, a number of white soldiers paraded in front of the audience of conservative comedian Bob Hope’s USO show at Bien Hoa Air Base. “After they were seated,” wrote an African-American soldier protesting the display, “several officers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] were seen posing and taking pictures under the flag. I felt like an outsider.” An African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, reported that southern Whites were “infecting” Vietnamese with their racism. “The Confederate flags seem more popular in Vietnam than the flags of several countries,” the paper wrote, judging by the “display of flags for sale on a Saigon street corner.”
Black soldiers who pushed back against such Dixie-ism were subject to insult and abuse. Some were thrown in the stockade. When Private First Class Danny Frazier complained of the “damn flag” flown by Alabama soldiers in his barracks to his superior officers, he was ordered to do demeaning work and then demoted.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in early April 1968 and American military bases throughout South Vietnam lowered their flags to half-mast. In some places, such as the Cam Ranh Naval Base, however, white soldiers celebrated by raising the Confederate flag and burning crosses. Following King’s murder, the Department of Defense tried to ban the Confederate flag. “Race is our most serious international problem,” a Pentagon representative said. But Dixiecrat politicians, who controlled the votes President Lyndon Johnson needed to fund the war, objected and the Pentagon backpedaled. Instead of enforcing the ban, it turned to sensitivity training. The Confederate flag, a black military instructor told a class of black and white soldiers at Fort Dix, does not necessarily “mean a man belongs to the Ku Klux Klan.”
The Sum of All Lost Causes
Back home, a backlash against the antiwar movement helped nationalize the Confederate flag. The banner was increasingly seen not just at gatherings of the fringe KKK and the John Birch Society, but at “patriotic” rallies in areas of the country outside the old South: in Detroit, Chicago, California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. For instance, on June 14, 1970—Flag Day—pro-war demonstrators marched up Pittsburg’s Liberty Avenue with a large Confederate flag demanding that “Washington … get in there and win.”
For many, the Confederate flag remained an emblem of racist reaction to federal efforts to advance equal rights and integration. Yet as issues of race, militarism, and class resentment merged into a broader “cultural war,” some in the rising New Right rallied around the Stars and Bars to avenge not the South, but South Vietnam.
In 1973, shortly after the U.S. officially ended combat operations in South Vietnam, for instance, Bart Bonner, a conservative activist and Vietnam veteran from Waterbury, New York, met with South Vietnam’s military attaché in Washington and offered to raise “a private, volunteer force of 75,000 American veterans to fight in South Vietnam under the Confederate flag.” For Bonner, and many like him, that flag now stood not for the “lost cause” but all lost causes conservatives cared about, an icon of resistance to the liberal Establishment.
Bonner told Soldier of Fortune magazine that he had the financial support of Texas millionaire Ross Perot and 100 men, including former Green Berets, Air Force commandos, and Navy Seals, ready to “show the people of South Vietnam … that not all Americans are cowards.” He added: “The Stars and Bars—the Confederate flag—is a beautiful flag.”
[source : Before It Was a Symbol of Racist Backlash, the Confederate Flag Was a Symbol of Endless War, In These Times, http://inthesetimes.com/article/18153/the-confederate-flag-at-war, 7th July 2015]
But this virulent anti-Communism of the JBS went further than that.
On 31st October 1965 the JBS took out an ad in the Palm Beach post in which the JBS claimed that the civil rights movement was a Communist plot to establish a "Negro Soviet Republic".
The first example of the JBS campaign to oppose the Civil Rights Movement is an advertisement in the October 31, 1965 issue of the Palm Beach Post titled, “The John Birch Society Asks: What’s Wrong With Civil Rights?”
The half-page advertisement begins with the statement that nothing is wrong with civil rights, just with the Civil Rights Movement. According to the JBS, it constituted a communist plot to build a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the United States. The “average American Negro,” according to the JBS in 1965, “has complete freedom of religion, freedom of movement, and freedom to run his own life as he pleases.” Moreover, “The pursuit of happiness enjoyed by the average American Negro has been far superior to that of any race or any people among at least ninety percent of the earth’s population.”
The ad continues, “So what is all the complaining about?” The problem, according to the JBS, is that communist agitators are beginning to see the results from “patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years.” The reader is informed that this Soviet strategy in the U.S. is a continuation of anti-colonialism fermented by communists in Africa and Asia and conducted by those who have no interest in civil rights. According to the John Birch Society, both the push for civil rights in the U.S. and anti-colonialist activism in Africa and Asia are a communist plot to destroy all that is good and holy—namely, capitalism.
The advertisement then seeks to expose the “big-lie” of anti-colonialism: “Its specific core of falsehood has been that the colonial peoples of Asia and Africa wanted and deserved their ‘independence’ from the nations of Europe which were oppressing and exploiting them. Actually, by 1926, the French in Indochina or Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Belgian in the Congo, and other ‘imperialistic’ powers, were giving their colonial subjects a very enlightened and benevolent rule.”
The next step in this communist plot, as stated in the ad, is the formation of a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the U.S. that would include the major cities of the South. JBS claimed this to be the real intent of American civil rights leaders. The ad continues, “A careful study quickly reveals that every part of the civil rights program has been designed, and in is being carried forward, as a step in the Communist strategy for these purposes. And the current leaders of the nationwide civil rights campaign have such extensive records of affiliating with Communists of Communists, of being guided, trained, and supported by Communists, and of themselves supporting Communists agents and causes, as to make their real purposes as obvious a sunrise to anybody who will simply use honestly the intelligence that God gave him.”
The JBS authors close by stating that “American Negroes as a whole” did not plan this or want this and and “are no bigger dupes in yielding to the propaganda and coercion of the comaymps among them, than are the white people in the United States in swallowing the portions of that propaganda which are labeled idealism. “Comaymps” was JBS shorthand for communist sympathizers.
Across the bottom of the half-page ad is marketing of other JBS pamplets and books through American Opinion publishing, including It’s Very Simple and New York: Communist Terror in the Streets, both by Alan Stang. Stang published many works through the John Birch Society’s American Media, and also wrote widely on Christian Reconstructionism. Stang was a contributor to the Gary North-edited The Theology of Christian Resistance, one of many examples of the overlap between the JBS and theocratic Christian Reconstructionism.
Stang passed away in 2009 and was eulogized in the pages of the JBS’ New American magazine. Yet other 1960s-era JBS leaders are again leading the charge in a contemporary state’s rights projects: nullification. Leaders who were involved with the organization in the 1960s include its current president, John McManus. McManus was the surprise guest speaker at the Ron Paul Rally for the Republic, the counter-rally to the Republican National Convention in 200. In his remarks, he told the audience, “If you like Ron Paul, you’re going to love the John Birch Society.”
[source : The John Birch Society’s Anti-Civil Rights Campaign of the 1960s, and Its Relevance Today, Political Research, www.politicalresearch.org/2014/01/21/the-john-birch-societys-anti-civil-rights-campaign-of-the-1960s-and-its-relevance-today, 21st January 2014]
The penultimate paragraph in that JBS ad reads:
"Civil rights" is a perfect example of Communist strategy and Communist tactics at work - so far successfully - in making an anti-Communist people help to fasten the tiny but almost infinite chains of a central Communist tyranny around their bodies and their lives. And we think it is time for our fellow citizens, white and black, throughout the whole United States, to wake up to the real meaning of what is happening all around us.
There is also a reference to a pamphlet entitled American Negro Problems, which according to the JBS was full of "agitation and propaganda". But you can find that pamphlet on t'interweb, and thus read it. There is no such "agitation and propaganda". But there are suggestions and proposals on how to help the negores in the South protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan and other violent white supremacist organisations, and how to organise and stop the exploitation of Negroes not just in the plantations of the South but in the factories of the North.
The JBS paint the pamphlet as one demanding violent revolution. But no such calls are made. Only calls for a safer and fairer America for Negroes.
But it gets worse.
Much worse.
President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on 22nd November 1963. That's Dallas, Texas. Oh, the yellow rose of Texas, and all that.
Before JFK arrived in Dallas there was a flyer handed out accusing JFK of being a Communist traitor. This was traced to a General Edwin A. Walker, who had previously handed out JBS literature to his troops. Walker's aide Robert Surrey was the man tasked with distributing these flyers, and he and supporters of Walker handed the flyers out and stuck on car windscreens.
But after the assassination the JBS with assistance from Fred Koch, cofounder of the JBS, founder of Koch Industries and father of the Koch brothers, then accuse the Communists of killing JFK!!
But the thing is the JBS pushed the idea that the civil rights movement was a Communist plot. There's the aforementioned ad, and they also pushed a pamphlet by Alan Stang entitled It’s Very Simple
There is a joint strong whiff of racism in the JBS/Confederacy/KKK movement: to the JBS everything is and was a communist conspiracy, including the civil rights movement, which made them allies of the KKK.
Hence their support for the Confederate battle flag, the fucking Stars and Bars!!
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