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Gen. Lee statue can be removed, Virginia Supreme Court rules
- Thread starter Loudninja
- Start date
- News
In parts of post-Soviet eastern Europe, they've moved all the old dictator statues to parks at the edge of town, many of them purposefully knocked over. At some parks, people can freely deface them, spray graffiti on them, etc. Turns them into anti-monuments, and allows people to reflect on the horrors of their history, rather than aggrandizing the perpetrators of those horrors.
Where should controversial monuments go? – DW – 06/18/2020
While colonial-era statues are being torn down in the UK and Belgium, some Eastern European countries have already banished communist-era monuments to isolated parks. Are there better ways to deal with canceled "heroes"?
www.dw.com
Statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee comes down in Virginia capital
Gen. Lee statue comes down in former Confederate capital
A statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that towered over Richmond, Virginia, for generations has been taken down, cut into pieces and hauled away.
apnews.com
I know he's sending a hand signal to the crane operator, but I still love this picture.
Not sure if that's the best analogy. Hitler isn't known as a traitor (though he was once charged with treason), but as a contender for worst monster in history.
I suggest comparing this to having a statue of Judas at a Christian church. Who knows, that might even spark a moment of reflection in the congealed brains of the people upset about this removal.
For any people you know in the South who have been indoctrinated into the "Southern Gentleman" revisionist history of Robert E. Lee:
www.theatlantic.com
The revisionist myth of Lee started almost immediately as the war turned against the South. Confederates pivoted to lionize Lee and place all of the blame on the Confederacy's loss on Jefferson Davis. Lee surrendered, Davis fled, and the South sought a majestic hero and "a lost cause." This has been covered a lot by modern historians, from Jill Lepore's new history of America "These Truths" and also in the final episodes of Ken Burns' The Civil War, but this article is succinct and gets to the point.
That Arlington National Cemestry was constructed on his plantation is a fitting legacy for Lee, a man responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other in American history.
The Myth of the Kindly General Lee
The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.
www.theatlantic.com
The revisionist myth of Lee started almost immediately as the war turned against the South. Confederates pivoted to lionize Lee and place all of the blame on the Confederacy's loss on Jefferson Davis. Lee surrendered, Davis fled, and the South sought a majestic hero and "a lost cause." This has been covered a lot by modern historians, from Jill Lepore's new history of America "These Truths" and also in the final episodes of Ken Burns' The Civil War, but this article is succinct and gets to the point.
That Arlington National Cemestry was constructed on his plantation is a fitting legacy for Lee, a man responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other in American history.
I'm thinking mostly in terms of "once beloved icon that in reality did horrible shit to people," as Lee was regarded as a hero even by much of the North, along with most other confederate politicians and commanders. Pretty much all of them got to go back home and do their rich white man thing in the South. Probably one of the biggest mistakes in American history was not charging them with treason and crushing the Southern governmental system to a pulp in order to rebuild it from scratch.
As the conservative dipshits say: losers don't deserve participation trophies.
Much less southern traitors who deserved a traitor's end.
Much less southern traitors who deserved a traitor's end.
I certainly agree with all of that. And yeah, it's disgusting how Lee got retconned into being a hero. I did an essay on Lee, at my teacher's suggestion, in 1st or 2nd grade. And that essay, echoing the single library book I read, said "Lee was on the wrong side, but only because he was such a patriot of his state. It shows you can be wrong and still be a hero". Want to hear a truly mind-boggling fact? Writing this essay did not teach me that the Civil War was over slavery. No, I learned that it was about whether or not states could secede from the union. At least I learned the word 'secede', eh?
And I grew up in Colorado, not the deep south.
At that early an age? The patriotic indoctrination is strong.
I grew up in San Antonio in the 80's: the Alamo defenders (who were all assholes) were portrayed as mythic heroes. I'm not exaggerating. We watched crazy slide shows that showed Davy Crockett fighting multiple bears with his fists and James Bowie killing a ton of Mexican soldiers in a bizarre political cartoon style. They weren't people - they were gods.
As a Canadian, the American pantheon of national heroes is a completely different experience compared to who we hold up on a pedestal. All I know about our first Prime Minister is that he was a notorious drunk and a Tory.
Lee was against putting up statues. That's the best part. The leader of their fucking team was taking the loss more gracefully right after the war than these asswipes almost two centuries later.
Lee was racist and a traitor, but holy shit I sometimes cannot believe that people can go so much lower than that.
If I were Twitter and I had banned a fairly prominent personality, I would also probably frown on users disseminating that personality's statements on my platform.
Like, he was banned because of the inflammatory rhetoric he spread on Twitter. Getting others to do it by putting out easily screenshotable 'statements' shouldn't be any different.
It's kinda like how Jesus was against public displays of worship.
(Not comparing Lee to Jesus.)