Arlington National Cemetery is the only monument we need to Robert E. Lee

boing
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Yea, I got that, but that’s the thing about confiscation - it’s not yours any more. Now it’s a place for American heroes. Don’t the Daughters of American Whiteness have their own cemetery dedicated to property rights and states’ rights and whatever the stalking horse is this year?

So what? There have been calls from people to forbid the teaching of Spanish, or to burn Beatles records, or to exterminate humanity. Somebody somewhere can say any damn thing, and then journalists can write, “some have said.” That does not imply these are mainstream positions worthy of serious debate.

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The perfect comeback to any conservative who bemoans removing a Confederate statue because it’s “erasing history” is to ask “so. . . the Russians shouldn’t have removed all those statues of Lenin and Stalin then?”

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43

If I were the Lee estate I would probably be pushing for the ‘did nothing wrong’ angle. If I recall there was a bit of a technicality in the oath you would swear before the civil war: you swore allegiance to your state and the state of Virginia voted to secede, therefore technically Lee was in the right.

The article says that they went a different route and successfully contested the legality of the ‘tax’ used to steal the property. They then sold the property back to the US Government.

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They may not be worthy of serious debate, today.

But there will be more and more such demands

“Another demand — that the statue of Thomas Jefferson be “re-contextualized with a plaque” to include the history of the statue as an “emblem of white supremacy” at the University — brought shouts from the crowd with supporters yelling, “Take it down.””

and I suspect that many (who fear their degree of wokeness will be perceived as insufficient) will find those demands hard to oppose.

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That’s actually a pretty good point. Well played.

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It is worth noting not even Robert E. Lee wanted cnfederates to be memmorialized.

As someone that grew p a stone’s throw and a decent walk from an activly mantained battlefield I feel that those memorials that exist should be put in museums and used to teach the context and time leading up to the civil war and the ‘compromise’ after that we still feel the repercussions of.

Any monument to the actual soldiers and men in the fields? Those should remain. Regardless of side or Why many of those were simply young men plucked from their homes and told to fight. Often it was the poor man on the front as the rich man could afford to bribe their way out of serving in any way that put them in harm’s way.

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i’d be willing to leave any monument erected prior to 1/1/1876, they would have been erected by contemporaries and participants. everything else should go.

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Nice. Gonna have to remember that one.

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I have been posting this on Twitter in response to “THEY’RE ERASING OUR HISTORY!” nobs:

selective_history
selective_history.png1120×594 28.8 KB

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Monuments to Confederate soldiers or officers in specific historical context (or in any cemetery) strike me as right and just. In my view, for instance, the monument of General Pickett, at Pickett’s Charge, at Gettysburg is appropriate and – at least the ranger guide I had – was told with the profound humanity related to a General ordering (and being ordered) to send his men on little more than a suicide mission. To understand Gettysburg, one needs to understand the battle, and statutes are what folks placed to memorial such things.

Monuments placed in town squares completely separate from any specific historical event, placed n the 1920s to let the black folks know who is in charge are an entirely different thing.

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the statute of Pickett viewed from The Angle or the Copse of Trees sets perspective on how insane that charge was.

The view of Seminary Ridge from Cemeter Hill is fairly chilling.

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It is curious that there are (were) monuments to the Confederacy in California, Ohio, or West Virginia (wikipedia says they have the one of the first, even though they broke away from Virginia because of the war).

It’d be interesting to do research to find just how many other loser monuments kept around for anything other than irony or art/history in other countries.

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There are limits to my tolerance. If you keep insisting that two plus two equals six, then yeah, I am going to call you ridiculous. Much like the disingenuous attempt to equate Jefferson with Lee. It’s a transparent attempt to misdirect and does not deserve discussion (except for how it makes the poster of such an argument look like a jerk).

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As an European I was always amazed that the Union didn’t actually “hang Jeff Davis from a sour Apple Tree”. I never quite understood why the leaders of Confederacy were treated so leniently by the winners of the war. I mean I understood the rationale after reading up on the subject, and I respect the logic of it, and political realities, but it stands in such a contrast to how this sort of things was dealt with in good ol’ Europe.

If you start an open armed rebellion against a country and you find yourself on a losing side in a civil war you could count on either being exiled (if you are fast enough) of being shot or hanged by victors.

Heck, English put on atrial the corpse of Oliver Cromwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell#Death_and_posthumous_execution

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“Equating one small subset of smallminded bigots with “everyone” was your
move, not his.”

I actually didn’t equate one small subset of smallminded bigots with
"everyone". I’m not sure how you got that from what I wrote other than
perhaps hearing other people’s words when you read mine.

Let me go back to Angela Nye and change the order of presentation.

Angela Nye followed her remarks on CNN with “… I’m calling out white
supremacy for what it is. And sometimes what it is, John, are blind spots.
Sometimes what it is, is not acknowledging that this country was built upon
a very violent past that resulted in death, and the raping, and the killing
of my ancestors.”

If I understand the essence of her argument, it is:
There is some moral equivalency between the man who wrote “all men are
created equal” but paid, argued and maneuvered to enslave her ancestors and
the men who later fought later to keep her ancestors enslaved.

Can you help me understand jlw’s position that this argument is ridiculous
and your position (it seems) that she’s a smallminded bigot?

I have the same question regarding Yale, Rutgers, and GWU who have renamed
buildings solely to stop memorializing slave-owners. While the founding
fathers have a special place in our country, these universities had
buildings named after important people in their history so it seems a
similar case, though on a smaller scale.

And to repair the transition from “arguments” to “people” error that I
made, here is my thesis recast (and with less ambiguity):
Dismissing all arguments others have made that equate slave-owning founding
fathers who argued successfully to continue slavery and their resultant
memorials with the statues of their grandchildren who fought to preserve
slavery as worthy of ridicule without providing evidence of serious
consideration of the various arguments seems illiberal (narrow-minded,
bigoted) to me.

The reason I called out jlw’s remark was that I don’t see how “all
positions other than this one are ridiculous” helps us get to “we will live
with this”.

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“There are limits to my tolerance. If you keep insisting that two plus two equals six, then yeah, I am going to call you ridiculous. Much like the disingenuous attempt to equate Jefferson with Lee. It’s a transparent attempt to misdirect and does not deserve discussion (except for how it makes the poster of such an argument look like a jerk).”

I guess it’s fair for you to think me, Angela Nye (and probably the presidents of Yale, Rutgers, and GWU), jerks when I started out by calling jlw position narrow-minded for not considering reasons why the descendants of slaves might have an argument on this that wasn’t ridiculous.

You come across as intolerant (close-minded, illiberal), so I’m not really hoping to reach you.

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Hey, if you want to come over here and discuss it, fine. There’s this interesting little venue just outside of my city that we can do it, maybe you have heard of it? It’s called KZ Gedenkstätte Dachau. I have been visiting it more often since Trump was elected, to remind me of why it is folly to tolerate nazis, fascists, or whatever they are calling themselves these days.

There are some discussions and arguments worth having, but this is not one of them.

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You’re a bit too far away to make it in person…

“There are some discussions and arguments worth having, but this is not one of them.”

Did you bother to find out why I referenced Angela Nye or the presidents of Yale, etc before replying? Probably not. I feel you should. You might actually understand my point instead of assuming I’m with Trump.

Not Dachau, Auschwitz. Heart wrenching is as close a description as I can make. It’s been over a decade and my eyes still water just writing this.

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Darn you, slippery slope!

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There is a profound difference between tolerance and affirmation.

I am required as a citizen of a democratic republic to tolerate Nazi views expressed by American citizens in a manner which is law abiding. This does not mean I am affirming or supportive of Nazi ideology.

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