Robert E. Lee and current events

Amen!

 

haha, no doubt

 

What Charlie said

 

True. Suspect Lee would have used the term "miscreant" - despised US Gen John Pope as bad as he would despise Kim, and that was as strong a term as he would ever employ.

 

Speaking of the whole General Lee and the removal of Confederate statues etc... I found this video rather "interesting" :
listen from about 1:30-2:30 where he compares Lee to figures like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Stalin etc... as being among a group of people who were skilled tacticans or political figures yet they murdered millions too.

Yet this supposedly ultra liberal channel which calls itself The Young Turks and was founded by a Turk, Cenk Uygur, makes no mention of this political party which is also "coincidently" named the Young Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Turks This party, unlike Lee or the Confederacy as a whole for that matter, did commit genocide. Now I guess he might claim that naming his channel The Young Turks has no relevance to the political party Young Turks- but for a liberal who claims to be historically sensitive I'm surprised he didn't realize how problematic it would be to use such a name for his channel. He has multiple videos attacking the Confederacy but zero about the genocides committed by the Young Turks movement- geez I wonder why?? No it couldn't be that he's a typical two faced lefty

 

Although I'm not American I have studied American history. The statutes are a part of your culture; good or bad.

 

The statues are not a part of the history of the civil war....they are part of the Jim Crow and Civil Rights movement...placed by white people to intimidate black people...NOT to celebrate the confederacy.

There are MANY confederate era statues that document the Civil War...that are in museums and battlegrounds with the appropriate context...that are significantly less controversial.

 

Says who? I am truly asking that as an honest question and not with the tone that it may imply. I have very little knowledge regarding the history of the placement of these statues...... when/where and what for.

 

You might try https://www.google.com/amp/amp.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate

 

The link didn't work. Though I'm not sure I completely agree. Given African Americans fought for the Confederate as well, also the recent obsession goes much further then just confederate statues, beyond slave owners to pretty much any statue (Christopher Columbus was vandalized).

I think kids have too much time these days to think about their feelings and what makes them uncomfortable.

 

Sorry about the link, I have a very poor internet connection with a not so smart phone...but you can google the site easily enough.

African Americans fought for the confederacy...as slaves! So I don't understand how that applies to the issue.

 

@Scott Slough I just read like 5 quick articles and you are correct most fought as slaves and the number that fought as free men is a major discrepancy.

Either way, this is a weird conversation for AH. I don't know the motives for putting up statues, I don't know the motives for those that fought in the civil war. But I believe discussing and tearing down statues, any statue, is a way to divide us for political gain. Per and simple it is an easy fundraiser.

 

Abraham Lincoln's bust was burned recently in a southern state. I'm fairly certain he was at the front of anti-slavery. These tools don't care about the history that any stature honors. They're just banding together to do whatever they feel like, because no one will step up and tell them they're wrong.

Shoot them all, and let God sort it out?

Americans are so obsessed with being politically correct that hurting someone's feelings just won't happen any more.

 

Scott, that is true in many cases, but does not begin to unravel the complexity of the issues. One of my signature lines below quotes J.P Hartley's prescient opening words to his novel The Hireling - "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." It is a bit of wisdom some of the current offended classes might consider. Judging any historical period by the standards of the present is an exercise in ignorance. It would be the same as condemning Rome and all of Western Civilization because of Rome's slave-based economy. A belief to which I am sure some uneducated neo-Marxist is happy to subscribe.

In fairness to the South, it went through a period of occupation and "reconstruction" unknown to the rest of the country. It left the region destitute, a condition from which it never fully recovered until WWII. My mother, who is 93, clearly remembers her great uncle Paul who was a young infantryman in the Army of Northern Virginia. Another ancestor, William Barksdale, fell mortally wounded leading a Brigade of Mississippians which broke a Union Corps on the second day at Gettysburg. For many, pride in those ancestors and in their sacrifice was about all they had left. Remember, one in four Confederate soldiers never returned home. And so the war retained an immediacy and bitterness which lingered for generations. And none of that had anything to do about slavery, but everything to do about the post-war subjugation of a region and a people. A lot of monuments did indeed go up after WWII - in part as a reaction to desegregation, but also because for the first time since Appomattox, the states could afford them.

Slavery, was indeed a central causative reason for the war. But you will find no period accounts of a Southerner fighting for slavery - anymore than a few abolitionists were fighting for the North in order to free the slaves - at least until after 1862. Period correspondence is full of a clear understanding that slavery was not a sustainable institution. It is interesting to note that 90% of Southern soldiers were not slave owners. And those independent minded yeoman farmers surely weren't dying in the tens of thousands at the behest of a plantation class. But it was an issue that the Southern States were determined to resolve on their own and in their own good time. Secession, and the determination of Lincoln to hold the country together, quickly escalated into all out war. There is nothing defensible about the institution of slavery - the sugar plantations of Louisiana were particularly ugly places. But you will find no legitimate historian who believes that slavery would have lasted more than another decade or so - certainly not into the 20th century. Who knows what form the region would have taken - South Africa and apartheid represents one extreme - Brazil, the other.

I think the US Army had done better than most of the country in reaching an understanding with this complex past. It claims all the soldiers from that terrible war as part of its heritage. The battle streamers of those campaigns which fly on the regimental colors of units which participated and the Army flag itself are each blue and gray. Cadets study the biographies and tactics of Lee and J.E.B Stuart as closely as they do Grant and Sherman. Our light tank in WWII was the Stuart - our medium was the Sherman. The Army honors Chancellorsville just as devoutly as Gettysburg. When Fort Hood, near Killeen, TX , was created shortly before WWII, it was only natural to name it for Texas's greatest soldier - John Bell Hood who initially commanded Lee's Texas Brigade. I think an appropriate act of inclusiveness by an institution that is the closest thing I know to a true meritocracy. It is a concept that the newly aggrieved thought police should consider. Of course, the SPLC is demanding the post's name be changed.

I think what bothers me most about the current frenzy - other than its ignorance of American history - is this almost Maoist insistence on collective "correct" thought. Anything, even slightly off the proper script is met with not just ridicule, but even violence. Does anyone really doubt the more radical of these nihilists would be perfectly comfortable consigning their enemies to re-education camps or worse? Collective outrage against our Southern history is a subset of that general assault upon American traditions - not Caucasian traditions - but American ones. We in the hunting community are targets of it as well.

If a community decides to remove a memorial object from its community - fine. It was the community that placed it there to begin with. But where does it stop? Should we dig up the Confederate war dead from Federal cemeteries (including a group in Arlington placed their by their Union adversaries). It is past time for the majority of good people in this country to bring this nonsense to a stop.

 

Thanks for that post, General.

I wish I could like it twice...

 

Thank you sir for your wonderful words of wisdom.

 

Red Leg you mentioned 90% of southern solders were not slave owners that is very true most of them fought to keep the states strong and the federal government week.
After the emancipation proclamation union desertion skyrocketed. They were fighting to preserve the union.
I'm not defending slavery just pointing out how history can have a selective memory.
And the north keep its own form of slavery for a hundred years after the war. To get a job in many places here in Western Pa you had to live in a company house and shop in the company store so what little you made you gave back to them. And my grandfather who is 85 talked about working conditions so bad he was told that he couldn't take the mule to the face where he was mining. When he asked why he was told roof was bad and it cost to much money to replace a mule. When he asked about his safety he was told they could hire another Irishman before the shift ended for nothing.

 

Well said!

The more recent intolerance of opposition is a societal weakness.

 

that is literally the dumbest argument ive ever heard...and ide really like to see any proof of this claim......because it implies that there is absolutely no other reason to put up a statue other than to intimidate black people.

.......if the goal was to intimidate black people......they would have put up statues of Klansmen or burning crosses.......not iconic american generals.