And R L is a blues musician.
None.
Nobody was “American” until 1783. Please, do try to keep up.
4,435 battle deaths on the American side according to the Department of Veterans Affairs; total American deaths unknown but it probably encompassed by 20,000 from famine, displacement, and disease. British numbers are unclear it (the official claims by the Crown were wildly exaggerated) but likely in the area of 12k to 13k including Loyalists, British Army, Hessian mercenaries, and others in battle deaths, perhaps five times that number from disease and other privations. Over the issue of legal representation in governance, something the American South did not lack for, and in fact, had received massive concessions since the drafting of the US Constitution despite their smaller voting population and perpetuation of the unpopular institution of human slavery.
What, exactly, is your fucking point?
Stranger
I’ll say this in Lee’s defense: he openly switched sides. He didn’t pretend to serve the United States while secretly betraying it to the other side the way Arnold did. In my opinion, that makes Lee a better man than Arnold.
I’ll give you that much.
Dammit!
Don’t pay attention to what I say, pay attention to what I mean! 
Stone mountain is a memorial to the KKK and southern racism, I hope they dynamite it off the face of the earth.
United in keeping the uppity black folk in their place, do you mean? 
Stone Mountain depicts the President of the Confederacy and two Confederate Army generals in bas relief commissioned by Venable Brothers, founders of the revived Ku Klux Klan on that site in 1915, and opened on the centennial of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It does not present any image of reconciliation, celebrate any former slaves who resisted and escaped from slavery, or do anything other than venerate he Confederacy as a wronged party in a war of their own creation and an issue opposed by the other fledgling democracies and liberal republics of the industrial world.
How precisely does Stone Mountain “showcase reconciliation” or “show that we’ve moved beyond the hate“? Please feel free to use as many words as necessary to explain your prevarication.
Stranger
Quite a few black prisoners were killed after the Battle of the Crater. Guess who was in command? Marse Robert
I’m not excusing Forrest for Ft. Pillow, but he was hardly the only Confederate general who was okay with murdering blacks.
I hate to nitpick, but must; people were most assuredly “American” before 1783. The word “American” to describe people from what would become the United States was being used before the Revolution, and in fact was a reasonably common use of the term in Britain. In in 1760 you had said to someone in London that you had an American friend, they would have known exactly what you meant.
“American” originally meant Native American, though it was swamped in English by “Indian.” “English-American” appears in the mid-17th century and just “American” was pretty common by the time the 18th century rolled in.
Nationality is not the same as nation-states, after all. People were being called “Canadians” before Canada was independent. People in occupied Poland were still Polish.
I get this. I do.
But it’s a pretty spectacular piece of craftsmanship. It’s not on the level of Rushmore or the Pyramids (I’ve seen all three up close) but it’s up there. I just wish that, instead of destroying it, we could rebrand it somehow.
Lee had a larger need to fight in the name of his hometown than to defend the oppressed.
Really, the only thing that lifts him from the bottom of the barrel is that everyone at the time was racist. The South seceded because of the economic ramifications of losing slavery, and the North went to war because it couldn’t allow the Union to splinter.
People often find it racist to say that the war wasn’t about slavery. But really, the sad thing is that it largely wasn’t. If the slaves had been robots and the North was going to block the South from importing them and instead say that they had to hire humans, it would have been the same war, and that’s a tragedy.
But even in that context, Lee supported his home state over the Union and that’s sacrificing the greater good for his own personal interests. I think it’s fair to say that no matter how much you might care for your loved ones, there’s a point at which preventing the nation from fracturing and weakening, preventing it from becoming prey to all comers that would love to take advantage of the rift, becomes more important.
Lee helped to support a war that got the people he cared about killed and risked the general freedom of all Americans, and he did it all for really no reason. He was too afraid to go against his family and connections, in the name of what was right.
In all respects, he failed to make any sort of morally justifiable choice.
Maybe it served a purpose to treat him as a hero for a while. But today, that shouldn’t be necessary. The man wasn’t no hero.
But it wasn’t about robots. Saying the war was “about the economics of slavery” but not about “slavery” is a distinction without a difference. But, yeah, the South and the North had different motivations. The North did not go to war to end slavery, even if the South went to war to preserve it. As you say, the North went to war to preserve the Union. Ending slavery came later.
Gtyj said it was the laser show that showcased reconciliation not the mountain itself. I haven’t seen the laser show (or Stone Mountain other than in pictures) but that’s certainly possible. People can stage an exhibit or ceremony at a site with the specific intent of repudiating the site’s original meaning. Like a memorial service held at Auschwitz or a freedom ceremony held at the remains of the Berlin Wall.
Sure, provided the show is based on the premise that Auschwitz and the Berlin Wall were massive wrongs.
Does the laser show featuring three white supremacists repudiate them?
Another fallacy used by Confederate (and other) apologists: that the only kind of loyalty is loyalty to individuals or causes.
People who opposed corrupt causes were (often) choosing loyalty to *principle *over those causes.
But apologists getting all gooey over loyalty to the Confederacy make it sound like theirs is the only kind that counts. It ain’t.
PS: I knew a woman once - a naturalized citizen, and an Iranian immigrant - who admired Richard Nixon because he stayed loyal to the Shah. It amazed me that someone who had betrayed pretty much every moral principle in the book - not to mention plenty of people - could draw praise for his loyalty.
Curious : if southern apologists value loyalty to a cause so much, how do they deal with Andrew Johnson, who stayed loyal to the cause of the Union? (To the point that he left instructions that when he died, his head was to be pillowed in his coffin on a copy of the US Constitution)
Who?
He meant Twittler, one of my favorite Twitter accounts