Is it more horrific that the majority people of Germany worked to kill as many Jews as they could, or that they simply ignored what everyone knew was going on? As said, personally, I find the latter more horrific and so I prefer to present things in that sense.
There’s nothing to prevent your average good, wonderful, and caring person from accepting and tolerating, or even for fighting to preserve, evil acts. That’s scary, and it’s worth noting that WWII is not the only time it happened.
So I do understand your point, and I don’t deny any of it, but there’s a different lesson that can also be taken.
To answer the OP original question, I think Lee is revered more than the others is because he is the most well known. There are ( or used to be anyway) tons of monuments to these people but I remember Lee being the most common. In any case, most of the monuments were erected to glorify segregation and have had a brand of misguided “greatness” attached to soldiers and politicians who, in any other context, would be labeled as traitors. Whether or not Lee was a good general is highly debatable, what is not debatable is that he betrayed the oath he made when sworn as an officer of the US Army and joined a seditious cause
Off subject, I for one do not think the Confederacy should be forgotten or wiped from history. What should be is that these individuals be labeled as what the were, traitors who precipitated a bloody war to maintain a heinous system.
Perhaps gather all of the monuments in a special area of Richmond. We can call it Traitors park
To preserve history, one correspondent on twitter recommends that a metallic plaque like the following be affixed to various Robert E Lee statues:
[INDENT] Robert E Lee participated and championed legalized kidnapping, human trafficking, torture, rape and murder. He led an insurrection against the United States to keep these acts legal. This statue was erected years later, to celebrate renewed oppression. [/INDENT] https://twitter.com/DanSchwarcz/status/1016874392935165957
As I’m not sure murdering a slave was technically legal at the time, I’d cross that out. I’d also throw in a couple of additional sentences regarding Lee’s personal views, perhaps with one of the quotes provided by Stranger On A Train.
That certainly would not be an attack on history. Shortly afterwards you could raze the statue, but keep the plaque, suitably modified. That wouldn’t be an attack on history either.
While I have a problem with any statues, miscellaneous works of art, plaques, monuments, etc. that in any way glorify slavery, persecution, or the suppression of rights of any group of human beings, perhaps the best way of dealing with this is by giving equal space to glorify those that were persecuted, and fought against such persecution. Examples of how this has been done in the past include the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
It was kind of iffy. The laws, of course, varied from state to state and decade to decade. But there was a general consensus that it was illegal to deliberately murder a slave.
However, as you might guess, there was a lot of gray area in what constituted deliberate murder. It was generally accepted that it was okay for a white man to kill a slave if it was done during an excessive corporal punishment or if the slave had done something which gave the white man an excuse that he was angered and murdered the slave in the heat of the moment.
And even in cases where a white man indisputably murdered a slave with intent and for no acceptable reason, it required somebody in the local law enforcement community to be willing to press charges. And then for the white man to be found guilty at a trial before his local peers. And if you managed to get the accused though all this and obtain a conviction, the punishment for murdering a slave was generally a fine.
Unless you killed a slave that belonged to somebody else. Then the owner could sue you for the loss of his property.
In all the antebellum state constitutions I’m familiar with (and would-be constitutions, like the Lecompton Constitution proposed for Kansas), the punishment for deliberately murdering a slave (or “dismembering” him) was invariably stated to be the same “as would be inflicted in case the like offense had been committed on a free white person”. (And in the 19th century I’m pretty sure that would be death, for any premeditated murder.)
The rest of the quoted paragraph does still stand, though; a white man would have to be prosecuted for murdering a slave by a white prosecutor, in front of a white judge, and convicted by a white jury; and that white jury would have to decide that no “he was coming right at me!” (“except in case of insurrection of such slave”) loophole applied. (Some antebellum constitutions did also explicitly state that accidentally killing a slave “in giving such slave moderate correction” didn’t count as murder.)
He swore an oath as a US army officer, then forswore it to wage war against the United States in support of White Supremacy. His belief is irrelevant to the treason - everyone who commits treason believes they’re in the right - and to the fact that the cause that he actually fought for was the torture, rape, and murder of black people for the economic benefit of white people.
I also question the use of ‘gentleman’ to describe someone who believed that raping black women and whipping black men is a cause for celebration, and that anyone attempting to interfere with the right of whites to split up black families, work the men to death, and rape the women should be fought. I think that for someone to reasonably be described as a ‘gentleman’ in the 21st century, they need to not fight a war for the express purpose of enabling rich whites to rape and torture dark-skinned people on a whim. I believe that a modern gentleman needs to respect the right of blacks to not be raped to earn the title, but apparently that’s a controversial position here.
Actually, every attempt to tear down monuments involves a lot of spreading of actual historical knowledge. The momements that are being torn down attempt to spread only ‘lost cause’ nonsense, which is contrary to actual history, and celebrate white supremacy. Memorials celebrating slavery and claiming white supremacy have as much place in the modern US as swastika bedecked statues celebrating Hitler and the Nazi regime do in Germany - and I don’t see any of the ‘erasing history’ claimants actually pushing for Germany to erect monuments of that sort. (Interesting fact: Since swastika flags are banned in Germany and several nearby countries, pro-Nazi groups often use the Confederate flag when they march.)
I’m not willing to compromise on the position of ‘are black people human beings who get equal rights, or is it cool to rape, torture, and murder them’.
If the problem is that without the statues people would start forgetting about the Civil War, I say we need to start putting up statues of General Sherman all over Georgia, so that people there won’t forget what happened in the Civil War.
Once you’ve actually seen the place, the ending of North by Northwest makes no sense at all. Aside from the unlikelihood of there being a private home (and airstrip!) on the mountain within walking distance of the monument, what were Cary Grant and Eva Maria Saint trying to accomplish by climbing down the carved faces? Once you pass Washington’s collar, it’s a pretty sheer drop of a few hundred feet down to a huge pile of rubble.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were great men of great character flaws. They are heroes who founded USA. They are villains who enforced Slavery.
Yeah, Washington and Jefferson did great good and great evil. We can celebrate and honor the good they did, while scorning the evil. With Lee, though, his greatness was all on the side of evil.
Well, not all. Before the war he served his nation honorably and ably, and after was quite distinguished as the head of Washington College. I’m not sure I object to honoring him for those achievements in very specific context.
By all means, there should be a statue of Robert E. Lee on the campus of what’s now Washington & Lee University. (I’m sure there already is one; no need to tear it down. But change the inscription if any of it honors his Civil War service.)
But how many statues do we have in this country, I wonder, specifically honoring the heroes of the Mexican War? IIRC, that was Lee’s main pre-secession claim to fame.
