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A portrait of Confederate general Robert E Lee that includes a slave guiding his horse is set to be reinstated in the Pentagon.
The 20-foot-tall painting, which was on display at the United States Military Academy for 70 years, will be hung in the West Point library under President Trump’s instruction despite a congressionally mandated commission that ordered its removal back in 2020.
I posted this fairly recent, but I think it bears repeating:
I think the case of “southern gentleman” Robert E. Lee shows the horrors of slavery. He inherited people as property from his father-in-law and refused to free them according to the will. They escaped his plantation under the understanding that they were legally emancipated:
Lee’s more strict expectations and harsher punishments of the slaves on Arlington plantation nearly led to a revolt, since many of the enslaved people had been given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died, and protested angrily at the delay. In May 1858, Lee wrote to his son Rooney, “I have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my authority—refused to obey my orders, & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.—I succeeded in capturing them & lodging them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called upon the other people to rescue them.”
[…]
Wesley Norris himself spoke out about the incident after the war, in an 1866 interview printed in an abolitionist newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Norris said that after they had been captured, and forced to return to Arlington, Lee told them that “he would teach us a lesson we would not soon forget”. According to Norris, Lee had the overseer tie the three of them firmly to posts, and ordered them whipped: 50 lashes for the men and 20 for Mary Norris. Norris claimed that Lee encouraged the whipping, and that when the overseer refused to do it, called in the county constable to do it instead. Unlike the anonymous letter writers, he does not state that Lee himself whipped any of the enslaved people. According to Norris, Lee “frequently enjoined [Constable] Williams to ‘lay it on well’, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”
He was too cruel for a professional slave driver to carry out his order, so he had to get a cop to do it.
This is why reactionaries love revisionist monuments while destroying other memorials like the Pulse massacre’s: they want to rewrite history to make it so they don’t look like villains.
Little wonder he’s a Republican sweetheart. A piece of shit with shit all around him and loving the smell like roses.
Celebrating treason and human ownership, that tracks 🤬
black trump supporters look extra fucking stupid right now.
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Should have burned it while we had the chance.
The portrait was originally removed by Act of Congress. Military staff who reinstated the portrait are following an illegal order.
Well yes but actually no. There is this silly little thing called Article II Section 3:
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
Meaning it is up to the president of the united states of America to see laws be faithfully executed or not, and in this case he chose not and gave the order to do this. This would be a huge fucking deal, and a blatant misinterpretation of the laws, if half the courts in the land weren’t pro-fascism and already agreed he could do this when he froze medicaid funding earlier this year.
This is what they mean when they say “make America great again”.
Why? Should we also put up some Benedict Arnold art? Suck his dick a little too?
At least Benedict Arnold was an American war hero at one time. He deserves it way more than Lee does.
Lee was against post war Confederate monuments and he was a traitor to the USA.
The child rapist who was Epstein’s best friend for nearly two decades did whattttt?
And this is what it was all about, people.
All the BS about “maga” and other baby-talk words are just noise - it’s about the RACISM and the butthurt that someone might point out that racism is a bad thing…telling others they might be racists is the real crime and the real hatefulness, in the conservative view.
We are watching the winners rewrite history right in front of our eyes. This is worse then 1984. We need to make sure we can undo all this bullshit. And burn this fucking painting.
They are the losers. Sherman stopped too soon
You cannot undo this. This is the start of decades of facist totalitarian governments.
Next they may want to hang pictures of Rommel, Manstein, Kettle or Guderian, who - just like Lee - were defeated enemy generals.
Appeasement is the US’s millstone around the neck.
This is the equivalent of Germany reinstalling portraits of Hitler
I wonder if the next move is going to be ending the 150+ year tradition of the Navy always having a ship named Kearsarge in commission. The original USS Kearsarge fought a famous Civil War battle against the Confederate raider CSS Alabama, sinking her off the coast of France. Since that time the Navy has always had a Kearsarge in commission, presumably as a giant “fuck you” to the South.
As a side note, the US Navy named all of its battleships after states, except for one that was named Kearsarge as part of this tradition. It’s always bothered me that there was this one exception to an otherwise-perfect naming convention, which I why I support having Puerto Rico become a state - with the proviso that they change their name to “Kearsarge”.
