#robert e lee

[victusinveritas]

[gregdotorg]

I had this Cy Twombly sculpture in my tabs for so long, I forgot whose account of performative mystification at seeing it put it there in the first place. But it was on the cover of the first photographs book.

Cy Twombly Flower Arrangements [greg.org] 📷: Cy Twombly, That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, 1998, via Independent; Cy Twombly Photographs, 1951-1999, 2002, via gagosianshop

[papanezblues]

btw Robert E. Lee was the only one out of 8 colonels from Virginia in the U.S army to join the Confederacy.

the “oh, but didn’t want to fight against his family!” excuse does NOT work, when people like George Henry Thomas—who was from Virginia—fought for the union as a general. other union commanders, like General Montgomery Meigs and Admiral David Farragut were also southerners who fought for the union.

AND General Montgomery Meigs—a Georgian—was the one who chose Arlington as the site for a national cemetery, to punish Lee & to remind him of the men he had killed, including Meigs’ own son.

[sophieinwonderland]

I generally think genocide is wrong... But people who claim the Confederacy, a short-lived rebellion founded solely to defend the institution of slavery and uphold white supremacy, as their "culture" are making the strongest argument that there might be exactly one instance where a cultural genocide would be acceptable.

There were only two things of value the Confederacy ever contributed. One was eroding America's sympathy for the South so much that Lincoln could get away with freeing their slaves with a pen stroke. The other was sending more than 200000 Confederate traitors to be removed from the gene pool.

[jron]

It’s no surprise that modern Confederates support the Epstein Class.

When I read excerpts from the accusations and email snippets from Epstein’s wealthy friends laid out online, it reminds me of very specific stories that I’ve read before. Those stories are the personal histories of enslaved people collected before and after the Civil War.

In Adam Serwer’s important research on Robert E. Lee (some of which is recounted here), he shares the contemporary accounts of Arlington Plantation from white visitors. One of the things visitors often commented on was the abundance of light-skinned slave children compared to other plantations in the area. He also notes how Lee would pay significantly more for young girls than for working-age men. In addition, he shares accounts from visitors describing Lee’s personal torture of the people he owned, and literal kidnapping of local mixed race girls from their poor families.

I use Lee as an example mainly because he’s revered by so many Confederacy-admiring people as a “good, Christian man.” But even if contemporaries considered him worse than his neighbors, he was not an outlier. Accounts from visitors to other southern slave plantations describe young and old men and dragging enslaved girls into sheds during the day and leaving those sheds alone, with the girls following later, injured, disheveled or with torn clothes.

It strikes me that we are witnessing the same depredations that the well-documented wealthy class was known for committing over a century and a half ago. Those evil men have had their reputations whitewashed by admirers ever since their deaths, and as a result many white Americans see these new crimes as unique.

But they are not. They are a part of a long history, of thousands of years of men (and women) who see themselves as superior and wholly entitled to the bodies and lives of other people.

It’s no wonder that the same people who idolize the evil men of 19th-century would make excuses for their imitators today. They have spent their lives arguing that we should honor a society where the crimes we are now seeing in the Epstein Files were an essential feature. Pedophilia and rape are not deal-breakers for these people in their political support, simply because they never have been.

[rebelyells]

Lee Jackson Day! Never forget your Ancestors! They paid the ultimate price.

[mightbesomebody]

Confederate bootlickers calling Lincoln a tyrant will never not be hilarious to me. I wish Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. A tyrant would've hanged Lee's good-for-nothing bitch ass.

[rmstitanics]

HISTORY MEME — BATTLES AND WARS THROUGHOUT HISTORY, 1/5

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (1861-1865)

“The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”

- Shelby Foote, The Civil War: a Narrative