Torch wielding protestors yell Nazi slogans as they defend Confederate statue

[Belsnickel]

(05-15-2017, 02:37 PM)Dill Wrote: Virginia is saturated with "Lee" highways, parks, schools, roads, highways etc. His home at Arlington is a national monument. This is understandable.  It would be very difficult to get rid of them all. I would very much oppose removing the Arlington monument.

I don't view a statue of Lee the same way I would a statue of Davis. Davis was an ideological leader of the Confederacy. He stood for a Confederacy of states based upon slavery. 

I don't doubt that Lee agreed with slavery, since he held slaves himself, but did he also "stand" for the slave system? He appears to have been esteemed as a great leader and brilliant general, whose abilities even his opponents admired and respected, as the Allies did Rommel during WWII.  He reluctantly went to war because he identified primarily as a Virginian.

Like Rommel, I can see why many would have a problem with a statue to him--because of all that went with his cause.  Ordinary Germans might see Rommel as a great soldier. Jews cannot forget his great soldiering enabled the holocaust.
Ordinary white folks might see Lee as a great solider, whichever side, while many African-Americans see him as foremost defender of the slave system whose devaluation of black lives continues in more or less obvious ways today (witness the right wing protesters in the link above).

In this particular case, though, I am not against removal of the Monument. If I understand correctly, it was sold, not taken down in protest of the Confederacy or some such. The park will continue to be named "Lee."  The statue will sit somewhere else.

There is a lot of truth in all of this. Lincoln sought Lee to be commander of the Union forces before Lee had formally chosen a side. Jackson was seen as one of the greatest strategists in the war and had he not fallen to friendly fire there are historians that speculate Gettysburg would have been much different. They both were magnificent leaders and military minds but they had a, shall we say, complicated relationship with the notion of slavery as well as a loyalty to the Commonwealth and so they were on the wrong side of history.