News

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.

“Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”

Well, that sounds good. So then to learn from history you'll be wanting to do a little Critical Race Theory right? You'll want people to know the history of LGBTQ+ oppression and the fight for gay and trans rights? You'll be wanting to promote Black History, the history of the civil rights movement, and indigenous history, since they were erased for so long, right?

Or could it be that this is more white supremacist doublespeak?

The portrait was originally removed by Act of Congress. Military staff who reinstated the portrait are following an illegal order.

Celebrating treason and human ownership, that tracks 🤬

black trump supporters look extra fucking stupid right now.

This should be seen for what it is: the latest in a series of “boiling the frog” escalations on totally rewriting the history of black people in this country.

The next time we get to take it down, burn it on the White House lawn. Melt down all those Confederate statues, too. Turn them all into statues of MLK, and erect them in the same places. Fuck those Traitors.

Andrew Johnson was a scummy Confederate sympathizer, so he tossed out most of Lincoln's plans for Reconstruction, which would have changed the trajectory of race relations significantly. Instead, we ended up with a century of Jim Crow.

I keep saying it over and over again. 160 years later, the confederates won.

This is the equivalent of Germany reinstalling portraits of Hitler

Should have burned it while we had the chance.

This is what they mean when they say "make America great again".

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".

Sickening.

Lee was against post war Confederate monuments and he was a traitor to the USA.

Why? Should we also put up some Benedict Arnold art? Suck his dick a little too?

Next they may want to hang pictures of Rommel, Manstein, Kettle or Guderian, who - just like Lee - were defeated enemy generals.

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.

The child rapist who was Epstein's best friend for nearly two decades did whattttt?

Appeasement is the US's millstone around the neck.

cheers to the generation for whom The Pentagon is a memory, maybe your world will be freer

The government of Rhodesian’s, the confederacy, and the Nazis.

Do not forget.