Pentagon is reinstalling portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee with slave
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/robert-e-lee-portrait-pentagon-confederacy-b2816481.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.nz501
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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:
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.
The MAGAs don't even try to hide it. When DeSatan was announcing his "Anti-Woke"standards in Florida schools, he flat out said he didn't want white kids learning things that would make them ashamed to be white. It may be the most racist thing I've ever heard come out of of a politicians mouth. He didn't bother to code his language AT ALL.
I grew up a standard-issue white kid, and learned all about slavery and the Native American genocide, and it never made me "ashamed" to be white. Those things were horrible, but I didn't do them, and I would never participate in such actions, and that's the point. It isn't about shaming whites for their history, it's educating them properly so they don't go down that path again.
Obviously, we didn't learn that lesson well enough in school, so we're slipping back. This is the problem with not having Federal educational standards, and letting individual states prepare their own curriculums. Across 50 states, some will do it properly, but some will take the opportunity to compromise their vulnerable young students and feed them racist propaganda instead of a real education, and indoctrinate them into racist ideology.
IF we can take our country back from the MAGA Nazis, we need to crack down HARD on anyone who insists that we keep the same educational structure that allows bad-faith states to use education as an excuse to indoctrinate. Just like we forced states to abide by Federal voting laws (until the MAGA SCOTUS ended it), we need to force intransigent states to educate their children properly. If they won't do it, the responsibility will be removed, and handled by the Federal government.
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?
Or you know, it's a lie. As they change the names of anything that has the word "Gay" in it, even if it was someone's name, or a gay civil rights leader a ship was named after
What a ridiculous thing to say.
Taking down a portrait is not erasing history, it's merely refusing to celebrate particular people or behaviors that the entire world finds abhorrent in 2025.
well, apparently not the entire world
The same dipshits pretended that people were learning history from statues. Instead of what those statues were actually for, and that was as a gigantic fuck you to Blacks, liberals, and the United States and a celebration of the Confederate traitor losers.
It's all lies. They didn't believe what they say, they're doing it to make their racist as shit supporters feel like they win someone, while they rob them blind and destroy their rights behind their backs.
Also, it's rich coming from the administration that has basically killed the Smithsonian because they don't want them to talk about slavery.
Well they learned from it alright...what to do differently this time.
Celebrating treason and human ownership, that tracks 🤬
What "Epstein Files" do you actually think are going to be released?
Do you really believe the Trump administration is going to release documents that show Trump is a pedophile?
Do you really believe that's what people are expecting when they say that?
You're complaining about distractions by posting... The distraction?
Post alligator Alcatraz or the military occupation of DC if you actually care.
You're swallowing the bait hook and sinker. The pedo files have zero chance to affect your king.
I hope not. This way, we can keep waving it, and insinuating the worst.
Y'know, exactly like MAGAs do.
black trump supporters look extra fucking stupid right now.
"those kids would be so mad if they could
readpay attention to current events". JpegHol up
Granted. You found the super Nazi.
(Real talk, I didn't mean for it to come out like that. But your response is funny AF.)
The portrait was originally removed by Act of Congress. Military staff who reinstated the portrait are following an illegal order.
Sure doesn't sound like "Defending the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic" to me, but what do I know.
Well yes but actually no. There is this silly little thing called Article II Section 3:
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".
If this is America, I want it to die.
I just smoke a lot of weed about it
Should have burned it while we had the chance.
I keep saying it over and over again. 160 years later, the confederates won.
No, they just haven't been properly crushed. We won't make that mistake the next time.
It's time to unfreeze Sherman.
…. From the River (Mississippi) to the Sea( Atlantic, ocean, whatever)?
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.
Sickening.
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.
Absolutely. "But muh history!", history doesn't require works of adulation to evil men be preserved physically to learn from them. Do they think paintings and statues of Hitler are just stored away at the back of museums in Germany? That shit is long destroyed by the allies at the end of the war. There were far too many efforts made to appease the southern states at the end of the war, and you can trace a solid line between those failures and many issues faced now.
Lee was against post war Confederate monuments and he was a traitor to the USA.
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.
You cannot undo this. This is the start of decades of facist totalitarian governments.
This is the equivalent of Germany reinstalling portraits of Hitler
Next they may want to hang pictures of Rommel, Manstein, Kettle or Guderian, who - just like Lee - were defeated enemy generals.
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".
They will when trump sees you posting about it.
Up until now, this was just history, so you know that no MAGA is aware of it. None of them know how to read, and if it wasn't on Fox News, they've never heard of it. Somebody is bound to tell them now.
The child rapist who was Epstein's best friend for nearly two decades did whattttt?
Appeasement is the US's millstone around the neck.
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.
Grant was almost perfect but he picked the worst possible cabinet until Trump.
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.