Not just any Lee statue, the one from Charlottesville famous for the Unite the Right Nazi rally that culminated in Heather Heyer getting murdered.
I ended up in Charlottesville for a wedding a few years back and unintentionally parked right across the street from the statue. It was covered up with plastic; sent a shiver down my spine when I realized what it was. I’m glad they’re melting that shit down to turn a hate symbol into something beautiful. RIP Heather, you stood up for real American values.
Charlottesville was the wake up call for many. Never I expected nazis openly marching on US soil, chanting slogans straight from WW2… nearly a century after WW2.
It also must suck for the locals to have their town’s name being forever associated to those scums.
Yeah, generally, I prefer stuff like this to get preserved for historical value, just out of public view.
But many of these things are rallying points for hate right now, and the value of actually destroying that in the present outweighs the value to any historian or student of history in the future.
This one in particular. History won’t miss it. Burn the fucker.
The vast majority of these statutes, including this one, were erected decades after the Civil War and have no historical value beyond being physical representations of Jim Crow. The guy that commissioned it purchased land and oversaw the creation of a whites only park on the site where it was erected. They were rallying points of hate when they went up and they still are.
It would be nice it it was just now, but those things were built as symbols of hate from the start.
As much as I am all for inclusive art, I would have not melted that statue and instead put it in a museum as a memorial to who the south once thought of as a hero. Maybe add some context like how he shouldn’t be celebrated, but still provide historical context as to his person and insight into how people back then thought of him.
Don’t worry, it’s the south. They have about a thousand more statues of that traitor at least.
Plus everyone and their cousin-sister has the middle name Lee.
Why? They’re a dime a dozen and were put up in the 1900s largely due to the Daughters of the Confederacy and to reinforce Jim Crow laws.
They aren’t really worth preserving. A picture can be taken to explain how awful these things are.
That would be one huge museum of equally bad similarly looking statues. No need to preserve them all, because there are so many of them, a couple will do.
But mah heritage! Them five years is the most important five years in history!
If they like the confederacy so much, they should go join them.
Oh wait, they’re all dead losers. Lmao
We should build a statue to Covid
Wooo.
Aside from the insanity of glorifying a literal traitor who orchestrated the death of thousands of US Citizens (and that is a massive underestimate of Lee’s impact) and it being a lightning rod for bgotry: Why the hell would people celebrate a loser? Like, not just in terms of having supported bigotry and hate but more as someone who got his ass beat.
And holy crap are people gonna be angry at the inclusive art.
I hope they guard it because it will get vandalized by some racist prick.
I’m glad they broadcasted that completely unnecessary detail just to rub it in lol
It wasn’t an unnecessary detail, it is integral to the story because it is deliberate positive symbolism. To counter that the original statue stood for deliberate hateful symbolism.
TIL swordd into plowshares isn’t just a MTG card.
I was expecting a photo of him melting into a pool of lava like the Terminator, but I guess this is probably more efficient
👍
Wonderful article, highly recommend y’all click through to read this one.
cast it into a giant dildo and imaple MAGAts on it.
Yeah, some of the MAGAt Nazis have already announced that they will keep laying down a wreath every year on the new statue that is being cast, no matter what.
It would be hilarious if they held their solemn loser ceremony around a giant dildo every year!
Hot take: I think they shouldn’t have melted the statue down in the first place and stuck it in a museum instead.
It shouldn’t have been out in public in this day and age because you know what the fuck kinds of people would even commemorate Robert E. Lee, but it should have been put into a museum as part of the history of the US because… well, he’s a sort of important player in US history. What he fought for isn’t representative of what the majority of sane Americans believe in, but it’s also cool to see a statue from the 1920s and why they wanted to commemorate a piece-of-shit Confederate - and a shame it got melted down, because it is a part of history whether we like it or not.
It isn’t required that we save every depicti9m of the guy in existence for museums to reference the guy or his role in the civil war. These statues were built 50-100 years after the war had ended in order to harass those who were seeking equality and civil rights at the time. This would be akin to some rightwing fascists constructing a statue of Osama Bin Laden in NYC in 2051. Would you not argue that such a statue should be melted back down immediately?
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Death always to the traitor Confederacy
i wrote a paper in college about this exact situation and had the same take lol, should’ve preserved it (in a museum) for history reasons.
LOL, those protesters can go stick a tiki torch somewhere
Bronze reclaimed from an unskilled (compared to USG), traitorous general. 👍
Lee was technically a USG, and was probably one of the best generals in the war. He pretty much kicked the north’s ass until the lack of industry in the south became an issue.
Yeah, I’m from the south but I love to shit all over the confederacy, and fuck Lee for being a traitor and siding with racists, but he was an extremely competent tactician. He shouldn’t be exalted for it at all but to say otherwise isn’t telling an accurate history of the Civil War.
Yeah, what he learned from the Mexican American war served him well. Shame it was used for traitors and resulted in drawing out the war.
When him and Grant’s forces actually met on the battlefield he got fucked up. The extent of his skill was overblown by decades of lost causers.
I’m pretty sure this is wrong. I’m no historian, but I have been reading a lot about the US Civil War recently, and based on that my impression is that he’s generally regarded as highly competent and probably would have been given command of the Army of the Potomac over McClellan had he decided to stay with the Union.
For the first two years of the war Lee and Jackson won every major engagement they had with the Union forces. It wasn’t until Gettysburg that they really got a bloody nose, and that at great cost to the Union and at least partially only because Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was such a badass.
Grant was highly competent as well, and relentless, and he had more men and materiel and better resupply. Once Sherman completed his run to Atlanta, it was pretty much over and just a matter of how Lee was going to surrender.
I never claimed the war was not already over due to Sherman, however, Lee’s hypothetical leadership of the Army of the Potomac has very little to do with the fact USG tactically defeated him in the Overland Campaign. They most major engagements until Lee met Grant, and the better general won. Based on what I’ve read about Overland, it wouldn’t have mattered if Lee was on equal footing, he was consistently outmatched by Grant.
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The government (in any form, city, town, etc) shouldn’t erect statues or monuments.
I’d say that bronze is tainted and should be entirely disposed of, but that would probably annoy environmentalists.
It’s a fucking material with insane recyclability, what it was previously used in won’t have an influence on what it’s repurposed for, it’s the Confederacy not a fucking 1000-year-curse. “Tainted” is about as good an excuse not to recycle it as “I don’t wanna”.
