A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

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A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee located in Lee Park, Charlottesville, VA is attracting attention from White Supremacists.


The ugly reality shows its face-

University Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors, Seniors, face off against KKK, and White Supremacists, and Extremist Far Right.


The police stood by, while White Supremacists did whatever they wanted to do, from Friday to Saturday afternoon-

Aug. 12, 2017

"... a vehicle has plowed into a group of peacefully marching counter-protesters at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday afternoon."

"There was someone in a dark vehicle that sped, very quickly, down this road and rammed into the crowd,” witness Nic McCarthy told C-VILLE Weekly. “People... He backed up and he went back in again.”

“Yeah, it was intentional,” said witness Dan Miller. “About 40 miles an hour, hit about 15-20 people, crashed into the two cars in front of it, and then backed up and sped away while cops were standing on the side of the road and didn’t do anything.”

A second video shows the silver car reversing down several blocks, its front bumper dragging along the ground, as the driver flees the scene of the carnage.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...nia-white-supremacist-rally-article-1.3406210


Police Arrest Suspect After Car Plows Into Anti-Racist Demonstrators During White Supremacy March

https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeednews/charlottesville-unite-the-right?utm_term=.blemV4MNq#.fnPy4AQ2l


Charlottesville is very much aware what all of this means-

"The University of Virginia granted degrees to Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler (music and English, and psychology, respectively),...)


http://www.c-ville.com


This event, August 12, 2017, is about more than a equestrian state of Gen. Robert E. Lee. The crazy people, from the other side of the mirror, have arrived to promote their brand of crazy. This is a small, peaceful, corner of the world, where healing is taking place. This is where the the crazy people are pitching a battle on sanity.


/end gsgs comment

Kessler said this week that the rally is partly about the removal of Confederate symbols but also about free speech and “advocating for white people.”

“This is about an anti-white climate within the Western world and the need for white people to have advocacy like other groups do,” he said in an interview.



A group called the Monument Fund filed a lawsuit arguing that removing the statue would violate a state law governing war memorials. A judge has agreed to a temporary injunction that blocks the city from removing the statue for six months.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/08...-white-nationalist-rally-turns-violent-video/


Debate over the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville began when an African-American high school student started a petition more than a year ago to have it removed. Lee, who was born in Virginia, commanded Confederate forces in the Civil War from 1862 until he surrendered in 1865.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...pares-for-violence-at-white-nationalist-rally

In May, a torch-wielding group that included prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer gathered around the statue for a nighttime protest, and in July, about 50 members of a North Carolina-based KKK group traveled there for a rally, where they were met by hundreds of counter-protesters.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/08...-white-nationalist-rally-turns-violent-video/



"Please consider the fact that last month the City and its employees made significant sacrifices to ensure that the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan could hold a rally.”

The Charlottesville Police Department previously spent a total of $32,835 on personnel and supplies for the July 8 KKK rally.

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/articl...-citys-decision-to-move-unite-the-right-rally


Members of the Ku Klux Klan staged a similar protest one month ago that ended in the arrest of 23 people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/kkk-rally-charlottesville-robert-e-lee-statue.html?_r=0



Friday night set the tone for Saturday, starting after a federal judge forced the city to accommodate Saturday’s rally after it had initially announced that organizers had to move it to another park.

U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed by right-wing blogger Jason Kessler, who organized “Unite the Right,” according to the Associated Press. The city said in response that it would accommodate the rally.

Hundreds of (...) marched with torches through the University of Virginia’s campus after the judge’s decision on Friday night,


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown...ille-va-fights-erupt-white-nationalist-rally/






This woman called it, for what it is-



http://www.theroot.com/why-haven-t-the-charlotte-va-police-responded-to-whi-1797778989
 
A silver car, seemingly deliberately, crashed at high speed into demonstrators on a small side street in the center of town and then into the back of another car, before backing up and fleeing. The counterprotesters were a diverse crowd of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Democratic Socialist activists.

“A car just drove into people causing a multi-chain accident…A car just drove into people. Somebody is really badly injured on the ground. And then the car smashed into other cars and backed out of there. It was completely tinted up.”

http://splinternews.com/several-injured-after-car-plows-into-protesters-in-char-1797782400
 
Charlottesville resident Nic McCarthy witnessed an unmarked car drive into a crowd of people, back up, hit them again and drive off.



"There was someone in a dark vehicle that sped, very quickly, down this road and rammed into the crowd,” witness Nic McCarthy told C-VILLE Weekly. “People... He backed up and he went back in again.”

McCarthy said he wasn’t sure how many people were injured.

“A dozen at least,” he said. “There was a girl that was caught and she was trying to get up and it ran over her again."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...nia-white-supremacist-rally-article-1.3406210

White Supremacist terrorist believed he could skip town, after he plowed into crowd ? If he was on I-64, there would have been a police car chase ?


Murderous weasel tries to say it was not deliberate. Witnesses saw him gather speed for two blocks, before he rammed into protesters. Why are Charlottesville police taking the killer's side, and muddying the issue ?

No license plates, blacked out windows- Not pre- meditated ?

Pictures of murderous weasel are circulating

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/art...esters_at_White_Supremacist_Rally_in_Virginia


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...ency-in-va-after-white-nationalist-rally.html

Trump’s oddly worded tweets and statement, which conspicuously didn’t mention white nationalism or neo-Nazis, was not surprising given his long history of hesitating to speak out against white-on-minority violence. They also aligned with his administration’s apparent priorities: in June, the Trump administration dropped DHS funding for a group dedicated to deradicalizing white-nationalist extremists.


https://www.dailykos.com

Trump ignores reporters' questions:
-Do you want the support of these white nationalists groups?
-Would you call this terrorism, sir?


https://wonkette.com/621579/this-is-your-wonkette-nazipalooza-rounduplive-thread

"We knew that if Trump was going to make a statement about the violence and death in Charlottesville, he couldn't really express empathy. After all, he doesn't really know what that is. And he wasn't going to condemn the white nationalists who literally ran people down with a car in a terror attack."

http://crooksandliars.com/2017/08/trump-charlottesville-dont-blame-me-also

What is with these White Supremacists yelling "White Sharia, Now!"

(Yes, I heard it.


:confused:)

gsgs comment-


A whole street full of White Right Wing Extremist loners, ready to kill people.
 
The New Yorker lets a journalist talk about it-


Back in May, Richard Spencer, America’s latest smirking white supremacist, led a march of the so-called alt-right on the city.

Just last month, members of the Ku Klux Klan took their turn.


Charlottesville’s city council voted to sell the statue of the general that stands at Lee Park, renamed Emancipation Park, and the ensuing chaos—a summer-long reactionary tantrum—has yet to wane.

Unsurprising, sure, all of it, but terror all the same—and, in the terrorist’s derivative way, soaking up more recent tropes: when, on Saturday, a car rammed into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, it was impossible not to associate the act, and the death it caused, with similar vehicular attacks, in Nice and in London.

(gsgs comment- What are the motives of people that supported Richard Spencer, in Charlottesvile ?

What were the motives of people that supported the Klu Klux Klan march in Charlottesville ?

What were the motives of the people that followed Jason Kessler to the grounds of the University of Virginia, bearing torches ?

Christopher Cantwell was there, with Kessler. He is the host of the “alt-right” radio show “Radical Agenda,” and described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “an anti-Semitic, Alt-Right shock jock and an unapologetic fascist.” http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2017/08/torch-wielding-white-nationalists-march-at-uva

/end gsgs comment about motive


" A photo by Samuel Corum for Anadolu Agency presents it as it is."

"An all-white crowd of older men and women, but mostly college-aged kids, carrying, idiotically, torches used to keep mosquitoes out of nice families’ back yards. Orange light defines the outlines of their heads. A kid in a too-big white polo, black T-shirt underneath, is in the middle of a shout, like some upset Nazi toddler. A forelock hangs down; the wind might carry it into his eye. Which awful word sits on that half-shadowed tongue?"

Trump knows, too—he’s too American not to recognize them—and yet he doesn’t say.

Sometimes it takes David Duke to point out the obvious: “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” Those and other, older promises as well.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/an...iolent-cliches-of-white-supremacist-terrorism
 
By the way, you're wrong about the Charlottesville City Council wanting to sell the Lee statue (which, not incidentally, has been identified as an exceptional work of art as art). They haven't publicly offered it for sale and I haven't seen anyone express interest in buying it. They set up a blue ribbon commission to advise what to do about the statue. The commission gave them two options: leave it and add historical context displays to the park or move it to another, more remote city park, which was donated by the same man who donated this park and statue and put it into historical context there. The City Council voted against both options it itself commissioned. It voted to take the statue down (at an estimated cost of $800,000--if Virginia law allows it to do so, which hasn't been settled) but they've given no indication what they'd do with it. It hasn't been put up for sale, nor has anyone expressed interest to spend something like a million dollars to have it in their yard.
 
As I see it, the problem isn't the statue of a Confederate General but what some people consider Confederate imagery to represent in the 21st Century.

The American Civil War happened. Why it happened and what the opposing sides disagreed about enough to cause a war are important. It shouldn't be forgotten.

BUT - the symbols of the Confederacy have been adopted by a minority of people whose modern opinions would have appalled some of the leaders of that time. That is the problem now. Remembering the Civil War is one thing. Using the symbols of the Civil War to glorify and justify oppression, hatred of others and lack of tolerance of differences between people is tarnishing the memory of those who fought in a cause they considered just.
 
I read an article about how the Russians dealt with their Soviet statues, they put them in a park and added historical text to them and arranged them with other art to put them in context.

Perhaps they should gather them up and put them in a Battlefield park to ad context to the horrendous carnage the was the "War of Northern Aggression?"
 
ANOTHER thread? Really? Four or five wasn't enough?

Hey Laurel .. make me a Mod so I can merge these goofs together, K?
 
I read an article about how the Russians dealt with their Soviet statues, they put them in a park and added historical text to them and arranged them with other art to put them in context.

Perhaps they should gather them up and put them in a Battlefield park to ad context to the horrendous carnage the was the "War of Northern Aggression?"

The Charlottesville City Council established a blue ribbon study commission on what to do with the statues (there's also one of Stonewall Jackson in a nearby park), and the commission recommended essentially what you suggest. It gave two options: Leave the statues there and add historical context or move them to another, larger, more remote park that the same benefactor had given and add context to it. The City Council rejected the plan and the mayor subsequently declared Charlottesville the resistance capital of the country. What a surprise that the alt-right showed up to demonstrate.

An fun aside. The city also has a big statue marking the Lewis and Clark expedition (they both came from Charlottesville) that features a demure Sacajawea kneeling at their feet. Folks have been trying to get rid of that statue for years too.
 
Maybe we can get one of Trump keeling at Putin's feet with his lips penis pursed? :)

Putin-and-Trump-440x270.png


:D
 
As I see it, the problem isn't the statue of a Confederate General but what some people consider Confederate imagery to represent in the 21st Century.

The American Civil War happened. Why it happened and what the opposing sides disagreed about enough to cause a war are important. It shouldn't be forgotten.

BUT - the symbols of the Confederacy have been adopted by a minority of people whose modern opinions would have appalled some of the leaders of that time. That is the problem now. Remembering the Civil War is one thing. Using the symbols of the Civil War to glorify and justify oppression, hatred of others and lack of tolerance of differences between people is tarnishing the memory of those who fought in a cause they considered just.

I think this has gotten way out of hand. The statues are historical. Use them to teach history. At Gettysburg, there are all sorts of statues representing both sides of the battle. What are they going to do, take down one side?
 
I think this has gotten way out of hand. The statues are historical. Use them to teach history. At Gettysburg, there are all sorts of statues representing both sides of the battle. What are they going to do, take down one side?
I think the idea is that these statues, in their usual contexts, serve to glorify treason, insurrection, slavery, race hate, and likely bad versifying. Whatever. :cool: A victorious North should probably have hanged the traitors and outlawed all celebration of the failed secession. It was almost a Pyrrhic victory -- win the war, lose the aftermath. But remember that the Confederate leadership WERE traitors, oath-breakers, slavers, irredeemable scum. Lee too.
 
... But remember that the Confederate leadership WERE traitors, oath-breakers, slavers, irredeemable scum. Lee too.

That is too harsh. They believed in their cause. You may think they were mistaken but most were honourable men. There were unpleasant people on the Union side too. It wasn't good versus evil but men of conviction who profoundly disagreed about the future of their country.

That is the problem with a Civil war, any Civil war. The aftermath leaves hatred for future generations.

What is wrong - now in the 21st Century - is that the historic Confederate cause has been perverted into a justification for White supremacy.
 
There were unpleasant people on the Union side too.


While the harshness of Confederate Prisons seems to have been more of circumstance and lack of resources, it appears the Union prisons were deliberately harsh:

Many Southern prisons were located in regions with high disease rates, and were routinely short of medicine, doctors, food and ice. Northerners often believed their men were being deliberately weakened and killed in Confederate prisons, and demanded that conditions in Northern prisons be equally harsh, even though shortages were not a problem in the North.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_prison_camps#Death_rates

And as far as 'honor' in the Union Army, let's not even go into things like Sand Creek:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
 
That is too harsh. They believed in their cause. You may think they were mistaken but most were honourable men.
The active secessionists of South Carolina, the first state to secede, are reported by your William Howard Russell as desiring re-union with Great Britain, to return to the status of a royal colony. That was treason. The Confederate leadership were all former Federal officials and officers who had sworn oaths to protect the Union. Thus they were oathbreakers. And the evil of slavery was the Confederacy's reason for existence. That makes them scum IMHO. They turned their backs on their country to fight for a regional feudal system. I do not forgive that.
 
... I do not forgive that.

You should. They believed the Union was going in the wrong direction and that made their allegiance to the Union unsustainable.

They might have been misguided or just deluded, but you should recognise that their beliefs were important to them. The Civil War divided friends and families.

Holding a grudge all this time hurts you, not them who are long dead.

The English Civil War was long before the American one, but the issues that divided England then are still felt now. But the hatred hasn't survived. We have statues of Oliver Cromwell and King Charles and no one is suggesting they should be removed. Our Civil War is history. We re-enact battles from it for entertainment and try not to kill each other.
 
They might have been misguided or just deluded, but you should recognise that their beliefs were important to them.

Right, but we aren't talking about the divine right of kings we're talking about owning other people.

Your Brits managed to abolish that in 1833. About 25 years before us yanks had a bunch of people die to get rid of it. In other words: people were literally willing to die for their right to treat other human beings as property.

That's not being misguided that's just evil.
 
Right, but we aren't talking about the divine right of kings we're talking about owning other people.

Your Brits managed to abolish that in 1833. About 25 years before us yanks had a bunch of people die to get rid of it. In other words: people were literally willing to die for their right to treat other human beings as property.

That's not being misguided that's just evil.

Read American history. Slavery was NOT the only issue. Some slaveowners were on the Union side. Many of those who led, and most of those who fought for the Confederacy were NOT slaveowners.
 
Right, but we aren't talking about the divine right of kings we're talking about owning other people.

Your Brits managed to abolish that in 1833. About 25 years before us yanks had a bunch of people die to get rid of it. In other words: people were literally willing to die for their right to treat other human beings as property.

That's not being misguided that's just evil.

Taking this back to Charlottesville and the supposed reason for all of this, Lee (the statue in question) did own slaves at one time, but he inherited them in a period when you couldn't just legally free them in Virginia--and if you did and you didn't continue supporting them, you weren't helping them survive and prosper; they weren't being treated much better in the North at that time. Lee never bought or sold a slave and, taking the Emancipation Proclamation as an opportunity, he freed all of his slaves two years before the end of the war. He also was on record as fundamentally being opposed to slavery. So, he isn't the best target for all of this.

The one who is the best target for this is the big daddy of Charlottesville, the nearly sole reason that the region is economically rich--Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves, but he bought and sold them and the only slaves he ever freed were just a couple of his own children he'd fathered off a slave (an underage slave when he first bedded her--she, incidentally, was the half-sister of his dead wife). He didn't even free all of the slave children he'd fathered--they were sold as part of his estate after he died. He never let a slave come between him and his personal comfort. In the only book he ever wrote, he "proved" that blacks were subhuman. His business ledgers not only dealt with slaves as property equal to his books and furniture but also included notes on breeding them to add to his property.

When the alt-rightists gathered in Charlottesville and marched a day before they had a permit to gather, where they marched was to the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the university he founded, the University of Virginia, where, one after the other, they knelt in homage to him.

So, what will be interesting in Charlottesville will be when the spotlight is taken off Lee, a man who worked at getting out from underneath the slave issue, publicly recognizing it was wrong, and onto the city's founder and economic prop, Thomas Jefferson.
 
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The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.
The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed...

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

There are unwitting victims of this campaign—those who lack the knowledge to separate history from sentiment. Then there are those whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a mythical figure who never truly existed.
Just as well that his estate in Arlington was seized and turned into a national cemetery. Such are appropriate places for statues of rebel leaders, as reminders of the deaths they caused.
 
Yeah, well, it's the victors who write history their way, isn't it?
 
Yeah, well, it's the victors who write history their way, isn't it?
A point I made in a nearby thread: The rebels won in the long run. US politics have been dominated by guys from south of Mason-Dixon for the last half-century. I'll argue that Confederate leadership was left mostly free and intact after the War of Southern Treason -- no mass hangings of traitors, no determined suppression of rebel ideology, early abandonment of Reconstruction. Result: their poison suffuses our national soul. They won.

PLUS -- a bit more from the article I quoted above:
Lee is a pivotal figure in American history worthy of study. Neither the man who really existed, nor the fictionalized tragic hero of the Lost Cause, are heroes worthy of a statue in a place of honor. As one Union veteran angrily put it in 1903 when Pennsylvania was considering placing a statute to Lee at Gettysburg, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse, then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to humanity.’” The most fitting monument to Lee is the national military cemetery the federal government placed on the grounds of his former home in Arlington.

To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.
 
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