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.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    30 minutes ago

    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.

  • DrunkEngineer@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

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

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      12 hours ago

      Sure doesn’t sound like “Defending the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic” to me, but what do I know.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    14 hours ago

    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.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      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.

  • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    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”.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        14 hours ago

        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.

  • Enkrod@feddit.org
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    23 hours ago

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

  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      13 hours ago

      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.

    • bean@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Little wonder he’s a Republican sweetheart. A piece of shit with shit all around him and loving the smell like roses.

  • Azal@pawb.social
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    I keep saying it over and over again. 160 years later, the confederates won.

    • null@piefed.au
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      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?

        • DancingBear@midwest.social
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          23 hours ago

          Wait, what does it mean? To me, it means something along the lines of these shits and times are crazy now. Things are not making sense. Two semetic folks are at war and both are accusing the other of being antisemitic, as a supporter of the underdog, who are literally their brothers and sisters…. Sigh

          Edit: ok, fine I post it because it is a funny not funny commentary that suggests half of what the administration is doing is distractions. I can only hope that it is 99 percent distraction and 1% action.

          • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
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            23 hours ago

            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.

  • Deacon@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

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    “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?

    • null@piefed.au
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      Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.

      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.

      • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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        13 hours ago

        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.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        15 hours ago

        Also, it’s rich coming from the administration that has basically killed the Smithsonian because they don’t want them to talk about slavery.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        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.