This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The statement was "myth", not "lie". Can you specify "a lie about Robert E. Lee" that Southern whites in general want to venerate?
I have been repeatedly told that the history of the Civil War that I grew up on was the "Dunning School", a deceptive attempt to hide the crimes of the South. I've never actually figured out which crimes were hidden from me. I was taught from the start that from the perspective of the South, the Civil War was fought explicitly in defense of Slavery as an institution, but most of the people bringing up the Dunning School claim that denying this was one of the central points of the program. So on the one hand I'm told I've been lied to, and on the other hand the claimed nature of the lie is either unspecified or, in my experience, itself straightforwardly false. I was taught that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who fought ablely for a bad cause, lost, and accepted the verdict of battle with dignity. Which part of that was false?
Which prominent figures on the Union side do you consider worthy of veneration? John Brown? Sherman? Grant? Lincoln? I'm quite fond of all of them, as it happens. Are you?
It's routine for me to encounter left-leaning people who venerate Lenin or Trotsky or some other august personage among the Bolsheviks, or who venerate people generations later who engaged in lawless violence in support of their cause. I encounter more who think these people were just rascally knuckleheads, and have precisely zero knowledge of the horrors they unleashed and championed. I think those people are straightforwardly worse than the modal Robert E Lee admirer, because the people and institutions they venerate were straightforwardly worse than the slaving South. And this, on the understanding that the South richly deserved to have a significant portion of its men ground into worm-food because of the evils they perpetrated. From where I sit, the left doesn't have the slightest claim to moral insight, much less moral superiority. A significant portion of politically-active leftists are isomorphic to actual-literal-and-not-figurative neo-nazis.
My understanding is that his contemporaries disagree with your assessment. Certainly I have never heard of any of the prominent generals fighting against him claiming that he was bad at his job.
The word 'honorable' can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. For someone who is a military leader, his personal conduct seems largely irrelevant, I don't particularly care if he cheated on his wife or (likely) not. Nor do I particularly care that he resigned his commission to the US before taking up arms against them, Stauffenberg broke his oath when he bombed Hitler, and still I find this the least objectionable life decision of his.
Sticking to a code of honor in warfare can be good if the code in question aims to prevent wartime atrocities and preserves the customs of war which limit the hellishness of warfare a bit. Other than that, being a good warrior or soldier has meant very different things at different times in human history, and I would count this more as 'being good at your job' without any value judgement applied.
From my understanding, the slaughter in the US civil war was largely confined to the armies, with less than 10% of the causalities being civilians. The PoW camps on both sides seem harsh by modern standard, but deliberate war crimes seem to be confined to the odd homeopath making baby steps towards death camps.
The "accepted the verdict of battle" is probably where we should give Lee credit, when he had lost, he surrendered rather than continuing to fight a partisan war.
In the end, he fought an unwinnable war for an evil cause. Other people in his place might have been worse, but he seems hardly hero material to me. I think his veneration can be seen as a clear political statement "the South was correct to fight the civil war, too bad it lost". A statue of Lee surrendering would have entirely different connotations.
The US South has provided military leaders from the revolutionary war to the present day, surely there is someone who could be venerated as a hero whose main claim to fame is not that he waged war against the USA to protect slavery?
I agree about Lenin and Trotsky being more evil than Lee. Of course, the most venerated violent figure on the left is Che Guevara, who wisely did not stick around after his revolutions long enough to get his hands dirty to the degree that Lenin did. Personally, I would cut him a bit more slack than Lee. Lee presumably had visited slave plantations and knew exactly what he was fighting for. Guevara had not personally witnessed the Red Terror in Russia. It turns out that communist countries are more repressive and economically poorer than their peers in the long run, and that commie revolutions are thus to be avoided. Still, I would not say he was wrong to oust Batista, just that the ideology which replaced him lead to bad long term outcomes.
The obvious counterexample to Lee is Forrest, who pretty happily ducked into the dishonourable behaviors: a slave trader who wanted to expand new markets in human bodies and treated slaves cruelly even by the standards of his time, at least oversaw and possibly participated in slaughter of individually-surrendered soldiers, signed on as an early member of the KKK and was a major leader in the early days, so on. Even in his everyday businesses he was a bit of a grifter, as minor a fault as that is compared to everything else.
The most charitable things one could say is that he somehow wasn't the worst, with some other southerners being even more reprehensible (along with Henry Wirz, I'll highlight Samuel Ferguson earned their express tickets to hell, within a year the KKK repelled even Forrest); his combination of strong tactical skill and minimal strategic emphasis cost the Confederacy no few lasting victories; among his compatriots he initiated squabbles and infighting that nearly got him killed; and when Lee surrendered Forrest eventually stopped.
And, uh, I guess the statue fits.
Lee was noteworthy not just for accepting surrender, but that he waged war with an interest in protecting 'enemy' civilians, not just in not killing them, but ordering (albeit with imperfect compliance) against the pillage and looting that had been common in that era. After the war ended, he returned to facing disagreement by fully above-board political means within the constraints of the surrender he gave. These behaviors were not only uncommon among Confederates, but not universal in the Union: Sherman and Sheridan are best-known for destroying civil infrastructure and private homes as a military tactic, but even post-war you have people like Burbridge who liked collective punishment and weren't particularly choosy about making sure 'fellow guerillas' actually were guilty.
There's certainly still warts, here -- Lee never countermanded the Confederate policies against 'traitors', regardless of race, which included kidnappings and simple murder; his personal philosophical opposition to slavery often fell second to his own economic and social interests; he was still the sort of racist common to his time. And it's definitely still a tragedy, where the man could have made better decisions earlier, or persuaded his commanders of better ways had he the skill to share the certainty he already held, and didn't. I'm a bigger fan of Longstreet, for example, and he gets far too short a shift in both the mainstream and southern-friendly versions.
((The extent Lost Causers defend Forrest or only mention him by his limited post-civil war racial reconciliation efforts is... usually one of the stronger examples against that school; I have no idea where Dunning proper falls on the spectrum for him.))
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As it happens, I just finished reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. He certainly respected Lee, but as @HaroldWilson says below, he thought Lee was overrated. Early in the war the Confederacy had notoriously better generals, and Lee was pretty much walking all over them, leading to a general sense of dread and doom whenever Lee acted that Grant lost patience with.
It should be noted that Lee also came under criticism from his own side, when they felt he was too slow and passive in his responses; some Southern newspapers took to calling him "Granny Lee."
There is also a sort of myth that has grown up around Lee that he was the most brilliant general in the war, and that Grant was plodding and mediocre and only beat Lee because of the North's superior numbers and equipment. This also isn't really born out by history.
In summary, Lee was certainly capable, but the South has turned him into a sort of Alexander or Napoleon, and not only overrated his military prowess but his honorable and humanitarian nature. In fact Lee was no worse than most Southerners, but he was no better; like most of them, he might have told himself that slavery was a benevolent institution and that he didn't personally hate black people, but he clearly did not like black people or consider them worthy of civil rights. He was also not a gracious loser; Grant was always hospitable and gracious when he met with Lee to discuss surrender, and afterwards when Lee petitioned him in the White House. Lee could barely manage to keep his resentment and contempt in check to be minimally civil.
He wasn't a terrible man or general, but he wasn't the Great Man that Lost Causers have made him out to be.
I also really want to know what leftists you have met, other than on social media, who adulate Lenin or Trotsky. I am pretty sure my circle is considerably leftier than yours, and I don't know anyone who admires the Bolsheviks. I know genuine tankies exist, but I think they are much more present online than in real life.
That's not an entirely fair standard to hold someone to, because extreme politics is a niche hobbyist interest rather than a general interest. It's very rare to encounter anyone IRL who has any substantive view on Lenin or Trotsky at all, unless you're very deep into communist/anarchist groups. And a non-leftist is unlikely to find themselves in such a situation for obvious reasons.
Coincidentally I've been listening to a lot of Chris Cutrone lately, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who is quite a big fan of Lenin (1:26:39 - "The people who reject Lenin have to reject Marx").
Concerns about LLMs notwithstanding, everyone who is present online is present in real life too.
Sure, but when someone says "I know leftists in my life who admire Lenin and Trotsky," I can't help wondering where all these literal Bolveshiks are hanging out.
Yes, but we are all familiar with the phenomenon of fringe, niche freaks who'd be all alone in their community gravitating towards each other online and thus presenting an online presence that dramatically exaggerates the impression of how many of them there actually are. A lot of rightists who are convinced that every leftist is a literal Bolshevik are quick to scoff that the actual number of real Nazis is miniscule, and vice versa.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Grant considered him, if not actually 'bad', then at the very least highly overrated.
Which seems fair enough given that he made certain the Confederacy's destruction at Antietam and Gettysburg. After all one has to fight the war in front of one, not the one you would like to be fighting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link