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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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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.

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.))