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If we're comparing people to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the rebel leader who killed tons of people for a bad cause fighting for millions to be enslaved and kept uneducated in harsh agricultural labor is clearly much closer to "Year Zero" than the people saying he shouldn't have done that, both today and in the 19th century. OP contains a ton of claims about him being conflicted and torn about this decision, and there were many southern unionists and abolitionists and widespread debate over secession, so clearly it was also controversial by 19th century moral standards. And the overarching discussion concerns public shrines and idols promoting veneration of Lee in the 21st century.
Lol all I said was this is year zero thinking, and you claim I am comparing people to Pol Pot? Do I even need to be here, it seems like you are trying to do both sides of the conversation yourself!
I wasn't comparing anyone to Pol Pot. I said exactly what I meant to say, and I meant every word of it. You are still applying your 21st century morals to a guy who lived in practically a different universe.
As you say the issue was clearly controversial - back then. Because it isn't anymore, I'm surprised to have to tell you, slavery was successfully abolished in the US years ago now. Nobody is torn and conflicted in two thousand and twenty three about whether it's ok to enslave black people. In 2023 the idea of enslaving another person is heinous, and considered a defining moral failing - like murderers and rapists, slavers are considered defacto evil, whereas back then people who owned slaves were controversial, but still respected - enough to lead the Union army for instance.
So unlike you, Lee did not have the luxury of recognising slavery as an easily answered black and white question, he was forced to consider the entire confederate cause (which was not just about slavery, although I understand why you think it was) and he even had to consider other things like looking after his home and family.
This is why I updated the scissor statement to something more recent - covid. Given how sure of your moral clarity you are, you can easily tell me who the failed human beings there were right?
Edit: legibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion)
I do not believe you when you claim you weren't explicitly comparing MadMonzer and I to the Khmer Rouge. "Year Zero" was Pol Pot's concept. The usage here was not in reference to the Nine Inch Nails album or the day after Nazi Germany fell. It's like if someone called a debate opponent a Quisling then claimed they weren't comparing them to nazi collaborators.
Unfortunately it has not been fully abolished, just the chattel kind. A whole lot of people still think of slavery as ok if the slaves are given that status by a court per the 13th amendment rather than an auction block. Those of us who recognize forced inmate labor as slavery are considered controversial. I am fully confident that I would have been an abolitionist then as I am now. I worked in the prison system as part of a family dynasty of prison wardens and grew up constantly surrounded by inmate chain gangs picking cotton and soybeans under armed guard in the hot southern sun and being used for all manner of work from butlers to factory workers. I was repeatedly taught both at home, school and in training academies that the Confederates were the good guys and chattel slavery a mostly benign institution and believed both for a time. Yet I turned my back on this career with an offer in hand to become a warden (the camp commander kind, not the rank-and-file kind) with a lucrative salary due to independently reaching the conclusion that inmate forced labor constituted a form of slavery. This relevation and acting as my conscience demanded as a result had immense personal and professional cost that I do not regret for a moment. So yes, I am fully confident that given I independently rejected a widespread socially accepted form of slavery at high cost while being socialized to see both prison slavery and the original chattel slavery as acceptable with strong financial, family and geographic incentives to choose otherwise, that I would have also rejected the original chattel slavery. Additionally, while most of my ancestors fought for the Confederacy as light calvary and artillerymen, a few took to the hills rather than be conscripted into their forces. But we're talking about Lee here, not me. And again, according to the claims above Lee recognized slavery as evil but chose to lead armies to defend it anyway.
In terms of covid, Lee was a high ranking leader who knowingly committed an immense moral failing that killed tons of people, not a rank and file foot soldier taking potshots. So the roughly analogous figures would be high ranking leadership deliberately making decisions that got hundreds of thousands or millions killed while knowing better. In that department I would place the scientific and political leadership who oversaw gain of function research and covered up the lab leak rather than sharing everything they knew, Chinese gov personnel who knowingly allowed international travel while they had a new virus actively spreading within their borders, as well as foriegn government officials who refused to strictly quarantine travelers coming from China due to putting political/business considerations of not upsetting the Chinese government above preventing a new virus from spreading into their citizenry.
I was referencing the concept of year zero developed by Pol Pot, yes. That is quite different from comparing people to Pol Pot, which is what you claimed I did so you could gotcha me.
It's like if two people were arguing and the one guy kept answering the questions he wished he'd been asked instead of the questions he'd actually been asked. No actual conversation can happen because the second guy isn't really participating, the first guy is treating him like a sounding board he can use to listen to himself talk.
It's actually like if two people are debating, then one insults the other by saying they have a Führer mindset, then attempts to claim they weren't comparing their opponent to the Nazis, just "referencing" how their opponent is like a Nazi. I was born at night, but it wasn't last night, and think this is an attempt at dodging the counter arguments. And in any case, the argument is over continuing to have public Confederate idols and shrines that were erected in the 20th century still be given a place of honor in the 21st.
That might have been the overall topic but it wasn't the topic of this argument. This argument is about Robert E Lee and the quality of his moral character, that is why I accused you of year zeroing after you said that he was a failure of a human being for choosing to fight for the confederates. Lee's choices, not yours, or mine, or some town council's. If you had just said 'I'm fine with the smelting, I don't think Lee should be celebrated because he was a piece of shit' I wouldn't have said anything, the same way I didn't say anything to everyone else who said something like that. The only reason I said anything to you is because it annoys the crap out of me when people scorn historical figures for not having the same amount of information as we have in the 21st century. Also I have used year zero thinking or something like it multiple times before here without being accused of comparing someone to Pol Pot - without being misunderstood at all even - so I'm going to stick with it.
Re covid, since I wasn't specific enough (sorry about that), who are the failed human beings - the vaccinated or the unvaccinated? I asked because I wanted to demonstrate the position Lee was in, of being stuck in the middle of a vicious argument between two sides that both have good points, not to mention the numerous personal factors that can get in the way. In my experience people have two options - no more - either they work off principles or they do as their most respected authority tells them.
For the failure of a human being angle: the framing of Lee as personally against secession and slavery - though there are many reasons to be skeptical - yet choosing to not only side with the secessionist slavers but become Confederate army supreme commander and personally lead the war slaughtering those trying to stop them would make him a traitor not only against one's government and former comrades but against one's own self and sense of right and wrong. Can't even use the "I was just following orders" cop-out when he was the one issuing them, or "I had no choice" when he was both offered US military command and had the option of sitting out the war in retirement. That would be the supreme failure as a human being in my eyes. Knowing better, having multiple ways out, and doing it anyway with mass murder. That should be scorned, not celebrated. "Vaccinated versus unvaccinated" is not even comparable.
The Confederate fire eater slavers acted in accordance with their beliefs that their cause was righteous. Under the framing of Lee as someone who opposed secession and did not like slavery, the act of him taking up arms to fight and kill for the Confederacy anyway is even less sympathetic, the piles of dead and mangled he personally created a Mt. Everest next to the mole hill of any personal reservations.
And this debate is against a backdrop of 20th and 21st century southern white right wingerd pushing Lee and a personality cult around other Confederate generals as paragons, role models, and heroes for those living today, teaching kids to hate "Yankees," and defending statues that were mostly erected in the 20th century as a middle finger to the civil rights movement and black, center and left southerners, erasing southern unionist history in many areas and promoting valorization of these generals and their short-lived rebellion as the core of Southern culture and Southern identities over everything else. Khmer Rouge comparisons for those wanting to take down those statues from a place of public honor are far off the map, this is just the South getting a little less right wing.
How did you achieve such a poor understanding of the Southern pride mindset when you apparently grew up in it? "A traitor against one's own self and sense of right and wrong?" That's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from a dyed in the wool Yankee - or an Aussie or a European even - zero understanding of the culture and philosophies involved. How did your Kingstown family manage to teach you the confederates were the good guys without ever teaching you why they thought themselves the good guys?
Generally when people explain precisely what they meant by a term, continuing to behave like they meant your outrageously uncharitable interpretation just proves you are being dishonest. Same goes for pretending you don't understand analogies that have been fully explained.
This is making the mistake of conflating being a Southerner with being a certain type of right winger who likes the Confederacy and sympathizes with their motivations. One can understand and have believed in an ideology yet later come to disagree with it and have disdain for the figures that ideology (quite literally) puts on a pedestal. So it goes for myself and Confederate whitewashing apologetics. Reverend Father Uncle Ruckus notwithstanding, black Southerners have never been fond of revering the Confederacy yet this does not make them Yankees, Australians or Europeans.
I take southern pride in Mark Twain, Tennesse Williams, bluegrass, marksmanship, barbecue, country music*, Mardi Gras, rock n roll, southern gothic, moonshining, NASA, Harper Lee, unrestrictive gun and knife laws, certain SEC football teams, Cajun and South Florida cooking & culture, MLK, Cormac McCarthy, Florida spring break, Sgt York, Claire Chennault and more great artists, political figures and athletes than can be named. I do not take pride in a couple generals who fought a short-lived secession war to continue slavery, or in their present day fan club.
As stated before, choosing to do something one knows is wrong plus killing tons of people in the process is what I consider to make one a failure of a human being. The abdication of responsibility when one knows better combined with mass carnage. Trying to ask me to categorize randos who did or didn't get vaccinated into that mold isn't going to work. They do not even come close to the category of "failure of a human being" in my mind. It's like asking me to pick which counts as a kidnapper, the guy who illegally downloads movies or the guy who pays for Netflix.
*With the exception of certain trends out of Nashville whose best remedy is measured in megatons.
After conceding that the Year Zero mindset label applied to MadMonzer and I was a reference to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, what more is there to debate about it? I was pissed, that's not going to change, it can be continually relitigated without changing my negative reaction to being given that label one iota or you can just drop it and move on.
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