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CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA- Simple things for simple minds. Radical leftists had a meltdown over a statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which led to a “Unite the Right” rally that turned violent. The leftist meltdown has resulted in a real meltdown, with the Lee statue falling victim to a 2,250-degree furnace, the Washington Post reported.
“Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue has met its end in a 2,240-degree furnace. The divisive Confederate monument, the focus of the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2017, was secretly melted down and will become a new piece of public art.” Hopefully, it doesn’t resemble the abominable MLK piece of “art” unveiled in Boston earlier this year.
“The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing over Lee to the [sic] Charlottesville’s black history museum, which had proposed a plan to repurpose the metal,” the Post continued.
“In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the monument should remain intact or turned into Civil War cannons. But on Saturday, the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small southern foundry, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.”
Information Liberation reported that Lee Park, which was renamed Market Street Park after the deadly 2017 rally, “was transformed into a dangerous homeless camp and drug den.”
Moreover, many on the extreme left are now slamming Charlottesville’s city government, claiming police violence against “unhoused” black people at the former site of Lee’s statue.
Early in October, police responded to a report of a stabbing at the homeless encampment that replaced a statue that posed no harm except to whiny leftists who would rather erase history than learn from it.
The statue, with Lee astride his horse Traveller, was a fixture in downtown Charlottesville for nearly a century. The statue was torn down in July 2021 after the George Floyd riots, which shook the country throughout much of the summer of 2020.
“Today the statue comes down, and we are one small step closer to a more perfect union,” NPR reported then-mayor Nikuyah Walker. As we have seen in over two years since Walker made that statement, the United States is no closer to being a “perfect union” than we were back then. Some might argue we are even further apart.
As one might expect, the academic contingent played a large part in having the statue torn down and now melted into liquid metal.
“We want to transform something that has been toxic in the Charlottesville community,” said Jalane Schmidt, religious studies professor at the University of Virginia and one of the project’s organizers. “We want to transform it into a piece of art that the community can be proud of and gather around and not feel excluded or intimidated.”
“People are willing to die for symbols,” Schmidt said. “And as we saw in Charlottesville, they’re willing to kill for them too.”
Perhaps they can use the melted-down Lee statue to build one honoring everyone’s favorite drug overdose victim, George Floyd.
In describing the destruction of the statue, NPR waxed poetic at the sheer majesty of destroying a symbol of American history:
“They use a torch to score the head of the statue in the pattern of a death mask. Lee’s face falls to the floor with a loud clank.”
That was virtually orgasmic for some, including the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Cultural Center in Charlottesville, Andrea Douglas.
“The act of myth-making that has occurred around Robert E. Lee, removing his face, is emblematic of the kind of removal of that kind of myth,” Douglas said.
NPR continues to marvel at the sheer awesomeness of the statue's demise:
“A furnace is ignited and heats to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a side yard of the foundry. Workers feed pieces of the verdigris statue, including General Lee’s saber, into a large vessel inside called a crucible.”
“We are turning swords into something else,” said Douglas. “That saber is the object of violence, and it was the object of power, the object of conquest. I think that is an important symbol to really sort of dig into.”
Gen. Robert E. Lee is an enigma of sorts. A brilliant military tactician, Lee served as the Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, according to the Lee Family Archive. When Virginia decided to secede from the Union, Lee felt he had no choice but to resign his commission in the United States military and defend his home state of Virginia.
“I cannot fight against my relatives, my children, my home. I have been a soldier of the United States, but I am a son of Virginia, and I must do as my State does,” he said.
Roy Blount Jr., who wrote a biography of Lee, says Lee struggled with the decision of Virginia to secede from the Union.
“The decision [to resign his Army commission] was honorable by his standards of honor–which, whatever we may think of them, were neither self-serving nor complicated,” Blount says. Lee, he says, “thought it was a bad idea for Virginia to secede, and God knows he was right, but secession had been more or less democratically decided upon.”
Lee’s family did hold enslaved people, and Blount says he had been “ambiguous” on the subject of slavery, which led some of Lee’s defenders to “discount slavery’s significance in assessments of his character.”
In an 1856 letter to his wife, Lee appeared to come out against the practice of slavery; however, the message was mixed.
“In this enlightened age, there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatriate on its disadvantages.”
He did continue as follows and suggests that perhaps, in the long run, blacks would be “better off” in the United States than in Africa:
“I think it, however, a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, & physically.
The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt praised Lee upon the 100th anniversary of his birth, praising his “extraordinary skill as a General, his dauntless courage and high leadership,” while adding:
“He stood that hardest of all strains, the strain of bearing himself well through the gray evening of failure; and therefore out of what seemed failure he helped to build the wonderful and might triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share.”
Gen. Robert E. Lee is a mystery of a man, someone who seemed torn by the issue of slavery and between loyalty to his country versus loyalty to his home and his family. Lee was the face of the Confederacy. However, whether we like it or not, the Confederacy and the Civil War are part of our history.
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” By burying our heads in the sand, tearing down and melting statues that offend our sensibilities, we may feel good at the moment but accomplish nothing but virtue signaling. Pretending that Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy never happened teaches us nothing.
Comments
2023-11-02T22:45-0400 | Comment by: Jim
Horrible, just horrible! General Robt. E. Lee was and is an American Hero that was loved by the US Army and US Government up until he followed his heart and went with his beloved Virginia during the Civil War. He NEVER once committed any War Crime nor did anyone of his troops. He hated the Civil War and how it tore the Union apart but did his Duty as a Virginian.