To Argue That the Confederacy and General Lee were "Honorable" is to Embrace and Defend White Suprem

[sheshe2]

A small excerpt says it all. General Kelly is a disgrace to his uniform. Lee, then and Kelly, today violated their oath of allegiance to the United states. So much for an 'officer and a gentleman'. Lee treated US military men as enemies and violated his oath as a US officer with the black soldiers he captured. He used them as human shields and sent them back to the south to be re-enslaved. Good old Kelly. Called a (black) widow .. of a war hero a liar for calling out the despicable pResident about his tone deaf phone call and not even knowing her husbands name. Get the picture white supremacists vs black citizens and military persons and their families. No respect due them, they are black after all.

Kelly. Lee. President. You all have dishonored our soldiers.

......................................

Most important, to defend and make noble the Confederacy and its leaders like Lee is to be complicit with a basic logic that deems black people to be inferior to whites. On the supposed honor and integrity of Lee, Gregory Downs has this to say:

It is surprising that a person who recently called for veneration of U.S. soldiers who die in combat should go out of his way to celebrate people like Robert E. Lee, who was responsible for killing active-duty U.S. Army men, especially since Lee violated his own oath of allegiance to the United States, taken when he graduated from West Point. Lee also argued that he did not need to treat active-duty U.S. Army prisoners of war according to the laws of war if they were black, and made efforts to prevent exchanging them and to use them as human shields. Additionally, Lee's army notoriously diverted as it invaded Pennsylvania to capture free black people and send them to the South to be enslaved. 

Certainly Lee considered himself an honorable man and thought about honor a great deal. But we aren't obliged to stop the conversation at that point. Lee's antebellum orders to whip and torture slaves, his wartime efforts to treat U.S. Army soldiers as human shields, and his army's efforts to enslave free people all have to shape our understanding of who he was. 
Gen. Kelly's claim that it "was always loyalty to state first back in those days" is false as he stated it. Loyalty to state was a part of people's perceptions, but Lee's oath was to the United States, not to Virginia, and Southern slaveowners celebrated federal power over the states when it helped them defend slavery. They passed -- as a demand in the so-called Compromise of 1850 -- the single-largest expansion of federal power over states in U.S. history to that time in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which empowered federal marshals and commissioners to disregard state and local courts in order to send black people -- including in practice free people never held as slaves -- to the South for enslavement.

These are the roots of the white supremacist project as manifested by white-on-black chattel slavery in America. If the Confederacy (and later on the Black Codes, debt peonage, Jim and Jane Crow and modern American apartheid) was a tree then white supremacy and anti-black animus were its roots. These attitudes have evolved over time (shifting from explanations rooted in "biology" to "culture" but are still present in American society.[/div]

http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2017/11/to-argue-that-confederacy-and-general.html#more

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended.

Of course it is a defense of white supremacy. Any talk of heritage or honor or defending one's state is a thin cover and a distraction from the foundation of that heritage, and those states. And that foundation is slavery.

[sheshe2]

2. Thanks, guill.

Not sure anyone would even read it. Yes, that foundation is slavery that the GOP upholds with 'honor'.

[Locutusofborg]

3. A Brief Excerpt

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states#Mississippi

[sheshe2]

4. You posted without comment.

Your point, please.

[ismnotwasm]

6. It was the declarations of the individual states intent to secede

And yup—

[KT2000]

5. Human trafficking

is what Kelly and the others want to regard as honorable.
Approving of those who fought for human trafficking for forced labor is showing, for the world to see - the mind of a Nazi.