@quiet_NaN comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 7mo ago

One of the Most Despicable Characters I’ve Read About in Years, and I Just Read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Earlier, we talked about the sexual dynamics at play in pledging a sorority, inspired by reading through this series. Now I want to dig into the other major strain of the series: race and Greek Life in Alabama. It’s an interesting article, talking about actual real-life integration of an institution in 2013. We’re talking about the Obama years here, people! This story has everything: hot blonde elites cavorting in grey uniforms, burning crosses, a gay Uncle Tom with a humiliation fetish, a sinister political bloc designed to get the best seats at football games, a moral universe that doesn’t seem capable of considering any race outside of ADOS and Sons of the Confederacy, and a band of Nice White Liberals who didn’t seem to ask any black kids about what they wanted. I’ll be offering money-quotes and commentary below, to our author:

When I started working on a story about Greek Life, I did not think I'd end up recounting a 1980s stakeout and car chase. But then again, I had no idea about the Machine. And neither do most people in this country. Even some students on UA campus don’t know that it’s anything more than a rumor. But for almost a century, this elite group has been at the center of Greek Life at the University of Alabama. The Machine started at the University of Alabama a century ago — some date its inception to 1914, others as far back as 1888. Its real name is Theta Nu Epsilon, and it operates as a kind of meta-fraternity: an alliance, basically, that acts on the behalf of Greek Life. Every year, The Machine picks candidates from Greek organizations to run for everything from SGA President to student senators; it then supports their campaigns by allegedly pressuring fraternity and sorority members to vote for that candidate. Think Tammany Hall, only instead of controlling the election for New York City mayor, they’re compelling fraternity brothers to get out there and vote for the Machine candidate for homecoming queen. We were unable to find any situations in which the university has officially acknowledged that the Machine exists, and several people told us that it had never happened. For decades, it was made up of only white men. (There were no Black students allowed on Alabama’s campus until 1963, when the school was forced to desegregate. There were white sororities before 1963, but women were not invited to join the Machine — until, as you’ll see below, their votes became necessary.)

“Today's college leaders are tomorrow's presidents and US representatives,” Elizabeth says. “Especially in Alabama, [college] is the breeding ground for people who go on to be your local and state elected politicians.” Put differently, at UA, you learn a very specific way that power is accumulated and wielded. Namely: through The Machine. The Machine-to-wider-Alabama-politics pipeline was laid in the very early years of the Machine. J. Lister Hill, born in 1894, is believed to be one of the founding members of UA’s chapter of Theta Nu Epsilon (which became known as The Machine). He also helped start the SGA at UA and served as its first president. He then went on to become one of Alabama's US Senators, and was a vocal dissenter of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. But Hill was just the first of many to reportedly make the jump from Bama SGA to the political big time. Current US Senator for Alabama Katie Britt, Britt’s predecessor in the US Senate Richard Shelby, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, the late federal judge Robert Vance, and the late US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black all allegedly went through the Machine-to-politics pipeline. Oh, and another name: Joe Espy, lawyer to a former Alabama Governor, and also a former UA trustee. Today, recent Machine-backed SGA members are reportedly connected at the White House, in US congress, in the Alabama state house, and on the Tuscaloosa City Council.

We, of course, know about The Machine, because the UA alums among our own membership brought it up immediately. I do think that it needs to be situated within a larger late-nineteenth century yen for secret societies in American colleges at the time. This is when Skull and Bones and Wolf’s Head got big at Yale, along with imitators at Cornell in Quill and Dagger and the Friars at UPenn. It was a common tradition across the country. Having a mutual secret is one of the best ways to bind people together, and I truly believe in the aspect of the agoge that requires young men to commit minor crimes together to bond. At the time of its formation, The Machine was pretty normal within the broader college landscape, and it only developed into what it is today slowly.

As an org-of-orgs, the Machine could hold an internal election to determine SGA president, give its endorsement to the Greek Life membership, and then leverage that support to win a majority of votes. Win the room of frat bosses, you win the support of their supporters, and with a few girlfriends and hangarounds, you win the whole thing. With a third of votes already in their pocket, and turnout low, they’d only need to persuade a small number of outside students. Given that people have a documented desire to vote for the winner, and to associate themselves with powerful secret societies, the Machine endorsement rumor probably brings in some unaffiliated cuck voters on its own. But note that this is only possible inasmuch as your orgs favor loyalty to each other and to the Machine over any other ideological predilection or occupation. They have to be loyal, a trait already prized and selected for in fraternity brothers. For decades the Machine functioned just on the votes of the fraternities, until the university was integrated by force during the civil rights era...

[I]n 1976, a Black student named Cleo Thomas decided to run for SGA president — the first Black student to attempt a run. He won, even without Machine support, because he struck his own alliance with Black students, independents, and white sororities — a sort of counter-Machine voting bloc. For the first time in history, the Machine was a minority. “It was at that point that the Machine began to see the strategic value of bringing women on board,” John told me. By bringing sororities into the Machine, they could shore up a larger voting bloc and minimize the chances of a Cleo Thomas situation happening again. Which is exactly what happened.

This is sort of the path of American liberalism in a microcosm. Blacks, seeking to escape the yolk of white supremacy, ally with white women, seeking rights. Traditional white male power centers break up this alliance by co-opting white women, given them some power to prevent them from voting with the Blacks. It’s almost too good to be true!

The major sororities and fraternities at UA remained entirely white until 2013, when the university administration finally forced the issue. First they tried being subtle:

Blame it on inertia, blame it on tradition, blame it on racism, attribute it to Black students gravitating towards the historically Black sororities and fraternities on campus — whatever the reason, university administrators understood that the optics were very bad. In 2001, they actively assisted incoming freshman Melody Twilley — the first Black student to Rush the all-white sororities — by setting up meetings with sorority leaders and facilitating recommendations at a number of houses. But the Machine, according to the Los Angeles Times, allegedly “didn’t want to let her in.” And it got its way. The sororities ignored Melody and the university administration. And… that was the end of it. E. Culpepper Clark, a dean at the university and author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama, declared “God almighty, this is sad.” But it doesn’t appear that any further action was taken. (Similar to yesterday’s piece, we reached out to all of the named sororities and fraternities concerning components of this story; none have responded).

Imagine being the girl who was flagged as great sorority material, the hottest most demure black valley girl they could find. What a bizarre affectation. I can't imagine wanting to integrate, not a school or a business or even a restaurant, but what is ultimately a friend group. Going in and knowing that at some level, they're only friends with you because the admin told them they had to be. It would be psychological torture! Why would anyone want to be that person? The moment university admin got involved, any sane person with self respect would withdraw! The Los Angeles Times report on the matter does note that:

A few Latina and Asian American students have been accepted in the recent past, and last year, a woman who is part black was picked, though her racial background was unknown at the time.

Which was an interesting omission from the substack series. In the 2024 liberal moral universe, it is much easier to limit your actors to ADOS and Sons of the Confederacy, to the most obvious cases in your universe of racists and victims of racism. When you start including other groups, like Asian girls or Arab guys, things get complicated. What does it mean that the sororities would accept a Chinese girl, this despite the (at the time) liberal Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.

After all, southern black girls probably have vastly more in common with southern white girls than either have with Chinese girls. The white and black girls probably have families more rooted in the USA, similar cuisines and traditions, similar religious affiliations. This blindspot towards non-black minorities is one of my perpetual frustrations with American liberal attempts at intellectualizing race and racism. The book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, widely feted, frustrated me to no end on this count. Its comparison between race and the hindu Caste system was hopeless facile, and represented a deep misunderstanding of how a caste system functioned. Caste systems aren’t about the people on the top or the people on the bottom, they’re about the people in the middle: by convincing those in the middle to accept their subjugation to the strong in exchange for their elevation over the weak. Consider the response from the Greeks when the Ottoman Empire abolished the order of races:

In 1865, when the equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire was proclaimed, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, a high-ranking official observed, "whereas in former times, in the Ottoman State, the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first, then the Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them were put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying: 'The government has put us together with the Jews. We were content with the supremacy of Islam.'"

The role of Asian and Hispanic girls is under explored in the piece, while blacks are the most common minority at UA, they’re not the only ones! Looking at edge cases is how you determine things! Discrimination hits the black girl but not the Asian girl. Why? Racism is one explanation, and the one that the Nice White Liberals settle on. Ultimately they’d find another valley girl Jackie Robinson and inform the sororities in no uncertain terms that they must be friends with her:

[Kennedi] had a 4.3 GPA in high school and was salutatorian of her class. Her grandfather was a prominent Alabama judge who happened to sit on the university board of trustees. But in the sorority world, grades and connections can only take you so far. Not a single one of the panhellenic sororities on campus – there were 16 at the time – gave her a bid. Because like Melody Twilley, Kennedi was Black. Every year, hundreds of girls who rush at UA don’t end up with a bid. Sometimes they just didn’t play the game correctly: not enough recs, wrong outfits, too much social media, didn’t talk to enough girls, whatever. But Kennedi’s rejection wasn’t the result of a social faux pas or a fluke of the system. After Rush, a few members of Alpha Gamma Delta came forward and reported that sorority leadership had nixed the tradition of deciding as a group who would make it to the next round of Rush in favor of creating a shortlist — one that didn’t include Cobb. There’s no direct evidence that this change was made specifically to exclude Kennedi. But when those whistleblowers tried to argue for Kennedi’s inclusion, they were shut down by alumni, who according to a report in the Crimson White, said that Kennedi didn’t meet the sorority’s “letter of recommendation requirements.” A member of another sorority, Delta Delta Delta, was quoted in that same article saying the same thing happened in her house: leadership intervened in the recruitment process, and Kennedi was excluded.

Then-university president, Dr. Judy Bonner, was forced to acknowledge segregation within the Greek system. She finally did what the university had refused to do back in 2001: she ordered the sororities to essentially redo Rush with an extended timeline and open admissions policy, all under university supervision. In the aftermath, ten Black women were admitted to traditionally white sororities — including Kennedi. Let’s not forget that this all happened — and I cannot emphasize this enough — in 2013. Rush did return to normal the next year, but the message was clear: maintain this trajectory, or we’ll intervene again. And although the controversy in (again) 2013 was focused on sororities, the changes enacted in its wake affected fraternities as well.

Now, what’s missing from this story, and an alternative explanation I’d like to offer: the Divine Nine.

To clarify, Greek Life at Bama wasn’t entirely white at the time — just the “top tier” houses, many of which were founded as exclusively white organizations in the post-Civil War South. There was also the Divine Nine, a flourishing system of Black houses also called Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs). Of those nine, eight have chapters at the University of Alabama. Like the historically white Greek Organizations, each of these BGLO houses has stereotypes and traditions and tremendous pressure to follow in the paths of your parents.

These traditional black houses had their own organizations, and may soon boast a president among their national alums. Nowhere in the news stories about the liberal “heroes” trying to integrate the top sororities at UA were there any voices from these organizations. No one seemed to want to ask them their opinions. But consider: when you take the hot, rich, sophisticated, smart black girls and you go to them and say “hey, you’re good enough that you can rush the White Sorority instead of being stuck in the Black sorority;” you’re implicitly denigrating the Black sorority, and you’re permanently dooming it to obscurity. Without the hot, rich, Black girls coming in, the Black sorority will slowly lose prestige and power, left with only the poor, ugly, or those obsessed with race issues, a second tier pick. I’d love to know if the presidents of the BGLOs wanted the white orgs to integrate, or if they demanded that they not integrate behind the scenes.

The founders of the Hells Angels, who only admitted white and hispanic members, said later that they had the restrictive clause in order to avoid conflict with the black prison gangs over membership: the blacks would have responded with violence if the Hells Angels had recruited black members, as blacks prisoners were a patrimony of the black gangs and an integrated gang would threaten their hold over them. Similarly, promising black freshmen were the patrimony of the BLGOs. It was in the interest of the BLGOs for the best black candidates to end up in their houses, the worst outcome for them is for the white orgs to admit only the cream of the black crop. The last thing they want is for the university to handpick a hottie with a 4.0+ and pluck her out of BLGO life into the “real” sorority. That kills the BLGOs, slowly or quickly, knocking them out of top-tier contention. Suddenly the BLGOs are the only racially discriminatory greek orgs, and they are only racially discriminatory Greek orgs, they offer nothing else. It’s the tragedy of how affirmative action has impacted the formation of black communities in the United States, the Talented Tenth is pulled off and fawned over by whites, handed easy diversity positions, when they could be improving the quality of black neighborhoods and communities. Rather than the university demanding that the BGLOs be accorded more prestige within the system, they chose to tell the white kids: you have to have at least a few black friends. Another token black friend forced into the frats:

Enter Jared

Reading this substack author talk about Jared Hunter filled me with a level of disgust it is hard for me to properly articulate. I’m still grappling with just how much I hate this guy from his words and the descriptions of his actions, given that he is just some kid. A portrait of a grasping uppity hanger on:

[Jared] saw a different path to power: one that went straight through the big, old school, incredibly white fraternity houses. Jared has understood himself as ambitious from an early age. He went to a prestigious prep school; he did debate and mock trial; he did Boys States, the nerdy statewide program for kids hell bent on going into politics. His dream was to go to Georgetown University, a key feeder program for the federal government. But when the University of Alabama offered him a full ride and then some, he took the deal. Jared’s father had been a member of Omega Psi Phi, one of Divine Nine Black houses, and was dedicated to the fraternity. After graduating, he continued to pay his dues, helped organize their annual New Year’s Eve fundraiser, and religiously attended fraternity meetings. “Like, literally every Sunday,” Jared told me. It was a big part of his father’s identity. But Omega Psi Phi didn’t interest Jared, in part because he didn’t feel like he’d fit in there. He’d grown up as one of the only Black students in a wealthy — and mostly white — community outside of Montgomery, Alabama. These were the types of guys he knew; he’d gone to high school with them and wore the same clothes as them from the same bass fishing shops. He knew, in other words, how to be the one Black friend to the rich white people who’d swear there wasn’t a racist bone in their body (just in their family graveyards).

Jared accepted the bid with no delusions. He knew they were getting something from him — the appearance of diversity. And he was getting something from them. It’s the primary reason Jared was so intent on joining one of the more elite white fraternities. “I thought that being in an IFC fraternity, I would have opportunities to be more involved with SGA [Student Government Association] and other organizations on campus that I was interested in,” Jared told me. One of those other organizations was even more elite than the fraternity itself: The Machine. The way Jared first came to understand the Machine, he told me, was as a “pipeline” for Alabama politics — Jared’s ultimate ambition. Joining the fraternity was just the first step in that process. Next would be getting the Machine’s backing and winning the SGA presidency, thereby firmly positioning himself for the political future he’d imagined. Which, just a year after the system had rejected him entirely, is what he set about doing.

Tons of kids come into undergrad with these kinds of political ambitions. And Jared was far from the only one to come in willing to do the most disgusting things to achieve them. Maybe, like Caro said of LBJ, he took a perverse pride in wheeling and dealing, in being cynical, as though it made him better than the others. But I just can’t stomach this:

When I asked Jared how it felt to be aligning himself with a historically very racist secret society, he paused, and said: “You know, it's shitty and unfortunate, but where I'm from, that could be said about so many different entities.” He pointed out that the high school he attended, St. James School in Montgomery, was founded in 1955 as a direct result of the Brown v. Board decision. It’s what’s known as a “segregation academy”: a private school that opened to white students after public schools were forced to integrate. For Jared, when it came to the Machine, the ends justified the means. As he put it, their history is “worth reflecting on and acknowledging. But I don't also want something that's going to prohibit especially Black and brown people's career furtherance.” In other words, if the Machine could offer an opportunity, especially an opportunity that people like Jared had historically been denied, then he was gonna take it. But first, he needed to convince an organization hell-bent on maintaining the status quo… to change. And there was still plenty of change that desperately needed to come to campus. We went in depth on [Jared’s] campaign earlier this week, but we didn’t mention the unusual move he made during it. He published an open letter in the Crimson White, openly acknowledging that he had the Machine’s support and backing. “Running for office with the support of a group with such a checkered past was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made,” he wrote. Jared saw the acknowledgment as a way to build more transparency into the system: yes, he had the backing of the Machine, but he promised to represent all students. “Not only does the Greek community not fully define our campus,” he wrote, “it does not fully define myself as an individual.” It was a bold move, and I’m guessing it raised eyebrows among some Machine members — remember, this was the group that had allegedly stolen an entire run of that same newspaper to prevent its members from being publicly named, and which refused to even publicly acknowledge its own existence.

God this kind of whinging bugs me. There’s something so self-satisfied about this, knowingly taking advantage of systems that you claim to be better than. There’s a full throated defense one can make of The Machine, or any other institution whose past you don’t approve of. And if you want to make it I’m not going to mock you. But this is just being an open Uncle Tom, and expecting Johny Reb to reward you for playing coon while the white liberals tear up at how oppressed you’ve been. Disgusting.

Jared was willing to put himself into a box in order to get into a fraternity— he just didn’t realize how small that box still was, or how much of himself he’d still have to hide. As he described this all to me, I started nodding my head. “Ahhhh, so what they actually wanted was… Clarence Thomas,” I said. Jared immediately started laughing. “Yes,” he responded, “Yes! That’s exactly what they wanted. They wanted somebody in their Wrangler jeans to roll up in their F-150 and basically be them, but Black.”

White kids wanting to have friends who are like them is a Human Rights Violation. They don’t like white kids who aren’t like them either! And Jared was just saying how much he was just like those guys.

Kappa Alpha Order, commonly known as KA, was co-founded by a soldier who shot himself in the foot and actually had to sit out most of the Civil War. But that hasn’t stopped members from openly fetishizing its Confederate roots. Their website still lists Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” for, among other things, his “exemplary ideals.” And from the 1950s, it began designating one week in spring “Old South Week” to celebrate this dubious history, the climax of which was the Old South Ball. A bacchanal of antebellum nostalgia, the ball was where KA brothers could play beer pong in rebel uniforms while sorority girls outfitted in Scarlett O’Hara-style hoop-skirts and ribbons took photos draped over the fraternity’s decorative cannon.

One does have to laugh at shooting himself in the foot. But what’s so wrong with the myth of General Lee? I’ve talked before about growing up, in the 90s in the North, with myths of General Lee giving up his train seat to an old black woman. There’s a version of Lee, and the war between the states!, that lets us all have our pride and our brotherhood! That’s how you bring the country together! But Jared doesn’t want to make this argument, he wants to victimize himself for liberal sympathy while dancing in shoe polish for his frat brothers.

No one’s under the illusion that the Greek System at Bama is inclusive. Acceptance still hinges on your willingness to bend to the status quo — and not just when it comes to race. There’s part of Jared’s story I didn’t include up top. During his first year at UA, when he was being courted by ATO, and before being dropped… Jared posted to Facebook about gay marriage (this was the mid-2010s, remember, so college students were still posting things on Facebook). It was pretty innocuous, and said nothing about the fact that Jared — who, at the time, was very much closeted — was also gay. But Jared believes it was enough to immediately stop all overtures from the various fraternities that had shown an interest.

There are obvious, mechanical reasons why someone may not want to live in a frat house with a homosexual. That is not discrimination in and of itself. It’s not clear to me what a gay kid would really want out of fraternity life, other than, you know, the obvious. As the series continued, I was increasingly convinced that Jared had a weird fetish.

He would ultimately win the Machine nomination for SGA president, and win the position, but when he got there all they seem to want is to get good tickets to the football games:

Jared didn’t have to run any of his appointees by the Machine. But that’s not because the Machine was more open-minded than he’d expected. It’s because the Machine, he quickly found out… kind of doesn’t care. Which reminds me of Alex’s experience, in that basement, being told to vote for people with no further reasoning. It feels like something nefarious is going on — I mean, this is an organization that insists on meeting in basements late at night and dedicates so much energy to controlling the SGA. But as you keep digging, you begin to realize: there’s no secret agenda. The agenda is just…winning.

Ultimately any successful political organization has, as its number one goal, winning. Movements with ideological convictions among its members are unstable, prone to splitters. A laser focus on winning and maintaining power, on in group loyalty, allows for the careful husbanding of power, and its spending on carefully metered goals as needed. The author comes to a similar conclusion:

And here’s my theory: The Machine and its influence waxes and wanes in cycles. It exists to support Greek Life’s interests, so when Greek Life is under threat, it gets active. In the late 1960s and early 70s, fraternity and sorority enrollment nationwide fell sharply. Blame it on the counter-culture, blame it on institutional crackdowns, blame it on feminism or refusals to take part in such glaringly white institutions….for whatever reason, Greek Life’s hold on campus culture was loosening. Cue: the most active and violent period in The Machine’s modern history. Right now, Greek Life seems to be thriving at UA. Since 2000, the percentage of Bama students in fraternities and sororities has nearly doubled — in part due to the influx of out-of-state students in search of a “traditional” college experience (e.g., one where they get to “act like campus royalty”). The Machine has nothing to worry about, so it's gone relatively dormant, like a well-fed bear. But bears don’t hibernate forever — and when they wake up, they wake up mad.

Jared would finish up his character arc dropping out of SGA and Greek Life after getting a DUI going to Taco Bell and coming out as gay. He’d go on to law school at noted anti-racist institution…Washington and Lee (Shock horror!), where he no doubt remains the token black gay conservative. I’m convinced one of the reasons conservative find affirmative action so distressing is their experience with affirmative action in conservative politics. Nowhere can a black person rise farther with less talent than by claiming to be a Republican. Clarence Thomas is both the most eloquent arguer against, and the most persuasive example against, affirmative action. Jared might be a close second, though.

Context

Outlaw83 FiveHourMarathon 7mo ago

The problem with Southern whites wanting to venerate a lie about Robert E. Lee is there are in fact, plenty of Southern white people to be proud of from the time of the Civil War, except of course, most of them didn't fight on the side of the slavers in a war to perpetuate that practice. Which goes against the whole idea that the South isn't allowed to have Southern heroes.

The reality is you can still attempt to defend Robert E. Lee. You just have to defend the actual Robert E. Lee, not the one that existed in the mind of the Dunning School

Now, I know the response to do this is something like, "well, MLK Jr. cheated on his wife" or whatever. But the problem, is most left-leaning people are happy to either say that something like their personal foibles is widely outranked by what they did in their larger life (ie. MLK) or part of their record is a stain that should be criticized (ie. FDR w/ internment), but there's a difference to most people of the worst of left-leaning heroes and the worst y'know, defending slavery.

The reality for neo-Confederates is outside of the whole fighting to defend slavery, most of the Southern leadership during the Civil War that is venerated just didn't...have much to cheer for beyond that. Lee wasn't even a good general.

FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour Outlaw83 7mo ago

The problem with Southern whites wanting to venerate a lie about Robert E. Lee

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?

Now, I know the response to do this is something like, "well, MLK Jr. cheated on his wife" or whatever.

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.

Lee wasn't even a good general.

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.

quiet_NaN FCfromSSC 7mo ago

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.

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gattsuru quiet_NaN 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

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.))

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