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Leaving aside the fact that he was, indeed, charged with treason, are you seriously contending that an American who waged war against the US did not commit treason? Because that is the literal definition of treason
Excuse me but somehow I don’t feel compelled by an argument based on a grand jury indictment that is described as “forgotten legal and moral case” that “went missing for 72 years” (Huh? What even?). Considering a case where a general of a defeated army isn’t found guilty by any court on the victorious side of treason, or anything of the same magnitude for that matter, I’m prone to accept their judgment, or rather lack thereof, instead of that of modern-day Red Guards 150 years later who’re obviously all cocksure in their own ability to always know better.
But anyway, I get your point, or at least I think I do, but keeping in mind that accusing someone, even in his grave, of treason is serious business, especially if he was held in high regard by Churchill, Eisenhower, Wilson and so on (see the link above) so I think we ought to word such accusations accurately. What exactly did Lee betray? A constitution that is explicitly anti-racist and forbids slavery? Clearly not. A federal system that clearly forbids the secession of federal states in all cases? As far as I know, that’s not the case either – again, I understand that that Confederate states technically didn’t secede in a legal manner. A president who wanted to abolish slavery? No.
At the end of the day, what he did betray in full is a political code which holds that a military officer, when appointed and ordered, is to march his men into his own homeland and wreak destruction on it as if it was enemy territory.
What he "betrayed" is not particularly relevant. He literally waged war on his country, and he commanded armies which killed tens of thousands of his fellow citizens. To try to argue that that isn't "really" treason is rather silly. It is certainly possible to argue that he deserves a statute despite committing treason -- lots of people deserve statues despite having done some bad things -- but to argue that he didn't commit treason at all does not make sense.
For my part I feel like this comment throws the fundamental differences between progressive and conservative moral intuitions into stark relief.
The progressive doesn't see the object and context of the alleged betrayal as relevant because in a progressive's mind, the moral valance of an individual is more a product group membership/loyalty than it is one of personal conduct. All behavior is acceptable so long as it is aimed at an acceptable target.
Meanwhile to the conservative for things like the circumstance of the alleged betrayal is not only relevant but essential information because, to put it in rationalist terms, it helps you sort the potential cooperators from the defectors. In a conservative mind Hobbes' state of nature is an ever-present specter, and thus the moral valance of an individual often ends up boiling down to "can I trust this guy not to screw me over/stab me back". Hense the old sentiment that it is better to have an honorable foe than a perfidious ally.
To me, comments like those of @atokenliberal6D_4 and @fuckduck9000 above, and to a lesser extent yours here speak to a very particular sort of blindness. Progressive can't seem to imagine the shoe ever being on the other foot. They can't seem to imagine ever finding themselves on the "wrong side" because obviously whatever side they're on is going to be the "right side" and thus they start asking questions like why shouldn't we be cruel to our enemies?
...and that question is the first step down a very steep and slippery slope.
The shoe is never again going to be on the other foot with respect to people who believe so strongly in hereditary racial hierarchies that they think Confederacy-style slavery is the best way to organize society.
This question in particular is one the very rare exceptions where we can be extremely confident what the "right side" actually is. There are in fact certain values that are so obviously wrong that you don't have to extend any charity at all to them and it's ok to be as cruel as possible to those that support them. Whatever led to confederate-style slavery is one of them. Kill-all-non-Aryans Nazism is another. Almost nothing else is like this, but it's important to recognize the very special cases where you can make such strong statements.
When we're talking about things like actual 1940's-Germany Nazism and the the literal Confederacy, we're so far away from any normal political question that we really don't have to worry about slippery slopes. It's like saying taking antibiotics is a slippery slope of normalizing killing that will end in murder.
I realize that people have abused the words like "Nazi" so much that this kind of statement pattern-matches to something that's very worrisome and not true, but we can't let the corruption of the word make us unable to consider the concept---there were historical cultures in Virginia in 1850 and Germany in 1940 that really were that horrible. If the moderation team actually believes that insulting these specific historical cultures isn't ok here, then please ban me. I'm really not interested in discussing with any hypothetical poster that actually agrees with their tenets.
My case in point. Look around you. Look at who is it that's arguing in favor of "hereditary racial hierarchies". It aint the Republicans.
No, they are not, that is also a major component of my point. Contra the popular narrative the Nazis were not uniquely evil, they were bog-standard evil, and it is the liberal attitude that that "we can safely indulge in our darkest impulses because our cause is just" that leads to acts like the Holodomor and the Holocaust.
Is there something you have written explaining this? It seems to be the crux of the disagreement.
To me, their belief that someone's ancestry could give them so little moral value that it's perfectly ok to kill them seems uniquely evil by any modern standard. Replacing kill with enslave, the Confederates fell the same way. Is judging by "modern standards" the part that you are objecting to? I think modern standards are the right thing to judge by if we're worrying about slippery slopes.
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Except that I was not talking about betrayal in the abstract. I was specifically referring to the very particular issue of whether Lee's actions merit a statue, and even more particularly whether his taking up arms against the govt constitutes "treason." You seem to want to talk about something else.
Then apparently I am not a progressive.
Again, then apparently I am not a progressive
So was I and that's what I mean when I say that I feel like this comment throws the fundamental differences between progressive and conservative moral intuitions into stark relief.
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It gets tiring repeating this to you, but I’m not woke or progressive by any stretch of the imagination. I’m only in this because of the analogy to nazi germany and the prussian military tradition, as a german I’ve had to think long and hard about what it means to act justly within an unjust system, and I don’t think it can be done. The loyal dog of an evil master is not a good dog. So no, I do ponder constantly what to do when you’re on the ‘wrong side’. Frankly you guys are mindkilled, you’d defend anyone to get back at the woke.
You think Lee should be vilified. You think he should be vilified because he chose to fight for his native society, which was built on slavery. You think it should have been obvious to Lee that his native society was not worth fighting for because it was evil, because slavery is self-evidently evil. Only, slavery obviously wasn't self-evidently evil in the sense you mean to either Lee or his contemporaries, almost all of whom spent large portions of their lives coexisting with slavery. It certainly wasn't self-evident to their predecessors, who accepted slavery as a price worth paying to get the united states off the ground. Many of them could recognize that it was evil, in the sense that they wanted it to stop, without being able to agree that it was evil enough to sacrifice or even risk everything else of value in an attempt to end it, which is what you appear to be arguing.
What makes your moral assessments different from those of Lincoln or Grant or any of the others on the Union side, who thought Lee worthy of considerable respect despite having literally had to fight him? Could it be that your moral standards have... progressed?
Bonus question: I think abortion is an abomination, roughly equal to slavery. Do you consider me liberated from any concerns of loyalty to my fellow countrymen, given that they have maintained this vile practice at the cost of 60 million innocent lives? Had I the opportunity to contribute significantly to the military subjugation of my society, with a reasonable expectation that this would result in large-scale death, ruin and immiseration for my fellow Americans, should I do so?
That's all I'm saying, that it was recognizably evil, not self-evidently evil.
What actually happened is that Lee and co sacrificed and risked everything of value in an attempt to maintain it - see the difference? Good honorable men have a duty not to fight for a recognizably evil cause. If lee had gone on a trip to europe for the duration of the war, I would have no problem with him.
My assessments are substantiated, coherent and elegant. I don't respect their opinions any more than I do those of living experts and ordinary people.
So have yours and Hlynka's.
If there is ever a civil war between abortionists and anti-abortionists, I suggest you do not fight for the abortionists just because your home state is blue. As I said, morality in general, not just my morality, trumps the petty understanding of honor and loyalty lee used to justify fighting on the side of evil.
No, because it’ll end up a communist civil war type deal, where the deaths are front-loaded, and after that your goals will fail and it will go on as usual. But what should stay your hand is morality, not loyalty to your home state, or ‘basic human decency’ (in the sense of ‘being a good neighbour’), or legality.
No, they sacrificed and risked everything to protect and preserve the society that was attempting to maintain it. Slavery was a fundamental part of the South, but it is a mistake to reduce everything in the South to slavery, just as it would be a mistake to round everything in our current society to abortion or racism or whatever hot-button issue one considers important. They fought to preserve the lives and prosperity of millions of their tribe, despite the fact that their tribe was committing a great evil, because they thought that the good within their society was worth preserving, despite the evil.
Our disagreement is over what constitutes a "recognizably evil cause". Lee did not recognize the South as "recognizably evil" in the sense you seem to be using it, and in fact neither did Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, or myself. This is not because we are moral relativists, but because we recognize that all societies contain significant amounts of evil and injustice, and that attempts to solve large-scale injustices can have absolutely horrific unintended consequences, especially when those attempts bulldoze positive-sum norms. Accepting significant levels of evil and injustice is often preferable if no clean resolution is available. Even when conflict can't be avoided, limiting the scope of that conflict as much as possible is extremely valuable. The values that put Lee on the wrong side in the conflict are also the values that help him limit the scale of the conflict and bring it to an end, which is why they, and he, should be respected.
...And notably progressive compared to those who came before you.
In what way? Feel free to provide examples. If you can't do that, you should consider that your values are in fact to some degree progressive, and our values are not, and this is the difference we keep trying to point out to you. You seem to think that there's an easy solution available, and so anyone who ends up on the other side is just irredeemably evil. I think that the world is complicated, and those on the other side, even in war, are still redeemable, even respectable, provided they conduct themselves well. The fact that they are willing to fight is much less important than how they fight. Individuals rarely have much control over whether a war happens, but they have considerable control over their conduct in a war, and they can have a lot of influence on how the war ends.
The question was whether you expect me to sit the war out because I'm an American. You're arguing that it's not a choice of evils, but rather a choice between good and evil. If the anti-abortion side is credibly threatening to bomb New York City into the stone age, are my choices either to join them or to sit it out, or might I conceivably conclude that their ends aren't worth their means, and fight against them?
And likewise, Abolitionism resulted in a civil war where the deaths were front-loaded, most of their goals in fact failed, and then it went on as usual. Blacks remain a crime-ridden, poorly-educated underclass, and every attempt to change that fact has failed. Lee did not contribute significantly to that unfortunate reality, and his actions gave the attempt to make it otherwise as much help as could be asked for. The civil war was quite decisive; it is not clear how a worse, less honorable commander could have made it significantly more decisive, or improved the results of the aftermath.
You and the other progressives are angry that your preferred outcome didn't happen. You believe that it should have happened, because your theories say so, and further say that the only reason it didn't happen is because people got in the way. And in fairness, people did get in the way: Lee commanded the southern armies, and southerners refused to abandon their racism for a century or more after the war concluded. But your preferred outcomes didn't happen in the North either, because your theories are in fact wrong. Slavery and Racism are bad in and of themselves, and we are well-rid of them, but they are not the reason why Blacks More Likely. You don't want to admit that your theories are wrong, or that you have no idea what to do now, and so you attempt to scapegoat those different from yourself. This will not solve the problem either, but it will burn social cohesion and convince people who might otherwise work with you that you are incapable of cooperation.
Right, they failed, and if they had succeeded, it would have perpetuated a great evil. Hence my question: what decent man would fight and kill his countrymen for that payoff matrix?
This is a ‘both sides’ argument for refusing to fight in any war, it doesn’t justify lee and rommel’s actions.
Really what bothers me the most is the complacency with which otherwise decent men said ‘let’s go to war then’, over their own moral reservations (not mine!) . It would be of great benefit to humanity if the ideas they used to justify it (‘honor’ and duty to your state) would decrease in prestige so that this never happens again.
I do consider them traitors, but not in a formal sense, not to a state (as I said I care very little about duty to the state when it conflicts with morality). No, to their own conscience, to the side of good, to which their natural inclinations would have guided them without the aforementioned memes. If rabid nazis or the southern gentlemen culture which supported the caning of senatur sumner goes on an evil path, that’s business as usual, I expect that. But good men were not supposed to follow them there.
Cthulu swims left, and your opinions and Hlynka”s are considerably more progressive than that from an an american from 70 years ago, let alone grant and lee. Examples: blacks and women’s right to vote, your views on misgeneation , homosexuality, personal freedom, what constitutes fighting words, etc.
So the north are now terrorists killing millions of civilians unprompted. This is how ridiculously far you have to stretch your analogies to maintain your defense of lee.
That's one way to frame it. Is abolitionism alone to blame for the civil war? If friends Jack and Joe get into a fistfight over a disagreement, it's not Jack's fault alone for disagreeing. Both chose to escalate. And sure they were both equally insulted, their honor was on the line. And perhaps it would have been better if they'd bury the hatchet and avoided bloodshed. But if Jack was morally right, he had no duty to yield first.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Did you confuse me with somebody else? I never implied slavery and racism make blacks more likely, you and I have discussed HBD and other possible causes of black underachievement. Do I also refuse to admit that resisting the nazis was wrong and that their victory would not have changed anything?
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And as I keep replying, the fact that Sunni, Shia, and Suffi disagree on numerous points of order doesn't invalidate "Islam" as a meaningful category. Which of us is really "mind-killed" here?
Right, you’re surrounded: communists, progressives, social democrats, classical liberals, reactionaries, we’ve all been corrupted, now we’re scheming against you and all that is good. And I'm the moral crusader.
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Well, yes. Armies kill people; that's what they do. But anyway, I stand by what I said: if a military officer does not get sentenced for treason even in a political situation such as that we are discussing here, I see no good argument to call him a traitor.
Yes, that is the point.
Anyhow, if you really think "is no good argument to call him a traitor" -- like, literally, no good argument -- I guess we need to agree to disagree.
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I was under the impression that his country declared independence from the country he waged war on?
So, if I renounce my US citizenship, declare my state an independent country, and lead an army towards Washington, DC, I have not committed treason? Neat trick! It does raise the question of why a pardon of Confederate soldiers was deemed necessary, however. This conversation is bordering on silliness. I really do not understand the need to refuse to concede a single point to one's opponents in an argument. Again, it is perfectly possible to argue that Lee deserves to have a statute, despite committing treason.
Yes. It's called secession. Though I think you should just defend your territory rather than march on the enemy capital. Many such cases. Some of them successful, the United States of America being one of them.
Simple: to show them who's boss.
Yes, I know. Consider the possibility that I do not have a need to refuse to concede a single point, but I just disagree on the matter.
That, of course, begs the question.
Yes, and what the American colonists did was clearly treason. There is a reason that Franklin said, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Just as they committed treason because they literally waged war against the Crown, so, too, Lee committed treason by literally waging war against the US. The fact that the colonists won means nothing, just as the fact that an act of terrorism leads to the achievement of political goals does not mean the perpetrators did not commit an act of terrorism.
Much like calling it "treason" does.
There's nothing clear about it to me. Secession isn't treason any more than divorce is infidelity, and much like you're insisting waging a war for independence is treason, some Catholics will insist that there's no such thing as divorce, and that any romantic relations with another person after marriage are infidelity. The "silliness" which you are experiencing, that you mentioned earlier, is just two different worldviews colliding. It's not a question of who's wrong, it's a question of how we define terms. In the other thread someone asked why didn't Lee join the Union army to sabotage it from within, under my framework that would be treason. But politely declining, making it clear where your loyalties lie, and waging war, is not.
Except that sometimes coming up with eccentric definitions obfuscate matters. When the Constitution explicitly defines treason to include precisely what Lee did, then although it is fine to say that you define it differently, but then it is incumbent on you to explain why what Lee did, whatever label you assign to it, does not disqualify him from having a statue. As I have said, there might well be a perfectly legitimate argument in that regardm but "under my definition, Lee did not commit treason" is not such an argument.
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