They’re not only getting rid of all acknowledgements of the accomplishments and contributions of Black Americans they’re restoring all the Confederate iconography.:
The Pentagon is restoring a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background, to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed, officials said.
The 20-foot-tall painting, which hung at the United States Military Academy for 70 years, was taken down in response to a 2020 law that stripped the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.
That legislation also created a commission to come up with new base names. In 2022, the commission ordered West Point to take down all displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.” A few weeks later, the portrait of General Lee with his slave in the background was placed in storage.
It was not clear how West Point could return General Lee’s portrait to the library without violating the law, which emerged from the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.
“At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place,” said Rebecca Hodson, the Army’s communications director. “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”
Unless the person was Black or a woman. Then there’s no need to ever think about them again.
The Times reports that the Lee decision was actually complicated because he was the superintendent of the school from 1852 to 1855. His name and likeness were all over the place on the campus. So they decided to rename some of the stuff but also allow the portraits of him in his blue United States uniform to remain while removing the portrait of him as a Confederate traitor with a slave in the background. Oh the wokeness of it all.
But the NY Times doesn’t mention the rest of the story: As Max Kennerly explained on BlueSky:
This painting is classic Lost Cause revisionism; it was commissioned after Truman ordered desegregation of the military. Army Secretary Gordon Gray was a nepobaby (daddy was chair of RJ Reynolds) who led the dubious “Gray Board” that yanked Oppenheimer’s clearance. Real piece of work all around.
This portrait was outright racist, segregationist bullshit and it is a abomination that it’s being put back up so that Trump can reconstruct the country of his youth.
Personally, I don’t think there should be any recognition of Lee as anything but a traitor to the United States which is what he was. But they tried to meet half way and look what they got. They should have put the painting in an obscure museum of traitors at the site of the surrender.
But our historian in chief loves him:
In recent years, Mr. Trump has argued that the decision to rename the bases stemmed from a broader effort to erase the country’s traditions and heritage. He also has praised General Lee “as the greatest strategist of them all,” and suggested that “except for Gettysburg” he would have won the Civil War.
Utter fantasy. It shattered the hyped up myth of Lee’s great prowess but it was US Grant who won the war with his strategy of relentless attack in the west and Virginia. Lee was only a Colonel when he was made the top confederate general.
But it just figures that Trump would revere a traitor to America. it takes one to know one.
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