Rewriting recent history. Trump restores ‘Robert E Lee’ name to military forts
A statue of the Confederate General Robert E Lee was officially taken down in Richmond Virginia in 2021. Numerous attempts to get it taken down had been resisted until the pressure of the Black Lives Matter movement finally saw it done.
The statue was one of many put up not immediately after the US Civil War but decades later to remind people who was in charge in the Southern US- slavers. At the time Donald Trump called the removal of the statue ‘desecration’ and later claimed that if Lee had been in charge in Afghanistan the US would have won. The kind of view of history that makes even Boris Johnson’s efforts look tolerable.
Now Trump has ordered the name Robert E Lee to be restored to military installations underlining if it were needed his racism.
It wasn’t just in the US that racists venerated Robert E Lee though. A few minutes from my North London abode at Tottenham High Cross there was for some years a pub named after him. The attached nightclub Charlie Browns was better known. The late Dale Winton DJ’d there and mentions the pub in passing without comment on Lee. Then again Winton who died in 2018 backed Trump in 2016.
Robert E Lee does however still deserve to be remembered as the Civil War General who led the military fight against the abolition of slavery. Remembering and cheering on are not the same things
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