Robert E Lee The Great Emancipator

[Liz Rosenthal]

It appears that I am being marginalized by a majority view (here) that objects to a very specific kind of iconoclasm. We all have our idols. No one wants to see his or her idol smashed. But I wasn't really writing so much about Lee as about the similarities between slavery and other atrocities that have occurred in this world.

Elie Wiesel's accounts of "life" in the concentration camps are often remarkably reminiscent of life for black slaves in the antebellum south. Academics have written comparisons of the two. I didn't come up with this all by myself.

The Holocaust wasn't "just" about mass murder. It had an ideology, just as the Slave System did. The Holocaust literally set up an entire alternate reality, governed by the Nazis and their allies, but lived by the inmates. Families were split up. People's separate identities were taken from them. They were treated like animals - in fact, worse than animals. Survivors have had to deal with these horrific memories. Many committed suicide; others tried to pick up the pieces of their lives after finding that they'd never see their loved ones again. Some were able to get through the memories by educating the public about the Holocaust, as Elie Wiesel has done.

On the issue of what the South was fighting for, I suppose people on this Forum will never agree. But if you read the various states' Secession Statements, you will see that they agreed that slavery was the "cornerstone" of Southern civilization and that they were seceding for this reason. Once slavery was dead, certain people, like Alexander Stephens, V.P. of the Confederacy and author of the "cornerstone" notion, began characterizing southern secession as having been done for a variety of reasons and not for slavery at all. This was, in effect, a P.R. campaign after the fact.

Anyway, I'm not sure this had to get as personal as it did. I stuck to facts; some others resorted to snide remarks clearly intended for me. Is that really necessary? Frankly, I'm disappointed. I thought we were all adults here.