What a strange place we have arrived. I wonder how many Trump supporters imagined they would one day be in the position of defending Robert E. Lee as being as great a man as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They all owned slaves and therefore must be morally equivalent, right? Trump's moral authority on any topic is if you ever did anything bad then it is okay as long as there are other respected individuals who did the same. But let's hear it since this is all about "statues" and the "value of history" and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethnic cleansing and racial supremacy.
George Washington looked like a white pimp, if he had been posing for a painting in 1970s Chicago next to a long line of black pimps getting their paintings done. He might have went by the pimp name "Old Wooden Teeth."
I don't recall King George Washington or the adulterous, sexual molester Thomas Jefferson, being canonized as saints in the Catholic Church or venerated as saints in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches. So, what do you mean they were "great men"? Adolf Hitler was a "great man" and he might possibly be roasting in roaring fires of hell.
George Washington and Jefferson were men of their times. They had some virtues and some flaws. I would leave it at that. I didn't know the two personally, so, it would be hard to judge but I might prefer Washington over Jefferson. The latter was banging a 13 year-old slave girl (likely white in hue or "swarthy" as most in all likelihood) that was a relative of his wife, then enslaved the children he produced with her who were again although "black" in all likelihood as white as Donald Trump. Then he had those kids serving him and his wife and their kids at the supper table. Had he been Pope in Rome you secular Americans would be calling him Satan. But because he was a President who could wax well philosophically (brought on in part by a life of leisure produced by owning a slave plantation) you Americans deem him "the greatest man ever." He too may be roasting in the roaring fires of hell. You see... one could argue Adolf Hitler improved a lot of things for the German whites of his country when he led it from the helm. But you know... even if I turned Milwaukee into the richest city on earth and were celebrated by most men and women on earth as one of the "greatest" to ever walk the earth, I will still have to answer to God if I butt bang my wife's 19 year-old niece all throughout our marriage. I answer jut like those homeless men laying on the liberal, rich streets of LA, God will not be impressed by my rank and celebrity status as you Americans are.
It's not a mere matter of owning slaves either. One could possibly do that and not be a bad person. Particularly if the enslavement was fully consented too. But there is the issue of the well being of those enslaved as well, and the methodology to motivated the enslaved to work. On the latter part of methodologies of motivations to work is where Washington and Jefferson fall short of myself and Donald Trump. They both had plantations that used
torture to motivate slaves to work. Actual torture. Scourging across the back like Jesus went through. They tortured their workers--deemed also their property--to increase productivity among their enslaved workforce and to increase their (Washington and Jefferson) wealth.
George Washington in particular was kind of like Lee in that both fought enemy forces in part to keep slavery going in the Americas. The British were freeing black slaves in the American colonies and offered an Emancipation Proclamation. And some of those escaped slaves they made it to the British lines eventually relocated to Canada. The North of the North.
Donald Trump and I are better men than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson was grabbing 13 year-old girls by their.... whereas as Trump was doing it to grown women.
A good book on the "torture based economy" the United States once had. I'm pretty sure this dude is liberal. I read his book a year or more ago.
