Donald Trump

Hartmann Report -  Robert E. Lee killed more Americans than Hitler. More than Khruschev. More than King George III, Ho Chi Mihn, or Kim Il Sung. He killed more Americans than we’ve lost in every war since the American Revolution, combined. He was the largest mass murderer of Americans in our nation’s history.

General Lee was not a good man: he was a morbidly rich oligarch who not only bought and sold enslaved human beings but delighted in whipping and torturing them.

Three of the two hundred-plus enslaved people he held at his plantation — Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and their cousin George Parks — escaped and were captured in nearby Maryland. The report in the March 26, 1866 edition of The New York Daily Tribune, quoting Wesley Norris at length, tells us all about Lee’s proclivities:

“He then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; …

“Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to ‘lay it on well,’ an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with [excruciatingly painful saltwater] brine, which was done.”

Fearing Lincoln might end slavery in America, Lee raised an army and tried to use it to end democracy in the United States; he thus committed treason in a way that exceeded even Benedict Arnold’s wildest fantasies. His war killed almost 750,000 men, women, and children, all Americans.

No American has ever betrayed or visited as much violence on this country as severely as did Robert E. Lee.

And so, when Lee lost the war that he’d started against us, the federal government seized his slave plantation and turned it into a cemetery for the Civil War dead. It’s today named Arlington National Cemetery.  

So, perhaps it makes perfect sense that the current chief betrayer of the ideals of our nation, convicted felon and Putin toady Donald Trump, would brag to a group of American soldiers that he’s going to rename a military base after Robert E. Lee.