The Woke's Shallow Crusade Against US History Continues
Just when you thought the stupidity of erasing history had stopped, now comes news that the poison of wokeism is inside the gates at Arlington National Cemetery. That this story isn’t front-page news is disgusting. As Americans, we should be ashamed for allowing this to happen.
Additionally, this is just another piece of evidence that proves not only that the woke Left in our country doesn’t care about education and an accurate accounting of history, but it also serves as proof that they have no aptitude for education at all.
Now What?
The Pentagon is set to remove a monument from the Arlington National Cemetery that has been standing since 1914. This monument of reconciliation stands over the graves of men and women who have died in battle during the US Civil War and beyond. The mainstream media and woke activists in government call the monument a “Confederate Memorial” when, in fact, it is a post-Civil War monument to the reconciliation of the Union and the Confederacy; a monument to the healing our nation had to endure.
According to Patrick Reilly of the New York Post (text out of order):
“The statue removal comes following a nationwide push to remove Confederate symbols from military institutions following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests…
“The statue was erected in 1914 and features a bronze woman wearing a crown of olive leaves atop a 32-foot pedestal.
“According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock, and a pruning hook, with a biblical inscription at her feet that says: ‘They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks'...
“An independent commission recommended that the memorial be taken down in 2022 as part of its final report to Congress on renaming military bases and other buildings or items celebrating the Confederacy.
“Following the report, a congressional mandate called for the removal of all Confederate memorials by Jan. 1, 2024.”
To their credit, more than 40 House Republicans, led by US Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin insisting that the commission overstepped its authority when it recommended that the monument be removed. The Representatives accurately point out that the memorial isn’t one centered on the Confederacy, but rather celebrates American unity in the wake of the Civil War. They also rightly claimed that removing the statue would desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers buried there.
The Historical Irony
There is a fair amount of irony in the subject of Arlington National Cemetery. Chief among those ironies is that the land on which it now sits was the home of Robert E. Lee and his wife – Mary Custis Lee, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington – for the 30 years before Lee decided to lead the Confederate Army.
In the book, Arlington National Cemetery – written by George W. Dodge, he writes:
“During the Civil War, numerous Confederate prisoners were transported north through Washington, DC; those with serious wounds or illness were admitted to local hospitals. Over 500 Confederate prisoners succumbed to their wounds or died of disease while at hospitals in or around the capital during the Civil War. From 1862 to 1865, some of these soldiers were buried at the Soldiers' Home Cemetery…During the Civil War, the Soldiers' Home Cemetery would be the burial ground for at least 128 Southern soldiers or sympathizers…Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, while serving as the US Secretary of War in the 1850s, was the driving force behind the establishment of the Soldiers' Home.
“On May 17th and 18th, 1864, the first two Confederate soldiers were buried in the new Soldiers' Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. About 377 Confederates were buried in Arlington during the war…Confederate bodies were placed alongside those of their deceased foes, white Union soldiers, for burial. Black Union soldiers of the United States Colored Troops were buried separately in what is now Section 27…
“A Confederate Veteran's association in Washington, DC, the Charles Rouss Camp, petitioned President William McKinley in June 1899 to set aside a new Confederate Section at Arlington National Cemetery. The time appeared ripe for this request as the ‘South’ had united with the ‘North’ in the Spanish-American War of the previous year and McKinley appeared sympathetic to the plight of isolated Confederate graves with deteriorating wooden grave markers. The United States Congress approved the plan for a Confederate section and appropriated funds on June 6, 1900.
“Beginning in May 1901, Confederate soldiers were disinterred from the Soldiers’ Home Cemetery and moved from other parts of Arlington Cemetery. By October 1, 1901, about 264 Confederates and Southern sympathizers had been reinterred in the new Confederate Section known as Jackson Circle. From 1901 to around the 1930s there were an additional 222 burials in the Confederate Section. Among these burials were 58 wives of Confederate soldiers.
“As the significance of Arlington National Cemetery has grown over the decades, so has the significance of the Confederate burials. Burials that were intended to disgrace Lee and his family are now part of the most significant military cemetery in the United States. Soldiers who were Lee's pawns on the battlefield are now, in effect, part of a memorial to him. Individually, the stories of certain soldiers must be told.”
Illustrating The Arrogance Of The Hateful Left
Relevant to the argument that the woke activist Left is both hateful and shallow in their thinking is this passage from above, “Confederate bodies were placed alongside those of their deceased foes, white Union soldiers, for burial. Black Union soldiers of the United States Colored Troops were buried separately in what is now Section 27.”
How is it that for 159 years the American people – from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line – have had the intellectual capacity to understand that everyone who fought in the American Civil War was a descendant of those who braved the unknown and took the chances to not only make it in the New World but to survive an impossible battle for independence in the Revolutionary War?
For 159 years both Union and Confederate Soldiers have rested peacefully – side by side, White and Black alike – in Arlington National Cemetery. And for 122 of those years, our elected leaders had the wisdom to preserve history and honor those – the victorious and defeated alike – for the personal sacrifices they made.
Here are some prickly questions for our woke overlords. Shouldn’t we take all the Civil War statues down? Shouldn’t the entire US Civil War be expunged from our history? It was based – at least in large part – on slavery so why not just expunge it from history as if it never occurred?
The reason the arrogant, ignorant, activist Left doesn’t want the entirety of the US Civil War expunged from history is this. They want to write that history the way they want it to be read. One needs only look back on how these indignant malcontents tried to re-write history in their embrace of the 1619 Project, a factually inaccurate and politically biased piece of special interest activism that sought to expunge the events that led up to 1776 as the genesis of the United States of America.
What Next?
In the aftermath of the lionization of George Floyd as some sort of cultural martyr (the man had both fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death and tested positive for COVID), the transformative Marxists who camouflage themselves among the useful idiots of the woke, ramped up their campaign to expunge US history by claiming monuments honoring the Confederate soldiers who died for their cause are somehow reflective of racism in today’s America.
The notion is ridiculous. If we are to take a knee to this preposterous narrative the hateful Left promotes, then why not place sanctions on Spain and England for executing the slave trade? How about slapping more sanctions on the Third-World African countries directly linked back to the tribes that cooperated in capturing rival tribesmen for the slave merchants; the tribes that profited from the sale of their rivals to the slavers? Wouldn’t that be more appropriate than removing a piece of bronze and granite? And what about the racist segregation of Section 27?
To follow the thought patterns of the intellectually stunted woke class, we should be digging up every grave in Arlinton National Cemetery to give preferential re-internment to every one of the fallen based on race, class, and bias…oh, and whether their great Uncle Festus owned slaves.
One would think that the deaths of over 600,000 young men and women would be enough to satisfy the special interest bloodlust of the white-fanged Left. Evidently, not. Rocks and metal have to pay a price too.
Lost In The Arrogant Ignorance
Lost in this display of childlike ignorance is this. The woke and manipulative Left are destroying perfect opportunities to use monuments like this as “teachable moments.” They are destroying historical markers – both of location and time – that could be used to educate future generations about past societal norms, and past cultural maladies, and provide reference points for how far we – as a nation – have come in our task to constantly be forming a “more perfect Union.”
But, perhaps that’s their goal. If there are no reference points that serve as markers for how far we have come from the maladies and inequities of yesterday, how can we measure how far we have progressed?
If in fact, this is the point; if the woke, special interest, transformative Left is seeking to erase history in an attempt at political opportunism and disingenuous social engineering, then our country is facing a most potent foe in a Fifth Column that seeks to destroy freedom itself.
We must defend the accurate accounting of our American history at all costs. While we should applaud the 40 US Representatives who opposed this monument’s removal we must chastise the rest of the congressional GOP for abdicating their responsibility to our history. With a Republican-run House, a stand-alone bill blocking funding for such activities could be easily passed. Why aren’t they pursuing this action?
That said, this event proves beyond doubt that the woke Left couldn’t give a damn about education, our children, or history. They only care about their own jaded, one-sided, and selfish emotions. How about that for “equity”?
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