And none too soon
The Army will remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington this week and the wingnuts are having a hissy fit, as usual:
A woman representing the American South, standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, lords above most other monuments within America’s most revered resting place. It portrays, according to the cemetery’s website, a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial, and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year’s appropriations bill. The memorial “commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” not the Confederacy per se, the group led by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.) claimed.
The Army, which operates Arlington Cemetery, informed lawmakers Friday that it would proceed with the monument’s removal, officials told The Washington Post, because it was required by the end of the year to comply with a law to identify and remove assets that commemorate the Confederacy. A congressional commission had previously decided the memorial met the criteria for removal.The task will cost $3 million.
These officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said that out of an abundance of caution, security at the cemetery would be enhanced when the work begins in coming days.
Glenn Youngkin will put the monument somewhere in Virginia so all the Lost Cause fanatics can still go and pray in front of it or whatever it is they feel they need to do.
The Lost Cause movement, which recast rebel traitors as morally righteous warriors defending states’ rights and spread the false belief that slavery was benevolent, is evident in the memorial’s bronze panels. A weeping Black woman, described by cemetery historians as a stereotypical “mammy,” clutches the baby of a White officer, and a camp servant dutifully follows his enslaver toward battle.
The memorial’s Latin inscription directly references the idealized mythology of the Lost Cause, the cemetery’s historians say, further underscoring the deliberate historical distortion.
The marker was erected in 1914, part of a constellation of Confederate markers that rose throughout the early 1900s to cement the ideals of white supremacy as Black Americans demanded equal rights.
That context must be understood, said Ty Seidule, a retired Army general who was the vice chair of the congressional commission that recommended the monument’s removal from Arlington. While Republican lawmakers described the marker as an ode to reconciliation, it was installed in what was then a racially segregated cemetery and molded in celebration of an emerging racial police state in the South.
“It’s incredibly ironic the party of Lincoln is the one doing this,” said Seidule, a historian and visiting professor at Hamilton College, describing the GOP effort to stop the marker’sremoval. “It is the cruelest monument in the country because it is so clearly proslavery.”
These people can bellyache all they want but there is zero reason to keep such a grotesque celebration of white supremacy, installed at the height of the propaganda push to re-imagine the civil war as a righteous philosophical disagreement over states’ rights, anywhere near the national cemetery. In fact it’s disgraceful. As far as I’m concerned all the 20th century Lost Cause monuments can be melted down for scrap iron. It was nothing more than a political gambit to justify slavery and Jim Crow and there is no reason to valorize them.
Look at this thing:
Happy Hollandaise everyone!