Sunday, December 17, 2023

The Confederate Memorial At Arlington Cemetery Will Be Removed!

A relic of the Old South is eliminated.

The Republicans love to preserve the Confederacy. Donald J. Trump had considered it a punishable offense if protesters destroyed Confederate monuments. Mind you, Black men who support separatist views support the former president. This would not change their minds.

The U.S. Department of Defense has formally removed names of Confederate soliders and leaders from U.S. military bases. It has brought conservative outrage due to their opposition of WOKE ideology.

So Arlington National Cemetery is removing a Confederate Memorial. It has drawn the ire of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia.

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 (R-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 due to the sensitivity of the issue. They said out of an abundance of caution that security at the cemetery would be enhanced when the work begins in coming days.

Workers will remove the memorial’s bronze elements and leave its granite base in place to avoid damaging nearby gravesites, officials said. The Army is coordinating with the state of Virginia and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a federal agency, to relocate it to New Market Battlefield State Park. The site is about 100 miles west of Arlington.

Removal of the memorial was recommended by a bipartisan congressional commission appointed after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 was followed by a wide-scale reckoning with the nation’s history of racism, and it marks a significant moment in the Defense Department’s mission to cleanse the U.S. military of Confederate iconography.

The commission found about 1,100 assets that commemorate the Confederacy, including base names and street signs, and advised the Pentagon on what should be removed or changed. The memorial at Arlington was the last significant item on that list, Army officials said, and its ouster comes just before the Jan. 1. deadline set by Congress.

Let me ask you a question.

If the Democratic Party, the party of racism, the Klan and liberal indoctrination, how come the Republican Party is devoted to preserving the insurgency that devoted its existence to preserving slavery, racism, lawlessness and colonialism?

The Democrats still are dealing with -isms within its ranks. They are under pressure to end its support for the apartheid regime of Israel. 

The Republicans who are openly calling for -isms is lockstep in authoritarianism, censorship, persecution of critics and dismantling democracy.

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