After a recommendation from a bipartisan congressional commission, the Army is finally about to take down a 32-foot memorial at Arlington cemetery dedicated to "our dead heroes" of the Confederacy. Naturally Republicans are angry:
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.... Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is disappointed by the monument’s removal, said Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson. Youngkin plans to relocate it New Market Battlefield State Park, which would be a “fitting backdrop” for the memorial, Porter said.
What is with these guys and their endless devotion to the Confederacy? It was a fucking rebellion aimed at keeping Black southerners enslaved forever. It's now 2023. Even Southern Republicans ought to be willing to get rid of memorials dedicated to that. They should ram a few sticks of dynamite into this memorial, not spend $3 million to carefully relocate it.
But of course not. It will be treated reverently and moved to a site dedicated to a last gasp little victory over Union forces. And then they wonder why Black people keep voting for Democrats.
"What is with these guys and their endless devotion to the Confederacy? It was a fucking rebellion aimed at keeping Black southerners enslaved forever. "
You answered your own question there, Kevin.
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Feck off
beat me to it. I can't tell if Kevin was being snarky or still doesn't fully appreciate the depth of Republican racism.
Oh, I think he appreciates it but doesn't appreciated just how far Republican politicians will go to get their racist base out to the polls.
That's all this is about at the end of day, protecting the world view of a bunch of people who are exercising their freedom to be racist jerks. Those people, much like the anti-abortion crowd, show up reliably on election day and have to be catered to. The Republicans are on a slow trajectory to loss as their older demographic dies off. They're doing a great job of turning disaffected young men into converts, though, and that's what's going on here.
Slavery was an abomination? We'll yeah, that's just like your opinion, man.
>>>What is with these guys and their endless devotion to the Confederacy?
yeah, it's quite the mystery, isn't it?
so eager to claim tyranny in the most innocuous modern events, but pure unadulterated admiration for the tyrants who raped women and sold their own children as livestock
it's a real stumper
I'm sure it was rhetorical but have a +1 anyway!
"How is it," the English essayist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) asked at the start of the Revolution, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
Touché!
Please, Democrats, please . . . with media reports that Black voters, particular younger Black voters are "increasingly open to supporting Donald Trump" . . . PLEASE make a big deal about this, along with the way Trump and Giuliani have destroyed the lives of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Hilarious concern trolling!
I'm sure all those Black voters, particularly younger Black voters are increasingly embracing monuments to treason and chattel slavery.
Heh.
Two things.
First, click all the way through to read the letter they sent to Sec. Austin. It's actually worth a read.
Second, despite the decent arguments in the letter, note all the people whose names are signed. Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Clay Higgins, Ronny Jackson -- the finest of the Republican Party. /S
oooo, almost got me.
A memorial for the reconciliation, in light of the fact that said reconciliation was over the bodies of lynched African Americans across the country, is just as bad as a Confederate memorial, IMHO. F%$k reconciliation. It just meant more white supremacy and terrorism.
I read the letter, and, by itself, it seems to make a good case for keeping the monument in place. It summarizes, "the Reconciliation Monument does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity."
However, the monument absolutely “honors and commemorates the Confederacy”. Northern officials let the United Daughters of the Confederacy raise the money for the monument and hire the designer. As Kevin notes, the text on the monument uses the language of the confederacy when it proclaims to honor "our dead heroes". Also, other text on the monument, as well as the persons shown on the statue including southern slaves, embraces the “lost cause” narrative.
White southerners I suppose felt better thinking of their dead loved ones as “heroes" who were fighting to defend their homes and for a right to rule themselves. But in hindsight we are far less forgiving, given that the right to rule themselves meant they felt a right to have laws that kept blacks enslaved.
Reconciliation = "let's all agree to the Lost Cause narrative and look the other way on Jim Crow"
Can’t get through The Washington Post’s paywall.
Also, the Republican party was founded in opposition to the political forces that would become the Confederacy. The GOP is literally supposed to be the anti-Confederacy.
until the 1% took over the republican party and realized that getting votes through social programs costs money while the white supremacist vote can be had for free
(minus the minimal cost of cops and prisons of course)
+1
It's like when earth's magnetic polarity reverses, the Dixiecrats became Republican and the Progressives became Democratic.
+1, also
Some guys just love losers. They want to be like them. The Confederacy lost, so they turned it into the "lost cause". Now, they're re-fighting World War II, except this time they're on the side of the Axis. Those guys lost. Their causes were repudiated.
I thought a good troll on this subject would be to offer a compromise wherein all memorials to Southern General Longstreet could remain.
And if the pro-confederates wanted to troll us they could build monuments to the last Confederate general to surrender, Standing Waite, a Cherokee Chief who was a slave owner.
Perhaps a monument to Jefferson Davis depicting him as he was captured… in a dress
That's "Stand Watie". The Cherokee part is correct.
So was the Confederate General and slaveholder part. Just the ing part was wrong.
my idea is to rename any schools named after jefferson davis the confederate president be renamed after jefferson davis the union general. davis wasn't the greatest of union generals but he was on the right side and did his part bring down the confederacy and end slavery.
Instead of Newmarket, it should be moved to Fort Sumter. Alpha and Omega.
The history of Arlington is interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_National_Cemetery
And of course the confederate memorial was added in 1914....
Lincoln asked Bobby Lee to head the union army. If Lee had accepted, the Union could have won the war years earlier, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved, and Lee could have become president. Instead Lee decided the state of Virginia was more important.
I have no sympathy at all for Lee. He was a slave holder who believed in slavery and fought to keep it. Based on reading this article in The Atlantic I am of the opinion he was a SOB as well as a traitor:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
“Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.””
Ulysses Grant, who was in a position to know, didn't think Lee was a particularly good general. Although, early in the war, his leadership of United States troops might have been better than do-nothing McClellan.
you could have picked a private at random out of the ranks made him a general and chance are he'd have been better than McClellan.
Lost Cause fantasia aside, Lee was better off in the CSA, butchering rebels.
https://www.historynet.com/the-butchers-bill/
You have to wonder how hard it would have been for Lincoln to fire Lee.
Boo hoo. Tear them all down.
Not that I want to give Youngkin a pass, but touring Confederate battlefields is a favorite pastime of those who just can't let this crap go and tourism revenue is important to Virginia.
No statues to traitors belong at Arlington.
uh, those confederate battlefields also happen to be union battlefields as well. that's why they're battlefields. btw the reason why touring them is a favorite "pastime of those who just can't let this crap go" is because the civil war is arguably the central event in american history and those fields are hallowed ground.
I think this crap really illustrates just how willing the maga crowd wants, indeed NEEDS, a fable to believe in. The big lie is going to be the albatross that never goes away.
MAGA’s strongest regions are the two most bound to myth; the Lost Cause in the South; the rugged, self-reliant pioneer in (much of) the Mountain West.
We accepted memorials to the German dead of WWII and Reagan famously, controversially, (and in hindsight, clearly correctly) spoke at Bitburg.
After wars you need reconciliation.
I am curious. Are you also OK with Israel destroying all memorials to the PLO and Hamas dead during their current operation in Gaza?
No one is asking the raize the graves of confederate dead. Or battlefield memorials . Why would you conflate that?
But notably, the confederate fought to enslave, not for self-determination.
The PLO and Hamas have memorials to their dead in Israel? That would be a big story if true. Because that's the only way your counter example makes sense.
the monument in question was erected nearly a half-century — two generations — after the end of the war. what does it have to do with reconciliation? the answer: nothing.
Yes after wars you need reconciliation. But that never happened, instead Union troops left the South as public support among those who could safely vote at the time wanted the troops back home again. Thus the South was allowed to take backsies and to this day for the most part has never acknowledged their sins nor asked for forgiveness.
Please cite all the memorials to the PLO and Hamas dead. Take all the time you need.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. I think they should grind the thing to pebbles, and use them to make a footpath leading to some slave memorials. I also think it's about time to do some serious quarrying at Stone Mountain, Georgia...
Many native americans would be with you on the Stone Mountain thing.
The solution for Stone Mountain is easy -- just replace the figures depicted there now with people who are actually from Georgia. I nominated the members of Outkast. I'd visit to see huge stone images of Big Boi and Andre 3000.
Also, Louisiana should totally put up a statue of William T. Sherman and name a bunch of streets after him. He loved the state, and was the first president of the school that eventually became LSU.
How about a monument at Arlington to Admiral Yamamoto or Field Marshall Erich von Manstein?