Prediction: Within 10 years, remains of the Confederate dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery will be exhumed and either desecrated, reburied elsewhere, or cast into the sea.
For that is the intent, apparently, by the federal law that requires the Defense Department to destroy anything Confederate connected with the U.S. military. West Point has erased the memory of Robert E. Lee. The Naval Academy removed Matthew Fontaine Maury’s name from a building. And now, the Army will remove the Confederate reconciliation memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.
Thus, given the language with which the DoD justified removing the memorial, the graves might well be next.
The Memorial
Removing the memorial continues what communist Antifa and Black Lives Matters terrorists began unofficially in 2020 with the widespread vandalism and destruction of Confederate and non-Confederate statues and monuments after the George Floyd Hoax. The movement went worldwide.
The attacks are really anti-white, anti-Christian, and anti-American, a movement to erase the history of the country, all supported by the Biden regime. The latest — taking down a statue meant to reunify the nation after the War Between the States — was the next logical step.
As former Democrat U.S. Senator and Marine Corps hero Jim Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal in August, the monument was not, as the communist propagandists who pushed for its removal claimed, a paean to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Noting that former Union and Confederate veterans fought side-by-side in the Spanish-American War, Webb recalled that Union veteran President Williams McKinley said “we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers.”
And “in that call for national unity the Confederate Memorial was born,” Webb continued. Designed by Jewish Confederate Moses Jacob Ezekiel, its face offers “the finest explanation of wartime service perhaps ever written, by a Confederate veteran who later became a Christian minister: ‘Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank; not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.’”
Continued the Navy Cross recipient:
What was it that Union Army veteran McKinley understood about the Confederate soldiers who opposed his infantry units on the battlefield that eludes today’s monument smashers and ad hominem destroyers of historical reputations?
McKinley’s fellow soldiers understood that during the Civil War, four slave states remained in the Union — Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky — and none of them were required to give up slavery during the entire war. And that in every major battle of the Civil War, slave owners in the Union Army fought against non-slave-owners in the Confederate Army. They understood that President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in those states or in the areas of the South that had already been conquered. The proclamation freed only slaves in the areas taken after it was issued. And in the eyes of a Confederate soldier, if Lincoln had not freed slaves in the union, why should the soldier be vilified for supposedly fighting on behalf of slavery?
Many soldiers in the North, and many more in the South, would have understood what John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), America’s most esteemed black historian, pointed out: In 1860 only 5% of whites in the South owned slaves, and less than 25% of whites benefited economically from slavery. An estimated 258,000 Confederate soldiers died in the war, about a third of all those who fought for the South. Few owned slaves. So why did they fight?
The soldier who wrote the inscription on the Confederate Memorial knew. And so did President McKinley and most veterans who have fought in America’s wars.
Democrat President Woodrow Wilson dedicated the monument, which stood at the center of Confederate graves in Section 16. Notables buried there include Ezekiel, as well as Confederate Navy Lieutenant Harry C. Marmaduke, Captain John M. Hickey of the Second Missouri Infantry, and Brigadier General Marcus J. Wright, who fought at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.
Every president from Theodore Roosevelt, up to and including Barack Obama, sent a wreath on Confederate Memorial Day.
The Law
No matter that honoring those dead was, as they say in River City, “bipartisan.” Once the post-Floyd-Hoax statue and memorial destruction began, official supporters of the BLM-Antifa Axis of Evil saw their chance. They took it.
Pursuant to the advice of a “naming commission,” the law says, the secretary of defense would “remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America … or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense.”
Nothing and no one was safe. Not a ship named for a battle. Not even another named for the father of modern meteorology and oceanography.
The law requires removing the memorial before January 1, 2024.
On December 11, a number of GOP congressmen told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, an affirmative-action appointment, that removing the memorial was not the intent of Congress. “The House of Representatives took action to prevent the removal of the Reconciliation Monument in the Fiscal Year 2024 Department of Defense Appropriations Act,” they wrote. “The Department of Defense must comply with this request or risk denigrating the delicate balance of the principles of separation of powers between Congress and the Executive, outlined in the Constitution.”
Fat chance that would have done much good. The lawless Biden Regime does what it wants.
And so the memorial will be removed this week.
That is why the next step will be disinterring the remains of Confederate dead. Indeed, disinterments elsewhere have begun. The remains of Confederate General A.P. Hill were disinterred in Richmond. Communists also forced the exhumation of Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife.
This won’t stop. Given the language of the law, the removal of the memorial, and the push to erase any positive memory of the Confederacy or its heroes, their graves at Arlington won’t be there much longer.
