Removing Arlington’s Confederate Monument Is About Political Power and Division
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By Carole Hornsby Haynes August 27, 2023 Podcast Transcript
The woke crowd has been on an American monument destruction rampage for years. Now they have targeted the most hallowed ground in America for their next demolition project – the Arlington National Cemetery Reconciliation Monument.
Demolition of this monument will be proof that the woke crowd is implementing a plot to erase the history of America, to divide our people, and to destroy citizens’ appreciation and connection to a vital part of our history – the reconciliation between the North and South following the Civil War. They are claiming that the Arlington Confederate Monument must be destroyed because it represents racism. But that is the Neo-Marxist/Maoist disguise to cover their real agenda – to create division. To get Americans fighting against each other. To destroy absolutely everything about America’s past and then they will assume political power and control of the greatest nation on earth.
As far back as the Civil War, Northern liberal historians have ignored facts and rewritten history about the economic, cultural and religious differences between the North and South and the underlying issues that led to the war while claiming that slavery was THE one and only cause of the war. Neo-Marxists found in this narrative their new victim class for their intent to divide Americans. Their radical agenda was greatly accelerated with the Covid lockdown of 2020 and the death of George Floyd.
Unprecedented property destruction across America was orchestrated by the far-left coalition of violent anarchists and the Marxist led Black Lives Matter. Then they systemically began the destruction of American heritage monuments – statues of Christopher Columbus who discovered America and opened the way for European colonization and Confederate leaders of slave-holding Southern states. They targeted the Founders and their homes and even the churches they attended.
In many states, ALL monuments and statues of Columbus and Confederate have been removed – often violently. Streets, schools, buildings, ships, everything that has a Confederate link has been renamed or removed.
Now the historical destruction of America has moved to the federal level.
In 2021 Congress passed the fiscal year Pentagon budget that was vetoed by President Trump because it included the Naming Commission. Congress overrode his veto and charged the Pentagon's Naming Commission to rid the entire military inventory of roads, buildings, installations, awards, insignia, memorials and any other manifestations of references to the Confederacy and Confederate combatants who served the South voluntarily.
In the commission’s third and final report, the panel recommended that the Army, which runs the Arlington National Cemetery, strip the Confederate Monument of its bronze, including the 32 figures, the plaques honoring the 14 states who sent soldiers to fight for the Confederacy and the large female figure holding the wreath of olive branches at the top.
There is also a recommendation to destroy the bronze work created by sculptor Moses Ezekiel. All that would remain would be the granite base with educational signage. Congress specifically put grave markers outside the commission’s remit, so while the artwork is removed, the grave marker function of the memorial’s base remains.
The Naming Commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have illegally slated the 109-year-old memorial for demolition. Austin's Order to remove or demolish the Reconciliation Memorial is illegal because the Memorial serves as the headstone for the monument’s famed sculptor, who was a Confederate veteran, along with three other veterans and two wives. Being a headstone puts it beyond the so called Naming Commission's mandate.
As an excuse for their barbaric recommendation, the Naming Commission views the figures around the base through the lens of racism with the focus on slavery. But the monument is not about slavery – or racism. And that is the problem. It doesn’t serve their purpose to admit that the North profited from the slave trade and slave-produced cotton and Lincoln’s commitment to preserving the Union. The narrative must be only that slavery was an exclusive Southern and Confederate thing so all things Confederate must be destroyed.
The Army Historian called the monument a disguise for “white supremacy.” This is a common Marxist cover to divert attention from their Neo-Socialist agenda. Marxists conveniently ignore that race relations were better in the South than in the North, with the worst being in New England. Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America noted this fact that was well known at that time. In fact, several Northern states had laws forbidding free blakcs from visitng the North for more than a few days.
It was New England shippers who bought slaves from other Africans and brought them to New England’s shores. Marxists conveniently ignore the horrific conditions under which these captives were brought to the North – chained to decks in the bottom of the ships without ventilation and living for months in urine, feces, vomit, and even death.
Six slave states fought for the Union to end slavery, yet continued slavery in their states until the 13th Amendment ended it in 1865. You’ll recall that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only pertained only to those slave states that had seceded, not to those that remained in the Union even though they still had slaves.
The socialist W.E.B. DuBois in his famous The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, wrote that Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports in the world in 1862 and remained into the War Between the States and even 54 years after the 13th Amendment ended slavery.
The woke crowd claims it was because of slavery that the South seceded. Yet they deny the fact that the Northern economy would have collapsed because it was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world. The North needed the South but the South did not need the North.
Why are the woke not changing the name of Brown Univrsity that was founded by a Northern slave trader or the name of Faneuil Hall in Boston because Peter Faneuil was a slave trader?
Since the South provided more than 75% of the federal budget, why didn’t the federal government purchase the freedom of Southern slaves? The reason is that freedmen would then go to the North and serve as job competition. Remember that I said several states had laws forbidding free blacks from living in the North?
Another reason why the federal government didn’t buy the freedom of slaves: the six slave states that fought for the North would have seceded immediately over federal overreach and they would have joined the Confederacy just as Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas did. Those four Southern states at first rejected secession and only seceded when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South to force them back into the Union so the federal government wouldn’t lose the income from the South.
What is the purpose of the Reconciliation Monument?
The first reason is that it commemorates the more than 400 Confederate soldiers and their wives laid to rest at Section 16, along with all the other Southern soldiers who never returned home, buried in unmarked graves scattered all over the South. This is why there were so many Confederate monuments erected at courthouses across the South. Those monuments were memorials of veterans for family members whose sons, brothers, husands did not return, buried in unmarked graves all across the south, to have a place to remembr their loved ones that did not return. Now most have been removed by hate-filled left wing radicals.
The second reason is that the monument is a testament to the reuniting of the American people after a horrible war and a tyrannical Reconstruction by the Radical Republicans.
Let’s consider why the Reconciliation Monument is so important to Americans.
Arlington Cemetery is the most hallowed ground in America with a direct link to both our founding family, George Washington, and the Confederacy’s leading family, Robert E. Lee. George Washington married Martha Custis, a widow with two children and Arlington Plantation. When Martha Washington’s son died, George Washington adopted his young son and reared him at Mount Vernon. Custis built the house at Arlington that was inherited by Mary Custis, his daughter and future wife of Robert E. Lee. After Mary inherited Arlington, Lee set about freeing the slaves prior to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Because he opposed slavery, he did not fight to preserve slavery, but fought rather for the right of southern states to secede from the Union.
After the War Between the States began and Lee had accepted command of the Confederate army rather than the Union army that was offered to him by Lincoln, the federal government seized Arlington Plantation. By 1864, Union Secretary of War Edward Stanton had already begun conversion of the property to a National Cemetery for Union and Confederate soldiers with Major General Montgomery C. Meigs in command.
Confederate military personnel were not initially intended to be buried there, but some were prisoners of war who died while in custody or who were executed as spies. The bodies of more than 2,000 Union and Confederate soldiers within a 35-mile radius of Washington, D.C., were gathered. Some had been interred on the battlefield but most were remains that had been left unburied. Meigs had not intended to gather the remains of any Confederate soldier because he did not want to mark their graves. However, the inability to identify the remains allowed Confederate dead to be buried along with Union dead in the cenotaph that was constructed in 1865 and the vault sealed in 1866. The total count of Confederate military buried at Arlington is more than 400 out of more than 400,000 graves of veterans and their wives.
The Reconciliation Monument signals an important moment in the history of America – the spirital and emotional reconciliation of the hatred and war between North and South. The federal government had created suffering and poverty among both whites and former slaves with the heavy hand of Reconstruction and Carpetbaggers as the South struggled to rebuild. This created anger and resentment among Southerners.
Yet when the country engaged in the Spanish American War in 1898, the former Confederate states pitched in to fight beside Union soldiers. Though the war lasted only four months, a spirit of reconciliation and teamwork developed between the Northern and Southern soldiers.
President McKinley, a decorated Union veteran, recognized the importance of reconciliation to building a strong military.
In 1900, he supported a bill to establish a Confederate section in Arlington Cemetery, telling the nation,
“Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other…The Union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice.”
About 260 Confederate bodies were brought from various burial places to this designated section of Arlington Cemetery. A few years later, Secretary of War William Taft – a future president – received a request to erect a monument in that designated area and to designate it as Section 16. The request was granted in 1906.
Moses Ezekiel, a world-renowned American sculptor who was the first Jewish cadet at Virginia Military Institute and a Confederate army veteran, created the Confederate Memorial in his Italian workshop in Rome. He was tasked to create a “Peace Monument” to capture the spirit of reconciliation, to serve as a memorial to the hundreds of dead Confederates interred in Section 16, and to commemorate the reunification of the North and South.
In 1912, President Taft presided over the cornerstone dedication ceremony which he called “a benediction of all true Americans.” He describe the future monument as “a beautiful monument to the heroic dead of the South.”
On June 4, 1914 President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the completed monument, calling it “an emblem of a reunited people.” In his speech at the dedication, Wilson spoke about the reconciliation that the monument represented and declared this chapter in America’s history closed. Here is what he said:
My privilege is this, ladies and gentlemen: To declare this chapter in the history of the United States closed and ended, and I bid you turn with me with your faces to the future, quickened by the memories of the past, but with nothing to do with the contests of the past, knowing, as we have shed our blood upon opposite sides, we now face and admire one another.
But that is just the point. The Marxist strategy is not to leave that chapter of history closed but rather to divide and conquer. The woke wants to undo the reconciliation between the North and South, take down American heritage monuments, and reopen old wounds on a chapter of history that has long since been closed.
James Ronald Kennedy, chief of the National Sons of Confederate Veterans heritage operations, says that one of the signals that a war is over and peace is achieved is when the defeated enemy is allowed to honor their war dead. “If the victorious side starts to desecrate their enemies war memorials, it means the war is back on.”
Yes, the Marxists are telling us that they are war against Americans and our Constitutional Republic. The ultimate goal is a New World Order with no sovereign America. Their Cultural Revolution began with little things – infiltrating our institutions and getting legislation passed. At no time were they stopped and now they are emboldened to finish their agenda. Unless we stop this demotion of our National monument, that will be a signal that they will have little opposition to a complete takeover at the federal level. It’s akin to allowing tiny chldren to have temper tantrums to get their way and continue their bad behavior without punishment as they grow up. It’s too late to change them as adults. There’s where we are now. These Left wing thugs are mentally ill and totally out of control because we did not stop them early on. They are ruthless, vicious, and will go to any length to take down the grassroots of America.
Conclusion
We know that the hate-America crowd will not stop with the Reconciliation Monument. Every veteran in America should be outraged because this is exactly what could happen to their memory in the future by power hungry politicians. Do you recall what liberals did to our Vietnam veterans after the Vietnam War?
Perhaps a hundred million Americans alive today are descended from Confederate soldiers and the women and families who supported the South’s war for independence. Will they be targeted? What Southern graves will be desecrated next?
You would think the government would think twice about angering the South since we’re in a military recruiting crisis and 44% of the U.S. military is recruited from the South. What fools!
So powerful was the feeling of reconciliation that Arlington Memorial Bridge, built in the same era, was purposefully laid out to connect the Lincoln Memorial with Arlington House, the former home of Robert E. Lee’s wife’s, as another symbol of national reconciliation. Why is that bridge to the Lincoln Memorial getting a multi-million-dollar restoration instead of demolition?
The woke intend to remove every last vestige of our heritage and culture so that America as we once knew it will be totally different in government, culture, people, and even the landscape. You see, the woke have read George Orwell’s book, 1984, where he wrote, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their own history.” And this is being done by dividing the people over the issue of slavery that ended nearly 160 years ago and was dominant in both South AND NORTH as well as in numerous other countries and in fact, still exists worldwide.
Most people are followers and will not get actively involved. We have to blame ourselves because we have allowed these Satanic thugs to steal our country and our God-given freedoms. Unless people are willing to take a stand for freedom, they will live in poverty and slavery like Chinese, Venezuelans, and Cubans. We have seen how successful a massive coalition of parents rising up has been in pushing back against child abuse. We have no choice but to do the same if we are serious about stopping the complete takeover of the federal government and decimation of our culture an total loss of freedom and property.
America needs your help. Here is what hundreds of thousands must do.
1. Sign the petition started by Christina Bell, which can be accessed at this link. Go to your search engine and type in “change.org Arlington Reconciliation Memorial petition”
https://www.change.org/p/defend-arlington-cemetery-confederate-monument
2. After the Defend Arlington Reconciliation Memorial petition was created, the ANC opened a comment period on destruction of the Confederate Memorial. Before September 2, go to your search engine and type in “ANC Confederate Memorial Public Comments.” Then at that website, add your comments.
https://anmc-confederatememorialpubliccomments.com/