A judge issues an 11th-hour order saving an Arlington memorial

In 2020, following George Floyd’s drug-induced death and the resulting riots, Congress passed a law requiring that the Pentagon remove all Confederate names, monuments, and symbols from military bases. The Pentagon has carried out this mandate with enthusiasm. Most recently, Biden’s Pentagon announced that it was planning to remove a monument honoring the Confederacy from Arlington, a move that threatens the eternal peace promised for those resting there. For the time being, at least, a judge has stopped the effort to do so.

If you read the leftwing media, the statue is evil in intent and appearance:

A monument to Confederate soldiers is scheduled to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery by the end of the week.

[snip]

Arlington’s Confederate Memorial offers a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to a report prepared by a commission set up in response to that legislation. The report notes that an inscription promotes the “Lost Cause” myth, “which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.”

As with anything from the left, it’s a little more complex than that. First, the monument’s history wasn’t about war but about binding a riven country together. Scott Powell, at Townhall, offers the larger history:

President William McKinley conceived of a Reconciliation Monument as a way of celebrating the success of a reunified nation that fielded an Army and Navy of enlisted men and officers from both the Southern and the Northern states who fought so effectively together that they delivered a surprisingly swift U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898.  This theme of respect and reconciliation between the northern and southern states was also supported by the next three presidents—Teddy Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.  They all believed in the importance of celebrating the reunification and reconciliation of America even though it was many years after the bloody and divisive Civil War.

Since Woodrow Wilson unveiled the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington Cemetery in 1914 proclaiming that, “the monument represented the best of America—a spirit reconciliation, democracy, freedom, heroism and patriotism”—hardly anyone voiced any criticism of this grand monument… In fact, most observers viewed the monument with reverence and awe.  It captured the “e pluribus unum” first conceived in 1776 at the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence and incorporated as a motto in the Great Seal of the United States better than any other monument in Arlington or elsewhere.

It's noteworthy that the woman who crowns the sculpture stands upon a pedestal bearing the Biblical verse, “And they shall beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” One can obsess about slavery—which was over—or recognize that the monument is about the end of a cataclysmic Civil War that almost destroyed a nation.

At a level both more prosaic and symbolic, the Pentagon’s rush to remove the statue risks disturbing the peace of those who, having served their country, earned their rest at Arlington. Despite the Pentagon’s assurances that it can remove the massive memorial without disturbing the surrounding graves, those who don’t wish to see America’s history (both good and bad) erased piece by piece apparently had compelling evidence that the Pentagon was misrepresenting the facts:

But the lawsuit [to stop the removal] accused the Army, which runs the cemetery, of violating regulations in seeking a hasty removal of the memorial.

“The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places,” the lawsuit accuses.

That’s why U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston issued a temporary restraining order against the Biden administration’s frenzied rush to remove a statue that represents a significant epoch in American history:

At a very fundamental level, I’m opposed to the left’s Maoist impulse to erase American history. Our nation, like all nations, has its good and bad. These should be remembered, as Oliver Cromwell said of his portrait, “warts and all.”

A placard discussing slavery (a worldwide institution throughout human history), the American Civil War, and the binding together of our broken nation would educate people and warn them against repeating the sins of the past. Instead, we’re still playing the leftist game of memory-holing the past and replacing it with its ever-changing roster of shibboleths, beliefs, felonious heroes, and anything else that it needs to bring to its knees a nation that, despite the sins it shared with the rest of the world, raised more people up from poverty than any other nation on earth, throughout history.

Image: The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery by Tim1965. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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