House Republicans want to prevent the Pentagon from removing a Confederate memorial from “America’s most sacred shrine,” Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia led a group of more than 40 GOP colleagues in calling for the Department of Defense to halt the planned removal of the Reconciliation Monument, also known as the Confederate Memorial, “until Congress completes the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 appropriations process.”
In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, the GOP lawmakers said the monument’s removal “does not align with the original intent of Congress.”
It’s a shame you’re just being bombarded with down votes for a completely legitimate read of historical events. You’re not even saying the South were in the right, just that their succession wasn’t the same as a hostile takeover. And because this needs to be said again and again, fuck the confederates, fuck any slave owners, and fuck anyone in the modern age who moderately supports anything related to Confederate “culture” or ideology.
I don’t mind the downvotes. I’m too long winded, and I’ll be the first to admit that if I think somebody is writing a diatribe about how misunderstood the Confederacy was, I would just downvote the bigot and move on, too. And while it’s a pet peeve of mine, really there’s no functional difference when it comes to understanding the Civil War.
Really, it’s alarming that we must say fuck the Confederates, fuck the slave owners, fuck the bigots and racists and Nazis and fascists. We allowed ourselves to think those ideologies were defeated, and we let our guard down.
But that’s also why I think it’s important to get the details right. The Civil War wasn’t a war of Northern Aggression, or a federal government overreach, or the mighty Union beating down our poor country bretheren into submission. The Confederacy were the fascists who wanted to exert their will on the citizens. They represented a political majority representing an extremist minority, and when they were rebuffed by the democratic process, they tried to use violence and phony legal arguments.
There are a shit ton of parallels between our current government and the pre-Civil War era. A hostile legislatire overrun with extreme bigoted fascists pushing imaginary legal arguments and horrifying morality has just a soupcon of Confederacy.