The Enemy That Hegseth and Trump Insist on Honoring

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/hegseth-confederate-reconciliation-monument-restored-military/684066/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/RXyWi

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves. It was first installed in the cemetery in 1914 and was removed in late 2023, as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States. The war against the Confederacy killed more than 300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads—a grim fact that the defense secretary trivializes in his efforts to score political points against the left.

Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is returning a portrait of Robert E. Lee to West Point. The Pentagon has reinstated old base names—in defiance of a law, enacted in 2021 over Donald Trump’s veto, that required their removal—by identifying honorable but previously obscure veterans who share a surname with rebel generals such as Lee and George Pickett. A statue of the Confederate general Albert Pike, pulled down during the 2020 George Floyd protests, is being reinstalled in Washington, D.C., by the National Park Service.

“Unlike the left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth said after announcing the return of the Ezekiel sculpture. That claim is hard to square with Trump’s recent complaint on Truth Social that the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” because of its museums’ focus on “how bad Slavery was.”

At best, Hegseth is going out of his way to needle and mock Americans who rightly see the Confederacy for what it was—a treasonous, doomed effort to keep millions of Americans in bondage. At worst, he and the Trump administration are making common cause with apologists who believe that the wrong side won the Civil War. Many people who refuse to repudiate even Confederate leaders claim they are merely honoring battlefield sacrifices of common soldiers. Americans should reject this sophistry.

*snip*

[CTyankee]

1. The South lost. Get over it.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Ping Tung]

3. Alaexader Pope thanks H&R for proving his point.

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring". Alexander Pope 1709