The Reconciliation Monument, which has been falsely described (including by the government) as a “Confederate monument,” was built, ironically, not to commemorate the Confederacy, but the reunification of America. Nevertheless, based on a recommendation by the Pentagon’s Naming Commission, one of many bodies formed in response to the Black Lives Matter race riots in the summer of 2020, the monument – which stands at Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) -- was all set to be dismantled until a Trump-appointed federal judge’s order stopped its wanton destruction. The lawsuit which ultimately led to this last-second reprieve came from a group called Defend Arlington, who pointed out that removing the monument “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 judge agreed, for now. But this reprieve may be temporary, unless the warnings that Defend Arlington offered can be proven convincingly. We hope, for the sake of maintaining this piece of American history, that they can be.
However, relieved though we are that this particular monument is safe for now, its removal should never have been contemplated in the first place. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that the existence of the Naming Commission itself is an unacceptable step on America’s dismal path toward willing amnesia. The woke argument for removing “Confederate monuments” was weak from the moment it was made. That it doesn’t even apply to the Reconciliation Monument only shows how dangerous that line of thinking can become.
To summarize briefly, the woke argument for removing monuments to the Confederacy has always been that they glorify an explicitly racist, losing cause whose very memory is painful to black Americans. To have it “celebrated” and commemorated with monuments is, therefore, actively insulting and cruel toward those same people. In essence, the argument is that the hurt feelings of blacks trump any historical or memorial value that the monuments hold. That this argument implicitly flattens all Confederates into racist scum goes without saying and is, perhaps, an understandable emotional reaction to people fighting for what was an admittedly unjust and anti-American system.
However, the argument also assumes that these monuments must be interpreted as celebratory today, simply because their intent may have been celebratory in the past. What they miss is that the reason those monuments’ building was permitted was because the trauma of the Civil War, and the necessity of North and South living together, required that the South be given some measure of honor in defeat, even as that defeat justly destroyed an unjust system. That Southerners should be allowed to believe that they produced valiant warriors was a practical political necessity, if only to prevent the resurgence of rebellious feelings. In other words, those monuments may once have been a price that America paid to enable itself to heal.
But even if that doesn’t convince you, ask yourself this: are those monuments still treated as shrines today, or are they mostly revered for their historical value? What’s more, has tearing them down decreased their relevance, or has it only intensified feelings of dispossession and anger that have, ironically, served to reinforce their importance in the public eye? We think the latter is true, and moreover, we believe that those monuments do serve a historical purpose today: that is to say, they prevent us from forgetting how close the country came to splitting apart forever, and why. For a movement that seems determined to obsess over America’s historical evils, in other words, the woke seemed determined to make it easier to forget one of our great national traumas. Why?
It is not lost on us that the logic behind removing these statues is almost identical to the arguments used for “no-platforming” speakers on college campuses, on the logic that no one with views that lack “moral clarity” (as understood by the woke) deserves to be acknowledged at all, let alone “celebrated” (as in the case of the monuments) or treated as an authority. Not only is this position about as morally arrogant as it’s possible to get, but it’s also fatally naïve: simply not hearing, or seeing, the evidence of the past, or of different opinions, will not make that past (or those different opinions) cease to exist. It may drive them underground for a time, but that approach has never, ever worked long-term. Which brings us back to the Reconciliation Monument.
As its name implies, the Reconciliation Monument is, essentially, a memorial to peaceful coexistence after war. And in its attempted removal, we believe we see the true underlying logic of the woke desire to tear down Confederate statues: because they view any willingness to offer pride, or dignity, or even common human decency to what they deem “evil,” even when defeated, as a compromise with that evil. To idealistic young people, this may sound noble, but to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history, this kind of thinking is a recipe for endless war, at best, and ethnic cleansing, at worst. It would be tempting to believe that woke statue-destroyers simply want to erase a hurtful memory out of concern for the feelings of an “oppressed” minority, but given their belief in hereditary blood guilt (or “white privilege,” as they call it), it would also be fatally naïve. The same logic that leads to bloodthirsty “from the river to the sea” chants would also happily countenance the destruction of people who were deemed to even be descended from evil.
Ironically, this is the same logic that defenders of slavery, themselves, used, when they argued that slavery was biblically sanctioned because blacks were the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah who was cursed with slavery for seeing his father’s nakedness. The “mark of Ham,” they argued, was black skin. That this was genetically absurd is obvious. But even if they had somehow been right about the ancestry of blacks, the argument was still morally repulsive. Those who are descended from a wrongdoer should not be punished for something they had no part in. Yet the woke are determined to visit the humiliation and persecution that they feel Southerners (and whites generally) were spared after the Civil War upon their descendants, using the exact same logic.
In order for their consciences not to prick, therefore, the humanity of those they hate must be erased. Which is the real reason why they want Confederate monuments, and even non-Confederate but still insufficiently condemnatory monuments like the Reconciliation Monument destroyed: any evidence that anyone fought valiantly for the wrong cause must be exterminated, not just because it might hurt the descendants of the victims of that evil cause, but because allowing for heroism, even from those we condemn, inherently affirms that very common humanity they want to ignore. And lest you think we’re being overdramatic, the Lincoln Memorial itself was just closed because it was vandalized with pro-Gaza graffiti. If Lincoln himself was targeted like this, then it’s obvious that the woke are determined, like the warriors of Hamas, to keep war going eternally rather than allow for any sort of coexistence with those they are determined to scapegoat.
And that approach, truly, is why the monuments are being torn down, using taxpayer money, by a Department of Defense that mistook a glorified PR exercise for a moral imperative to carry out Maoist idol smashing. That the enemies of wokeness are human, and that history existed that might argue against the reckless woke campaign of psychological terrorism against their fellow Americans, is something they, like all besieged and unfit aristocracies, are desperate to erase. We can only hope that history, and decency, finally start to triumph on this question, because if the woke assault on American institutions – and the American people -- continues unimpeded, we fear that the consequence will be a world where, once the Civil War is forgotten, another, worse one will begin and take its place.
