ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — A Confederate memorial is to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in the coming days, part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities, a cemetery official said Saturday. The decision ignores a recent demand from more than 40 Republican congressmen that the Pentagon suspend efforts to dismantle and remove the monument from Arlington cemetery. Safety fencing has been installed around the memorial, and officials anticipate completing the removal by Dec. 22, the Arlington National Cemetery said in an email. During the removal, the surrounding landscape, graves and headstones will be protected, the Arlington National Cemetery said.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disagrees with the decision and plans to move the monument to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley, Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said. In 2022, an independent commission recommended that the memorial be taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.
The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American South. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.
In a recent letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, more than 40 House Republicans said the commission overstepped its authority when it recommended that the monument be removed. The congressmen contended that the monument “does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.” “The Department of Defense must respect Congress’ clear legislative intentions regarding the Naming Commission’s legislative authority” the letter said. U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican, has led the push to block the memorial’s removal. Clyde’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Saturday.
A process to prepare for the memorial’s removal and relocation has been completed, the cemetery said. The memorial’s bronze elements will be relocated, while the granite base and foundation will remain in place to avoid disturbing surrounding graves, it said.
Comment: This snuck up on me, but it’s not surprising. Some refer to the monument commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and exquisitely executed by Moses Jakob Ezekiel as a reconciliation memorial. I don’t see that at all. As the Arlington National Cemetery website puts it, “the elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” It symbolizes the “Lost Cause” myth espoused by the UDC. The cause of reconciliation is better reflected in the tomb of the Civil War unknowns where the remains of over 2,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lie beneath a single memorial monument.
The base of the Confederate Memorial will remain in Arlington along with the remains of the Confederate dead. At some point, I hope a simpler memorial will be erected on that base, perhaps something like the Argonne Cross or Canadian Cross.
The Confederate Memorial will be relocated to an appropriate spot. Our Governor Youngkin has directed that the memorial be moved to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park. Whether the remains of Moses Ezekiel will eventually be moved to accompany his memorial on the very site where he fought for the Confederacy as a VMI cadet is a question that will undoubtedly be asked.
TTG
Well we haven’t done much for Blacks since the summer of George Floyd, so let’s remove another monument. Erase the history so we (the left) can rewrite it. Make them happy to have no past, then they will be ignorant of having no future.
Who were the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their descendants being reconciliated with? Certainly not the Ellis Island immigrants or the ones crossing the Rio Grande right now.
Yes, Fred, removing a tribute to the Lost Cause Bullshit, itself a cynical, knowingly dishonest rewrite of history, is rewriting history. Please elaborate.
Feel free to elaborate on why that was put up. Who, whom and all that. Or just shout End reconciliation now! for Emmit Till, or whomever is still victimized today.
Fred,
This could be dangerous to your health or sanity – so at least have something nearby, hopefully inanimate, to punch, kick, bite, spindle or mutilate. I’m talking about time = 0.53 and the next 20 seconds. (Our regulations don’t permit exposing test subjects to longer intervals). Yes his name is Johnson and he’s the “mayor of Chicago.” (He really is). Probably climbed the Alps with battalions of elephants and sacked Rome in an earlier incarnation. Yes, I’m sure. After crossing the straits and fighting his way over the Pyranees. Or was it the pyramids (?) – should we ask him?
—————————–
New Texas Law Allows Prosecution & Arrest of Immigrants Entering US from Mexico.
https://youtu.be/pqUB6xJYSes
The photo here (scroll down a bit) portrays a magnificent view.
Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial.
Arlington House, with the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy in the foreground,
https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/History-of-Arlington-National-Cemetery/Arlington-House
Arlington House, constructed between 1802 and 1818, was the nation’s first memorial to George Washington. In 1778, John Parke Custis, the son of Martha Washington and her first husband Daniel Parke Custis, purchased 1,100 acres of land in northern Virginia, on rolling hills overlooking Washington, D.C. In 1802, their son George Washington Parke Custis (the first president’s step-grandson) inherited the property, then known as Mount Washington. Custis decided to construct a Greek Revival-style mansion there as his home and a place to display his large collection of George Washington heirlooms and memorabilia (furniture, silver, china, family portraits). The estate was a working plantation, and the mansion, called Arlington House, was built by enslaved African Americans. George Washington Parke Custis and his wife, Mary Lee Fitzhugh, lived at Arlington House until their deaths in 1857 and 1853, respectively. They are buried in what is now Section 13 of Arlington National Cemetery. (Continues at link)
———————————-
I looked up the Tomb of Civil-War Unknowns. It’s understandably almost austere but rather bulky for my taste. I could easily see myself not objecting to an elegant redesign. The most austere and thought provoking monument of course are the graves, because there are so many. The entire subject brings up the topic of representational art and the sacred. I don’t necessarily cotton to the ideas that living things cannot be depicted, in fact it is possibly a very bad idea. Our classical and later Christian heritage make human beings – divinities of both sexes – the center and ‘measure of all things.’ Going all the way in the other direction as with Islamic, Hebrew and Shinto memorials and sacred art – well, there is much to be said in its favor, but can the human be just a bit sacred? In our current reality within the US the sacred is almost nonexistent in any form whatsoever (what is on offer is extremely commercialized and politicized) and unholy strife is the daily sermon repeated minute by minute. There’s an old testament passage somewhere about instructions concerning some temple or other and how the priests are to approach it. It’s typically obsessive as to detail, but I recall it saying that the surroundings should have “no dressed stone,” meaning no skilled work of cutting, finishing, polishing etc, only ragged boulders I guess. The last time I was in Washington DC was 1999 and 2000 and I remember being struck by the absolute absence of advertising or even printed signs anywhere on the magnificent state buildings, museums and monuments all along the way from the Capitol building with its sombre bronze horseman Ulysses S Grant on down past the Smithsonian and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Stunning. But the stones in those magnificent buildings, marbles, granites and limestones – certainly were “dressed,” they were not ragged, jagged boulders. I was also somewhat moved to sit and overhear ordinary people, some quite elderly, having coffee or tea – at how impressed they were with their nation’s Capitol which they had traveled far and paid good money to see. They were quiet, hushed and a bit in awe. It’s almost hard to believe, looking back. Maybe I was lucky. My favorite sculpture in the whole place and possibly anywhere on earth is that on of General Grant on horseback, by the way. And yes, the subject matter and location are indeed profound, but in fact it’s an absolute masterpiece of the sculptor’s art, an art practiced by Daedulus before he became an engineer and Socrates before he taught Plato.
https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/Monuments-and-Memorials/Civil-War-Unknowns
F&L,
The ‘absolute masterpiece of the sculptor’s art’ of Ulysses Grant was done by Henry Merwin Shrady. A counterpoint to this great work was another equestrian statue, one of Robert E. Lee, which was commissioned for Charlottesville by Paul Goodloe McIntire. This statue, culturally important and quite valuable, would have fitted in well at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market, part of the state’s slow, careful development of heritage tourism, now a multi-billion dollar enterprise that supports thousands of jobs. It was secretly melted down here recently by Negroes in a fit of spite. There seem to have been elements of a voodoo ceremony in the description by the black perpetrators of what happened when the statue went into the furnace. The statue was said to have wept. This whole episode is an absolute disgrace and reveals in the city’s governance remarkable, primitive stupidity.
Tidewater,
Interesting. I thought it was done by John Ward who did several of the bronzes in Central Park in Manhattan. Thanks. I didn’t know about that statue of Robert E Lee. I’ll do a search to see if I recognize it. I really disapprove strongly concerning such distruction. In fact there are some old so-called friends who I don’t speak to anymore since those days of George Floyd and subsequent pillage. One is a celebrated author who I’ve come to despise, a former student. He called the civil war statues “monuments to war criminals.” He wouldn’t know a war criminal if he was having dinner or sleeping with one.
F&L,
If service in the Confederate army had been regarded as a criminal act, then the ‘reconstructed’ governments of the Southern states would not have been allowed to grant pensions to their veterans, but so they did. The widow of Preston Brooks, the congressman, whom one remembers for the incident in which he broke a hollow gutta-percha cane on the person of Charles Sumner, received a pension for Brooks’s service in the Mexican war. However, that would be because Brooks died just before the Civil War began. Still, Mexican war pensions continued to be paid in the South after the war, and were not simply punitively denied across the board as one might do to war criminals.
Burton Harrison, the private secretary of Jefferson Davis, was brought to Fortress Monroe along with his boss, both entering from the Engineers Wharf in the harbor. (Races down from Fishing Bay sometimes used this–a later pier, of course — as a finish line.) He was eventually confined at Fort Delaware, as was my great-grandfather. Harrison became a successful lawyer in New York, beginning there immediately upon release, in 1866. He returned to Richmond to marry the patiently waiting Constance Cary, a remarkable young lady of impeccable social credentials who would become a successful writer in New York; they were a power couple who moved in high society. There was no stigma. Rather the reverse, possibly.
And of course, no charges were brought of treason against Jefferson Davis, Burton himself, or the Southern military leaders. I have read arguments that Secession was legal then and is legal now. I am not in favor. But in fifteen years amazing things could happen, with sudden climate collapse bringing out ‘booshwhacker’ warlords all over the place, and not just in North Carolina. (My Christmas present is lining up to be an expensive addition to my own personal arsenal, but I am having to study to get my terms right, like is it ‘Sig Sauer M-18’, or such, maybe ‘P-320’ (?) with that mysterious Quantico sight TTG mentioned, plus like a laser on the bottom, man, so I don’t look like an old idiot, or derelict and get kicked out of the pawn shop.
What I find interesting about the sudden, intense hostility towards the South over the slavery issue and the Civil War is how recently it became such an astounding noise. People are outraged over something that was legally settled even before the Spanish-American war? What I think it is all about is a plan by African American radical politicians to push for reparations. And like yesterday, the distinguished people of color in California who met and determined the amount of reparations that would be laid uponst their neighbors in perpetuity came up with a plan so fantastical that you have to wonder how these folks got the reputations to be on the reparations committee to begin with. They seem to be like you know, ‘challenged’.
The reality is that Americans don’t know much about the South, or about southern history, or about the Civil War. Southerners know this and don’t pay much attention to the noise. And amazingly, to me, the noise is from the Atlantic Monthly all over again. We’re back to Thomas Wentworth Higginson and those good Quaker ladies and the Port Royal experiment. It’s like some sort of cycle.
I sometimes think that you might see Charlottesville as a sort of independent Marxist Republic with a powerful woke black leadership, running things on the highly visible surface, but it is actually redneck underneath and out in the counties and coves; hence, the Ville is not what people think it is. ‘From Tuckahoe to Cohee’. This place is just a bit Cohee, no doubt, though you don’t see it at first. There are places not far from here where you get out of there at dark, and if you were black, not go there at all. The woke are running out of steam, even if they have managed to commit the greatest American art crime in a long time. Folks get tired of hearing about victims, and what one is to do for them, and Virginia history turns out to be a lucrative, highly organized industry that you do not want to rock. The information that the state collects from tourists who give enough information about the reasons for their visit to Virginia for the state to be able to categorize a certain amount of it (using AI?) as being in this (to me) new category of ‘heritage tourism’ is real evidence of this. We are talking billions of dollars.
Tidewater,
Whatever becomes of reparations, rest assured that they won’t be granted out of any virtues blossoming from the hearts of the powerful people who make such decisions, though a few deluded woke spectators may believe otherwise. Those folks tears don’t generally reach (or drip) as far as their pockets. Any such benificince will be shake-down and extortion moneys paid to pension off the guillotining hordes.
Every four years the Democratic party had to pay Jesse Jackson $X million just to go away, and X was rising.
The whole thing is a testament to the stupidity and blundering selfishness of the wealthy rulers. Reparations will infuriate poor whites who are still numerous. Is that also part of their game? They could easily build housing and end homelessness – why isn’t it done? The old nonsense about commies and evil socialism no longer applies. Because Goldman Sachs and the hedge funds prefer buying up all the housing stock and raising rents to unaffordable levels with their corner on the market. And they pay our scurvy politicians very well to keep thinks that way. It is already biting them in their asses big time by preventing perfectly decent people from ever starting a family, and will only get worse.
Be of good cheer!
The State of Florida still maintains Gamble Plantation
https://www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/judah-p-benjamin-confederate-memorial-gamble-plantation-historic-state-park
It’s a good look at Florida before electricity (and thus air conditioning). (The soil is terrible, and you have to wonder how anyone made a go of a ‘plantation’ there 100+ years ago) The Port of Manatee is right down the road, the outlet mall is a few miles in the other direction. It’s also where future Queen’s Council Judah P. Benjamin left for England.
Fred,
It was most likely a sugar cane plantation like those in Louisiana at the time. That field work was especially hard on the slaves. In Louisiana it was common practice to work the slaves to death and just buy more than to care for them enough to continue working. An odd economic model.
TTG,
The Gamble Plantation is 5 miles North of where I live. Louisiana wasn’t Haiti. What was the ‘economic’ model of Africa for those who weren’t sold off to be shipped elsewhere?
Fred,
After the slave revolt in Haiti, a number of sugar planters moved to Louisiana to replicate their former sugar plantations. Those slave plantations were labor intensive and required regular replenishment of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean. Some of those slaves brought the memory of the Haitian slave revolution with them. The largest slave rebellion in the US occurred there in 1811. The Gamble Plantation was a sugar plantation, but obviously has little to do with those Haitian planters. Gamble came from Virginia.
TTG,
Try getting your history right. First, slaves in America didn’t free themselves. Second the US government banned importation of slaves in 1807 – Five years after yellow fever put an end to the Le Clerc expedition to reclaim Haiti for the French. (Lord forbid anyone look up what DeSalanes did to his revolutionary opponents, or the rest of Haitian history) Some of those French aristocrats moved to Louisiana as opposed to going to revolutionary France? So what. They decided on sugar rather than cotton? Sure they did. And they grew those crops with the slaves they couldn’t import, purchased with the money they no longer had to buy them with.
Fred,
I never said slaves in America freed themselves. That only happened in Haiti. I said the 1811 New Orleans slave rebellion was the largest in the US. It was put down as were all the other slave rebellions in the US. It was a lot more than a few aristocrats who fled Haiti for Louisiana. Sugar planters, other whites and even freed blacks flooded into New Orleans. The slave trade there was already booming and it continued after 1807 with black market importation from Africa and the Caribbean and, more frequently, from the upper South. Sugar was already a major crop in the area before the arrival of planters from Haiti and it became much more widespread in the antebellum period with the arrival of planters from the upper South. It was more lucrative than tobacco or cotton in that area.
For some reason people think the US is exempt from par for the course signs of a declining civilization. Monuments get destroyed, defaced and torn down.
In 1,000 years they get dug up, put in climate controlled museums, protected from the elements and insured.
What people forget is that we are actually living IN history…it is happening all around us. Pretty wonderful, really! (At least to us history geeks.) Also, folks forget how totally screwed up the past really was and how daily life was pretty much nasty, brutish and short. Also…the US is not immune to history as some would like to think. We are neither better nor worse than those who have gone before–just different in outlook. Viva la diversity!
“daily life was pretty much nasty, brutish and short”
I don’t think so.
There are so many counterexamples.
I put that statement with
“Cops are pigs”,
“U.S. soldiers are babykillers”,
“Smash the bourgeois”,
“Smash the establishment”,
“America is Amerika, or AmeriKKKa”.
Coming from those attacking that which they did not control.
“Smash the establishment”
#the establishment/#la bourgeoisie=elites?
In his long career as a celebrity businessman, Trump used the world “elite” the way the agency [Elite, modeling agency] did, as a bit of marketing boilerplate more or less interchangeable with “classy” or “luxury.” Trump’s golf courses were “elite.” His buildings, in New York or Toronto, in Panama or Las Vegas, were “elite.” Mar-a-Lago was “elite.” Applied to people, it was an unvarnished compliment: Eli Manning was an “elite” quarterback.
This, however, changed abruptly in the summer of 2015. When Trump started running for president, “elite” no longer was a thumbs-up affirmation. He had followed politics long enough to understand that it meant something else when said in front of a red-meat Republican crowd. “The elites want Common Core,” he tweeted not long after he announced his bid, “so they can take education out of parental control. NO!” He stopped using the word only as a compliment. In interviews and speeches at rallies, as his campaign gathered momentum, the steady target of his ire was the establishment and its even more suspect inner circle: “media elites,” “the political elites,” “the elites who only want to raise more money for global corporations,” “the elites who led us from one financial and foreign policy disaster to another.” Hillary Clinton, he said, hammering away at starkly sketched lines, “stood with the elites.” In this, the otherwise unorthodox candidate was adopting a time-tested populist tactic, an insult used to great effect by such political notables as
LeaNder,
You left us hanging. I immediately thought of Huey Long, aka “The Kingfish” and former governor of Louisiana, as one of the political notables your comment was referring to. That might be an interesting comparison and contrast to make between Trump and Long.
Hmm? Once again? ….
Ok, maybe my association of two items on KH’s list with Trump once again only makes sense to me? Is the swamp not pretty much establishment, I asked myself.
“Smash the bourgeois”,
“Smash the establishment”,
Unfamiliar with soldiers as baby killers. Murderers I have heard over here.
Sorry, TTG, I was distracted. I am actually chewing over strongly related matters in Germany. … In relations to theories offered here recently. 😉
Yes, it starts with Huey Long. Not familiar with him though:
In this, the otherwise unorthodox candidate was adopting a time-tested populist tactic, an insult used to great effect by such political notables as Huey Long, George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. It even served as one of the linchpins of Trump’s closing argument. “It is time,” he told a crowd in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the day before the election in 2016, “to reject a failed political elite.”
LeaNder wrote above of
“theories offered here recently”.
If he or she is referring to the five quotations I wrote above, nothing theoretical about those.
Those were all things that were spoken loudly, in demonstrations, on bulletin boards, and in campus newsletters,
by people proclaiming themselves to be “the vanguard”,
during my years at Brandeis from September 1967 to January 1973.
If you doubt how much some people there, where Herbert Marcus had taught, were committed to “the revolution”, you might read this (emphasis added):
https://brandeishoot.com/2023/03/10/brandeis-most-wanted-women/
“Brandeis University has taught three out of the 11 women who have ever been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Most Wanted List.
…
let’s learn about and celebrate the radical women who shaped Brandeis’ presence in the mind of the FBI.”
LeaNder continued:
“Yes, it starts with Huey Long. ”
LeaNder, for a German, you seem to be forgetting something:
“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch!”,
translated into English as
“Workers of the world, unite!”,
from Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto,
which presumably is also the basis of why the opposition was not to “the elite”, but specifically to the somewhat different “bourgeois”.
Compare the definitions
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie
For some general information on the methods and goals of 1960s era student revolutionaries in America,
Mark Rudd’s
Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen
https://g.co/kgs/9S2Km2
gives a fairly authoritative reference.
Many of their ideas came from Germany via the Frankfurt School
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
For more promoters of revolution in America, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Browder
Yes, both the 1960s radicals and Donald Trump have spoken against “the establishment”.
Which just goes to show how America’s establishment has changed since the 1960s.
Keith Harbaugh,
Thank you for your comments on the Frankfurt school. I have just spent a few hours, if mostly on Wiki, trying to inform myself, at least a little. One thing struck me: Gramsci’s or Dutschke’s assessment that the only way forward would have to be “a long march through the institutions.” That has happened, hasn’t it?
And what now must be the remedy? Lawsuits! Litigate, litigate, litigate… I think there are some possibly important ones ongoing now at UVA.
Sorry, TTG, the citation to
“Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen”
above should close with a .
Laura,
“We are neither better nor worse than those who have gone before.”
We are a hell of a lot better.
“Diversity” is crossing the border a few million at a year. Many ready and willing to prove the “nasty, brutish” part wasn’t just in the past.
Yes that’s true, but you left out “while on their way to the gay and tranny rights pride parade as their jets cooled off from 80 consecutive days of carpet bombing children and moms in Gaza and a man rumored to be named Sullivan was heard on tape speaking to an FBI agent seeming to deny having anything to do with white powder found in the White House.”
– (From the introduction to “The Man Who Knew Queen Nefertiti and King Tut,” by Oprah Winfrey’s favorite book club author, Princess Mary O. Harry.)
Old one I wrote about statues
I got call from the devil the other day
He had a hand to play
I said it was a bit late
He said to listen is my fate
A prophet is coming to town
So don’t let me down
Just show him around
To the task you are bound
Now the devil and I
You could ask why
We know each other so well
Well It’s because I ring the judgement bell
That summons the judges
From there chambers
Below the cities streets
Where the heart beats.
Anyway I went down to the park
It was getting quite dark
A small oasis of green
Sometimes a bird might be seen
I sat on the bench
Mumbled a little French
To no one in particular
The usual peculiar
A dog came up to me
Looked me in the eye
A look I had not seen recently
Then he let out a long sigh
He proceeded to enquire
Where had all the trees gone
I said I don’t know squire
You had better ask the Don
I started to wonder about that prophet
Could this be him in disguise
I felt around for a blessing in my pocket
When I began to realize
I was in the company
Of the Lord’s right hand dog
Not some low level flunky
But a righteous cog
We came upon a statue
Of an important man
A paragon of virtue
One of the clan
He sidled up
Laid down his mark
Could have filled a judas cup
We headed back to the park
On the way he said
Why are there no trees
Just statues of the dead
Must be some industrial disease
The fruit of knowledge
Will not grow
On a concrete hedge
You will reap what you sow.
mcohen,
I like that one.
Thanks.Do you understand what is going on in the red sea.Strange stuff
mcohen,
No, I don’t. I would like to think that a complete target list is being developed so that the first strike will be memorable and effective. OTOH, it could be that we don’t know whether to shit or go blind.
mcohen,
If you look at whose ships or cargos are not being attacked it would provide a good indicator of who is trying to instigate yet another American intervention.
People forget that the founders of this nation tore down monuments themselves. It is as American as apple pie. Reading history books can inconvience political indignation. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/pulling-down-statues-tradition-dates-back-united-states-independence
Stefan,
After kicking the Europeans off the continent. King George had his descendants have wanted their colonies back ever since. That’s why they keep interfering with our government. Nice of you to recognize the left is waging war against the United States and thinks they’ve already won though.
It’s never have worked, Fred, us keeping the American colonies. We’d have had to keep on supporting you and we simply didn’t have the money. Also, don’t forget most of you were English then, and the English are real bastards to keep under control wherever they are.
No, it was better as it was, however sad it was that we abandoned you.
EO,
No Taxation without Representation! And don’t try collecting the guns&ammo. It wasn’t that our ancestors were abandoned, it was the abandonment of English principles. Seems to be happening again over your way.
But Fred, the taxation was to pay for keeping you safe from the French! You never paid for that and it still doesn’t look as if you have any intention of doing so!
The English have been supporting the Unionists in the north of Ireland for decades. Time to let them go as well.
Sell out the Prods, Stefan? Too late. We’ve already done so. January 2020.
Nobody noticed much. At the time Johnson was too busy selling out everyone else.
Stefan,
Religion is timeless. It is now not only Protestants versus Catholics. The tertium quid is Islam. Security forces know that the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islam have arrived. In Dublin’s fair city, it’s hijab time for ‘sweet Molly Malone.’
English Outsider,
What about Article 7 of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, swapping Louisbourg for Madras? Was that brilliant foresight or what? As early as 1748.
Fair exchange is no robbery. Anyway you weren’t supposed to notice. We thought you were too busy brewing up rotgut in the Appalachians.
We were wrong. You were also making illegal land purchases there, the whole business culminating in a most regrettable rebellion the entire purpose of which, as all know full well, was to ensure a certain Colonel Washington could keep his ill-gotten Appalachian gains.
EO,
Like I said, you guys still want your colonies back.
R.E. Lee was not in favor of such monuments and he would have been the first to say if it’s contributing to division and discord, get rid of it.
he actually may’ve been the first, in 1869, referring to a monument at Gettysburg;
“I think it wiser … not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
probably just over-wrought feelings for his role in guiding the loss of so many Southern soldier’s lives.
if racists & neo-nazis wouldn’t re-imagine such monuments as matters of depraved faith, maybe others wouldn’t actively take on that challenge & make them even more symbolic. ah, but we are such a reactionary people… that exceptionalism thing again? anyway, the New Market site is as good a place as any for Youngkin’s next pep rally w/ some carpetbagging loser.
So was Crazy Horse. His monument is bigger than Mount Rushmore. The dead do not get a say in it.
That one isn’t complete yet, though I did get a good Tshirt out of it.
@ babelthuap:
Pretty sure both Crazy Horse and Lee would also have objected to defacing mountainsides in order to put their faces on them.
English Outsider,
This is the first time I suspect I may have spotted some serious scholarly delinquencies lurking behind your hollow jests. 🙂 The issue was the powerful French fortress and harbor at Louisbourg on Cape Breton, right? There was all that important British and New England colonial overseas trade going into Boston Harbor, right? So this is not chickenshit moolah involved. Not a mere farthing or pennies-groats-worth business but your solid wonga. Then there were also the Grand Banks cod fisheries, centuries old, and important to the New Englanders as well as other Atlantic people. (See ‘Captains Courageous.’) So a French privateer had the weather gauge on any ship going into Boston harbor, and they were coming down from this fortified harbor on Cape Breton and seizing a significant number of richly laden colonial New England ships just as they were nearly home. Again and again and again, ‘their ship did not come in’. So what did the Bostonians and other New Englanders do? Infuriated, they put together a fleet, the fleet sailed up to Canso and joined a British squadron, they attacked the fortress from the land side, like Singapore, and incredibly, they captured the place. Everybody was surprised, and even way down in South Carolina, there were celebrations. Big problem solved not only for Boston merchants. Also London.
So what did the diplomats do at Aachen? They gave Louisbourg back? Traded it for Madras? With its good harbor. This is the development of the Indian Empire then. They knew that India was better for their purposes. They could hang on to that empire for a long time. So they made the perfidious trade. Even if they knew how their overseas relatives would feel about this. Betrayed. Enraged.
But it was a smart move?
Me, I never even heard about Louisbourg till I was a middle-aged guy. It is worth seeing. It explains quite a lot.
There is a discussion over at Larry Johnson’s website that should interest any Army veterans here:
https://sonar21.com/the-problem-with-israels-military/
The point is the importance of experience in the military,
especially in the enlisted ranks.
Ah yes, good old Larry, fresh back from Russia, rabble rousing his merry band of America despisers and Jew haters.
How much experience was there in US enlisted ranks going into WW2? Or in any other country that has enjoyed relative peace for years? Russia or Ukraine for that matter? Iran? Hamas? How much combat experience does CIA Larry have?
The necessary experience is gained and disseminated fairly quickly if the organization is dedicated to winning and otherwise capable of learning. Yes, there can be heavy casualties, defeats and just plain horrible screw-ups initially, but that’s war. In most modern wars the ultimate victor suffered initial setbacks until experience was gained and proper organizational structure was developed.
Assuming Larry is even presenting accurate info and making something close to a valid point; a big assumption.