Gen. Milley has weighed in on the subject of military bases whose names are associated with the Confederacy. He also adds some value judgements, presumably his own, regarding Confederate Officers and soldiers:
“Like the country it serves, the U.S. military is fighting an internal battle against racism, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Thursday, but old names and symbols of that enemy are present and strong enough to sow division.
“Divisiveness leads to defeat,” Milley told the House Armed Services Committee.
“There is no place in our armed forces … for symbols of racism, bias or discrimination.”
The Civil War was an “act of treason,” he said. The south’s military leaders betrayed their nation profoundly, and still, many military installations bear their names, according to Milley.
“It was an act of treason at the time against the union, against the stars and stripes, against the U.S. Constitution, and those officers turned their back on their oath.”
He goes on to support the removal of Confederate names and presumably symbols from the defence forces.
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I am unlettered in the details of the War Between The States. I would have thought however that the treason charge is unsupportable.
I think it is plain now that Miley is explicitly supporting BLM and the revolutionaries. The least we can deduce is that he will try to prevent any Federal military intervention in what might pass for domestic insurrection. In other words, he appears to be a supporter of Antifa and the associated mob rule. Perhaps worse, citizens militias could find the American military arrayed against them.
An alternative explanation might be is that he is concerned regarding preserving the loyalty, cohesiveness and morale of military units to the point of appeasement, or is he an aspiring politician?
I know not which. I do think though that this is ominous. I am reminded of the Imperial Russian army that refused to take action in St. Petersburg during the Russian revolution. They sat back and watched as the revolutionaries made the country ungovernable. What sayeth SST?
Walrus,
“They sat back and watched as the revolutionaries made the country ungovernable.”
What is there to say, but, yes? He and Espers have been vocal, and clear about their preference for the revolutionaries.
One worry, if Trump wins the Democrats will try and overthrow him. Presumably Milley and Espers would just watch.
– Eliot
Guessing “perfumed prince” with political ambitious (or at least fantasies of that).
He spends too much time putting make up on him and having pros airbrush his photos to be for real. Seems like dancing around to too many schools in the Army (though not so knowledgeable about Army culture to be sure about that). Like some kind of type A over-achiever/self promoter/pathological need to be recognized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Milley
Eh. …would like to modify my previous….Milley was somebody in his younger days. I guess he could be awarded all of what he was as a special forces guy if he was always in the thick of things, though I have no idea where. He’s too young for VN and too old to have been in direct combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. That said, now he’s a finger in the wind careerist. He must have been made to understand – correctly or incorrectly – that the fix is in against Trump and he wants to be on the winning side.
Maybe the General should read more history before pontificating. I don’t believe any Confederate officer was indicted for treason.
The fact that so many Confederate symbols were built and included in the “new” south after the war should prove to these current woke spokesmodels that the Union army and Northerners who defeated the Confederates where A-OK with all that.
Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the “principle author of the Declaration of Independence,” the manifesto of revolt from King George III and British government, is still named for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III.
However, as should be increasingly apparent to serious observers, the debacle In Charlottesville in 2017 was the beta of using Blacks as front meant to achieve a leftist, Anglo-zionist revolution in the USA. Attempts were made in 2017 to remove Jefferson’s statue from University of Virginia, the university Jefferson established; and steps were taken to turn Monticello, his home, into a showplace for the evils of slavery.
A 501c3 calling itself Integrity First for America (IFA) composed exclusively of Jewish lawyers, seed-funded by ADL and now boasting a war chest of $10 million, was organized for the express purpose of bringing a civil suit against protesters in the Unite the Right rally (against removing the statue of Robert E Lee). This organization’s motivating complaint is that protesters were “Nazis” and “antisemitic.” Their stated intention is to “crush, silence, and bankrupt Nazis,” white supremacists and white nationalists by getting court-order massive civil fines against the already-impoverished protesters/defendants. In a recent discussion, IFA conceded that civil authorities in Charlottesville — the police and courts — having prosecuted criminal charges against several protesters, convicting James Fields of the murder of Heather Heyer and sentenced him to life +400 years in prison, Charlottesville’s civil authorities are “not fully engaged” with IFA in its civil litigation. But ADL is, so no worries.
This tells me that what is taking place is the take-over — call it a coup — of the USA by what Jeff Gates (see Guilt by Association, https://www.wrmea.org/008-november/books-guilt-by-association-how-deception-and-self-deceit-took-america-to-war.html) called a “transgenerational criminal gang — zionists” and their fellow travelers.
“… so many Confederate symbols were built and included in the “new” south…”
They are not attempting to erase the civil war but are attacking the fabric of the civil peace that followed. This is part of a generalized attack on white American culture, on white American people. Southerners are simply the lowest hanging fruit. Appalachians can expect to be next, but it won’t stop there once the virtue signalling preference cascade herd stampede is fully underway. I don’t know whether Milley is either traitor or coward, but regardless he is a fool if he thinks he and his progeny will not be consumed in the end.
Russia was full of virtue signalers in the runup to 1917-1918. Back then they were called petite bourgeois useful idiots. Many if not most didn’t die in bed of old age but were destroyed in the unending purges.
The activities of the North in supporting post war activities in the South must have been based on decisions to promote ‘healing’ between the communities as fast as possible and, looking back, appears to have been pretty successful. That Gen Milley says what he says, without any apparent blowback, shows that conservatism is being replaced by activism in the upper echelons of power. Not a good move if a stable society is the objective, but perhaps it isn’t.
Whilst the Russian Army might have stood by, it was an act of suicide by their officer class as the revolutionaries subsequently eliminated most of them, active and retired (still a perceived risk). Not a precedent to be followed methinks.
Walrus,
A few points. First, in his opening remarks, Chairman Smith (D- WA) points out the need for members to remove thier facemasks to allow for proper identification of the members during the hearing and during voting. It’s confirmation that one reason all the mandatory facemask laws is that it makes identifying people harder, like when they ‘peaceful’ protest and spontaneous combustion of stores, 100% off sales, and graffiti appearance occurs. Second, General MIlley has indicated that 57% of the US armed forces members are not ‘minority’. Third, the general apparently believes racial identity is of paramount importance in a soldier. Fourth, General Milley’s predecessor, General Dunford, and all the others back to General of the Army Omar Bradley, failed in renaming bases, removing statues and symbols determined – solely by the left – to be “divisive”.
I agree with General Milley, “Divisiveness leads to defeat”. I will point out that unlike Omar Bradley, General Milley has never won a war anywhere. He is, however, responding to the house armed services committee chairman’s divisive and very political comments. This tragic divisiveness as a national issue has coincided with, drumroll please, the death of George Floyd. A point which Mr. Esper brought up, the chairman and ranking member did not. It is apparent that the marxist revolutionary movement known generally as BLM is divisive and is at least tacitly supported by Chairman Smith and apparently also the Secretary of Defense, Esper, though he’s as weasily about it as one would expect a politician to be; see his comments on Diversity and Inclusion! Which is the most important thing about the armed forces.
I would also point out that Chairman Smith did not mention that the rioters burned St. John’s Church and that the President went there only after a visible display of armed force, to include the D.C. National Guard, was used to restore order in the nation’s capital. Mr. Smith, in his silence on this fact, is a) complict! and b) violent!, and is certainly trying to coopt the leadership of the armed forces in his direction of the committee. I thank Secretary Esper for pointing out that more than 50 members of the national partk service police, which number less than 800 across the country, were injured in these ‘peaceful’ protests.
I agree, and apparently so does the entire country, that the conduct of the police of the city Minneapolis which led to the death of Mr. Floyd was outragous. The political party which runs that city was not mentioned. Let me help everyone out.
The Democrats run Mineapolis. They have for decades. If you want change, vote them out of office. General Milley could not say that, Sec Def Esper could have but didn’t have the courage to do so.
Milley is a fine one to talk treason. He is not remotely interested in the cohesiveness of the military or in staying aloof from the political fray. This man is a partisan actor and his comments on the ahistorical, revisionist talking points of the woke terrorists show that he has thrown his lot in with the revolutionaries. He is a danger to the Republic and must go ASAP, what the heck it Trump waiting for?
All
I think he should go. He is clearly an opponent of Trump and the president should not be expected to have a personally disloyal CJCS.
JohninMK
When military occupation and government ended in the occupied South, this was replaced by government there by newly liberated Blacks and Northerners who had gone South specifically to participate in the “Reconstruction” of the South (carpetbaggers). These people were generally very hostile to the White population and the experience was not pleasant. This persisted until the late 1890s when the occurrence of the Spanish War caused a call for volunteers to fight the war. Wade Hampton who was then governor of South Carolina said that “the South knows the cost of war, let the North fight.” Volunteering in the South was minimal. To avoid this situation in the First World War an effort was made to conciliate the South. What were expected to e temporary training camps were named for Confederates who were from the area of construction. National Guard units descended from Confederate units were allowed to wear battle streamers on their colors that stated the “full measure” of their devotion to duty, a burial section at Arlington National Cemetery (Jackson Circle) was created for Confederate dead. There were a variety of such measures taken and that worked. The South went to war.
All
In the event of internal conflict it is my opinion that the US Army cannot be made to fight and subdue their fellow countrymen. They will fight antifa, BLM and the like but not the general run of citizens under arms. This is especially true of the National Guard who are essentially state militia.
Has ‘wokeness’ come to West Point? The latest from Rod Dreher: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/social-justice-warriors-antiracism-wokeness-comes-for-west-point/
Pat Lang,
To expand a bit on your comment concerning moves by the national government to reconcile the South, I have an opinion about the now much reviled statues and other monuments. From the war’s end up to the early 20th century, the states of the former confederacy were desperately poor, in addition to the political situation during re-construction. It wasn’t until the 19 teens and twenties that there were resources to build memorials. That was also the period when the generation that fought was rapidly disappearing. The monuments were not built to remind the black population of “white supremacy”. They are memorials for boys and men who went off to war and especially for those who didn’t come home.
WPFIII
As a Northerner from Maine I see the civil war differently now than what I learned in school as a kid. I was taught that the civil war was entirely or mostly about slavery. The fact that the South was a neo-feudal agrarian society with close economic ties to Imperial Britain and the north an evolving industrial society pursuing economic autarchy, certainly revealed fault lines between 2 very different cultures trying to live under one roof. The “Consolidation” movement with its goal of evolving the United States into an imperial nation state(Buchanan, 1846, Mexico, the West) amplified the divide and the South chafed against federal efforts to have a unified foreign trade policy as opposed to a hodge podge of regional policies. Abolitionism certainly helped to fuel cultural bias and an attitude of contempt towards the “backward” South. It was probably inevitable that the South would be “brought to heel” at some point, as it was again at Little Rock in the fifties.
Colonel Lang is spot on about the integration of the South into the US Military after 1900 and especially after WW1 and that period of the 20s when all the base naming and most “Confederate” monument building took place, as the South experienced a resurgence of pride in its martial past. The boom years of the roaring twenties sure helped provide the money for all those statues. It was an alien idea in the South that “treason” was involved in secession and its military defense. Indeed many in the South might have considered the revolutionary ideas of Lincoln and the consolidation movement to be treasonous to the ideas embodied in the national charter constructed in 1787 in Philadelphia…
West Point:
I know a guy, pretty well BTW, who is a WP alumnus and former faculty member there.
He keeps up with events at the academy and says that it’s been falling apart for at least 10 years.
Discipline is a joke – can’t offend anyone.
He went to a class reunion there and an ethics professor explained how the honor code had to be compromised to accommodate the newer generations.
Half of his class walked out of the lecture.
I’m against the renaming. But if it is going to happen then the individual states should be able to do the renaming. NOT congress! How about a Fort Truscott in TX? Fort Shelton in NC? I have no drothers about the GA forts, but if Benning and Gordon are to be renamed, then GA should be given the option to rename Fort McPherson to someone other than a Yankee General from Ohio.
The first time I heard the idea that a so-called justification to take down statues of people of the Confederacy was because they “committed treason” was only last year sometime. In the past, when there would occasionally be an effort to change the text of a plaque on the subject of the Confederacy, it was not because of “treason” or “systemic racism”. It would be to soften the language and make the wording more general relating to a time in American history. The plaque would be replaced with a new one with a little different language. Since the whole effort to eliminate Confederate history from the public square had lost steam and faded away a while ago, I think that the “committed treason” slogan has been deliberately pushed recently as one more likely to influence public opinion.
It is true that Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was indicted for treason in May 1866. I think that at some point a second indictment was filed, probably replacing the first one. The case was dismissed in February 1869. One of Davis’s legal defenses was that secession was not illegal. There was no language in the Constitution about it. If to secede is not illegal, then you cannot have committed treason.
Leith
A solution at the other end of the spectrum: Trump issues an EO renaming all bases “Trump Base 1”, “Trump Base 2” etc. All references to Confederates removed, problem solved.
Another powerful video from Candace Owens – what does the black community really want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XBxy_7GknM&feature=emb_title
Owens’ prior video questioned turning into heroes any and all deaths of black criminals who died at the hands of white police officers. That video got over 100 million views.
Suggest the joint chiefs add this powerful black voice to their own viewing agenda, and hope this one goes as viral at the earlier one. The long overdue “frank conversation about race” must be a dialogue – not just the current one-sided scolding, laced with unilateral threats and demands.
Why does mitigating divisiveness now require total capitulation by only one side?
Deap
The revolutionary left always seeks total power against what their marxist faith thinks of the dead and regrettable past
All
Does Milley see himself as the emergent Bonaparte in a post revolutionary future? He seems a bit old for that.
Robt Willman
So far as I know, no Confederate soldier or official was ever tried for treason. The government feared that defense in open court.
The UDC made a big thing of the Lost Cause in raising $ & raising monuments to the Confederacy over the course of late 19th / early 20th centuries. Those many thousands of monuments placed in town squares (& similar civic settings) rather than battlefields represented the rise of Jim Crow & reinforcement of white supremacy as the local socio-political norm. This was purposeful intent.
The Army’s new training bases of the WWI mobilization were expected to be temporary & closed after de-mob. Many were & some were not. All part of our nation’s march towards empire.
To me, having grown up in & around air, army & naval bases, I’ve always appreciated what the US military (& DOE) has done for preservation of large tracts of Federal land… similar to the national parks. Of course there are UXO & nuclear / chemical hazardous waste sites, but at least the DoD usually makes a sincere effort at remediation.
Milley could be court martialed under the UCMJ for a number of things busted down to slick sleeve and dishonorable discharge. That would look really good on his political resume. Trump has that power in his hands.
ked
The “Lost Cause” description of the South’s memory of its struggle is just denigrating Yankee propaganda. It is essentially culture abuse. Did I not say that these WW1 camps were intended to be temporary. try to come up with something origial
J
It would be easier to simply order him into retirement where he can become a handmaiden to
biden.
Barbara Ann –
Another solution would be to also rename bases named after Union Army Generals – i.e Forts Campbell, Still, Dix, Greely, & Meade; Schofield Barracks, the Custer Training Center, and Camp Sherman to name a few. Plenty more out there. They were responsible for over 800 thousand killed and wounded Americans and tens of thousands of widows. Plus the incompetence of many of them led to many more casualties on the Union side. None of them were too smart including Grant. But then IMO the Union won the Civil War because of the strategy of General Winfield Scott, a Virginian who stayed with the Union, plus the Navy that carried out Scott’s master plan.
Colonel,
I would rather see Milley get the full ‘benefits’ of a court-martial, reduction in rank to slick sleeve, and dishonorably discharged, than to see him scooted off into retirement with rank and full benefits with a gentle pat on his bottom where he can sit on some corporate board drawing 7 figures plus.
What Milley deserves is working on a chain-gang busting rocks.
Colonel,
I just fixed up a bunch of baby-back ribs for the weekend. Wish I could send you a couple of plates via email. Maybe one day they’ll invent a 3d printer applique for back-baby ribs via email.
Artemesia, “Zionists” are not taking over America. We don’t do religious wars in the US. Other far more venal issues drive US politics- who gets what share of the public pie. Democrats demand pie for everyone. GOP expect a specific return, before making any public investment.
Speaking of the large land inventory held by the US military, time the federal government stood up to the nationwide issue of vagrancy – time to stop throwing money down a rat hole with thousands of failed local programs year after year after year.
We need to turn parts of the vast swath of land called El Toro Marine Base in Southern California into a work camp for vagrants, should they choose to come to California or anywhere else in the Western US.. Housing and jobs provided; along with lessons in basic self-sufficiency at these now virtually empty military bases.
ACLU and the 9th Circuit are good with that – alternatives provided so vagrants can be forced off the public streets, public sidewalks, public parks, public land and RR tracks.
Good for our national defense and security to get vagrants off our streets, out of our business districts, out of our mail boxes and off our free way off ramps. If military bases and work schedules are good enough for our military, no vagrant dare turn their nose up when offered the same good deal.
No coddling. No excuses.
Deap
What you are proposing had already been done more than 110 years ago.
Jack London chronicled some aspects of it.
I know not which. I do think though that this is ominous. I am reminded of the Imperial Russian army that refused to take action in St. Petersburg during the Russian revolution. They sat back and watched as the revolutionaries made the country ungovernable. What sayeth SST
For starters, can we stop please drawing totally a-historic parallels between Russia of 1917 and the US of 2020? There was NO St. Petersburg in 1917, it was called Petrograd–to remove germanism from its name. Secondly, most of the Russian Army was demoralized by namely “liberal” pro-war and pro-Western faction ranging from Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) to SR (ESers) and huge number of top brass which made Czar’s (a mediocre leader at best) possible. That happened in February 1917, by October 1917 the whole country was in disarray and the Army effectively ceased to exist as a coherent fighting force. Even greatest falsifier of Russian history–Solzhenitsyn–was forced to admit that Bolsheviks simply picket the political power from the floor, where it was laying because nobody wanted it. Russia lost more than 3.5 million people killed by then as a direct result of WW I. There are absolutely zero parallels to be drawn between Russia of 1917 and US of 2020. Zero.
Andrei Martyanov
Fully agree.
I think a common lesson of history has been that masses of people react negatively to military defeats.
Russia suffered defeats in World War I and in Russo-Japanese War: ergo 1905 and 1917 Revolutions
Likewise in Germany after 1918, in France after defeat in Franco-Prussian War, and many other such cases.
Deap,
“We need to turn parts of the vast swath of land called …”
No. We need simply take then closed for Covid sports venues and move the tent cities to them. There is an existing infrastructure of toilets and cooking facilities. Add some portable showers. Hold the classes there with the giant Megatron screens to broadcast them. Plenty of parking for
socialistsocial workers to drive up and the rest of the public to be democratic-socialist distanced. When they overflow, or the corporate BLM virtue signaling sponsors object, then relocate to the closed for Covid public school buildings. These and their surrounding infrastructure can be put to good use, unlike all those fear filled teachers who should be getting laid off since they won’t be doing any work.Everyone needs to remember the Obama purge of the senior officer corps of all services. Senior officers were required to sign on to a set of new policies the Obama regime dictated. These included accepting openly gay soldiers in the ranks and promoting women and minorities into positions of authority and also into combat billets. One not only had to accept these goals but to promote them. Half the senior officer corps (my estimate) retired as a result leaving behind the dross composed of virtue signalers and officer-politicians. So you get Milley and lots of others like him who are not and cannot be war leaders, but puff-balls worried more about appearances. Heaven help us if we get into serious conflict. Obama achieved his goal and those of his enablers to weaken the US military.