The Times on the Confederate statue and the pause in its removal:
Hours after workers began removing a towering Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily halting the effort to dismantle one of the country’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land.
Emphasis mine, for the benefit of people who pretend to be puzzled about why the monument should be removed.
The memorial has been criticized for its sanitized depiction of slavery, and the plan to remove it from the country’s most famous cemetery is part of a militarywide effort to take down Confederate symbols from bases, ships and other facilities. Dozens of Republican lawmakers have opposed removing the memorial.
Why would the military want to take down Confederate symbols? One, because a military needs unity, which becomes more difficult in an environment full of reminders of subordination and injustice. Two, because the creation of the Confederacy was an act of treason, and the military tends to frown on treason. Three, because the military has become a very significant path out of poverty and obscurity for people who don’t have the boost of white ancestry.
On Monday, as the work to remove the monument was getting underway, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that had been requested by a group called Defend Arlington.
The group, which is affiliated with an organization called Save Southern Heritage Florida, sued the Defense Department in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Sunday…
Save what Southern heritage? The slave-owning one. The enslavement-defending one. The Glorious Cause one. That Southern heritage.
The memorial was the latest such monument to be targeted for removal since the public backlash in 2020 against Confederate statues after the killing of George Floyd. That movement helped push Congress to establish the Naming Commission in 2021 to devise a plan to rid the military of statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy.
The Defense Department mandated that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be removed by Jan. 1, 2024.
But apparently it’s a very bad thing to devise a plan to rid the military of statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy. Somebody warn the Defense Department.
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11 responses to “Its sanitized depiction of slavery”
I don’t subscribe to the Times, so I don’t know if they include this detail, but per the Washington Post the reason given for the request was that the removal was disturbing the graves around the memorial. A District judge had rejected their request:
So they went to another judge. This one granted a temporary stay, but it sounds like he won’t have a lot of patience with the group.
The NYT article did mention the disturbance of gravesites as part of the reason, but that appears secondary.
I hope this isn’t too much of a digression: there is a large Confederate memorial at the Alabama state capitol here in town. The Confederate battle flag that used to fly on top of it was taken down in 2015. The monument itself includes this inscription, over the four sides of marker:
The monument was erected in 1898 by Historical and Monumental Association of Alabama & Ladies Memorial Association of Alabama, which I think explains some of the focus of the inscription on the perspective of war widows. The text is quite blatantly praising the men who fought for the Confederacy as “patriots”, “knightliest of the knightly race”, and “chivalrous”. I don’t think there is any effort to try to move it. There is also a statue honoring J. Marion Sims (“father of gynecology” who operated on slaves without consent or anesthesia) at the capitol, and recently a monument honoring his victims (titled “Mothers of Gynecology”) was unveiled; perhaps a counter-monument like that might be appropriate.
“J. Marion Sims (“father of gynecology” who operated on slaves without consent or anesthesia)”
Do a web search on Nazi hypothermia experiments. Highly unethical and apparently they also produced data useful for saving hypothermia victims now.
It sounds like using data from this Sims fellow also raises ethical dilemmas.
For even those who think that slavery was some sort of internship for sharecroppers, how can they justify the monuments and plaques of traitors who took up arms against the United States? I think that Gone With the Wind is one of the most atrocious book/movies about the Civil War era because it both shows slavery as a relatively benign practice with household staff treated like kin (which due to rape, they were in many cases) and promotes the “lost cause” romanticism of the Confederacy.
Okay, so we don’t use data from the unethical studies, even if that information saves lives. I guess the best answer is to go back and do the studies ethically? Until then, no one can use the process? “Sorry, sir, I can’t save your life. That method was developed with unethical data. Sucks to be you.”
This is one of the problematic tropes coming out of this. Of course we should use the methods to save lives. We don’t have to worship or idolize or build statues to unethical researchers, but at some point, letting people die because the doctors in the past did unethical things is just…sorry, I can’t even think of a term for it. Ridiculous isn’t strong enough.
Following up breaches of ethics with more breaches of ethics does not make us ethical. We save lives. Someone can put a disclaimer in the information packet if they like, or require the doctor doing the procedure to put an acknowledgment in, but what would that serve? We can’t undo the past. We should do our best to make the present and future better.
[…] a comment by Sackbut on Its sanitized depiction of […]
iknklast: The key, I think (I agree with your broader point, to be clear), is that when talking about this data, we must stress and give credit only to the victims of the unethical study itself, not to the individuals who performed it. So stop calling Sims the ‘father of gynecology’ entirely–hell, strike his name from the textbooks where that’s viable. Instead, talk about the women who suffered, and how they were treated, and then note that it’s a bitter irony that their involuntary suffering was the source of so many other women’s lives being bettered and saved. The proper course of dealing with ugly history is to own the holy fuck out of it.
(See also: modern-day Germany and Naziism)
@Ophelia:
Across the world there have been many examples of civil wars and other wars, after which former enemies have reconciled, and the military then wants unity.
Generally this is not best done by repeatedly emphasizing that one side were “traitors”, and not allowing them memorials to their war dead in a cemetery where their war dead are buried.
Acceptance (though not forgetting) of the past, rather than continual re-litigation of the past, tends to work better.
You omitted three, which distorts what I said.
Your passionate sympathy with the Confederacy and contemporary fans of the Confederacy is noted. Your complete, utter, total, smug indifference to the millions of people enslaved under that Confederacy and their descendants is noted. I told you yesterday to shut up and I wasn’t joking. You’re defending the indefensible and it’s repulsive. Just stop.
The removal is back on. The judge visited the site, and was not impressed with the plaintiffs’ concerns.
He also saw through to their real motives.
And he got to the heart of why such statues should be removed.
Of course some Republican state legislators spoke up in defense of free enterprise and against cancel culture.
(Note: while the cemetery is located within Virginia, it is federal property, run by the Pentagon which sits just to the south.)
Virtue signaling for racists?