In just a matter of days, the historic Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery is set to be removed by the Biden Administration as part of its ongoing campaign to erase Confederate history.
As ABC News reports, a cemetery spokesman confirmed on Saturday that the monument will be removed shortly. Security fencing has been installed around the memorial to keep visitors from getting too close, with officials expecting the removal to be complete by December 22nd. Officials insist that the removal process will not damage the surrounding landscape, including graves and headstones that are in the immediate vicinity of the monument.
The decision is opposed by over 40 Republican members of Congress, as well as Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.), who plans to relocate the monument to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley. It is not yet clear when the federal government will transfer ownership of the monument over to the Virginia state government.
Shortly after taking office, Biden created an allegedly “independent” Naming Commission to identify as many Confederate monuments as possible for removal, all across the country. The commission demanded the removal of the Arlington memorial in 2022, as part of its final overall report to Congress, which included demands to rename all military bases that are named after Confederate figures, including the legendary Fort Bragg.
The monument, carved by sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and frequently described as one of the most beautiful features in all of Arlington Cemetery, was commissioned in 1910 and unveiled in 1914. The elegant bronze statue features a woman crowned with olive leaves standing on a 32-foot high pedestal, and depicts multiple figures from the Confederacy and the Union alike gathered in the spirit of reconciliation after the Civil War. At the feet of the woman in the monument is a Biblical inscription which says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Despite the initial calls for the removal and destruction of Confederate history beginning in about 2015, there was an extremely expedited push across the country to do so during the race riots of 2020. Confederate statues, many of them hundreds of years old, were either vandalized or torn down by anarchic, communist, and black nationalist rioters, or were voted to be removed by local governments cowered into submission by the mobs.
Perhaps the most infamous example was the equestrian statue of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2017, a peaceful right-wing protest in support of the statue was attacked by a mob of Antifa rioters, which ultimately led to one Antifa rioter’s death from a heart attack. The city government voted to remove the statue, and despite insistence from some on the Left that the historic monument could be relocated to a museum, the 99-year-old statue was completely melted down in secret earlier this year.
Start the discussion at community.amgreatness.com