Pete (Hic!) Hegseth's Confederate Monuments Boner Resulting In Predictable Offenses To History, Common Decency

Glorifying losers? Sounds about white.

What is drunken limpdick Pete Hegseth up to today? Worshipping losers? How very on-brand.

Hegseth this week announced that a monument to the Confederacy that darkened the landscape at Arlington National Cemetery for a century before it was finally removed a few years ago will be restored. Why? Because Pete Hegseth respects history.

More precisely, Hegseth respects the history that has lodged itself in his mediocre intellect during feverish bouts of the DTs and couldn’t be removed if a B-2 dropped a bunker buster directly on his cerebral cortex. You could Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his entire brain and he would still squawk, “No woke! No erase history! Warfighter ethos!” like Mr. Burns waking up from that coma.

Pete Hegseth honors history, he doesn’t erase it! Unless you are talking about a Navy ship named after a gay person or a Black American, in which case that is unconstitutional bigotry against straight white men, which Pete Hegseth will fix by renaming the ships even before his morning hair oiling.

That sound you just heard is literally every historian on Earth simultaneously screaming.

Hegseth was so proud of that “woke lemmings” construction — such wordplay! — that he used it again while talking to Will Cain about the so-called “Reconciliation Monument” on Fox News a couple of days later:

This is so stupid. Does Pete Hegseth think everyone will forget about the Civil War if America’s landscape is not dotted with fucking statues honoring the traitors of the Confederacy?

“The Reconciliation Monument will return to Arlington where it belongs to recognize the service of Americans of all chapters.”

That’s if you want to consider Confederate soldiers to have been Americans, even though they made it abundantly clear by seceding and forming an entirely new nation that they didn’t, a mindset to which Hegseth could have clued himself in if he wasn’t wandering around in a 24/7 whiskey stupor.

What America’s drunkest Defense Secretary misses here is the context in which the Arlington statue was first erected. Will Cain claims it was “was designed and put in place to symbolize the reconciliation” of the two sides after the Civil War. This is not exactly true, or even at all. As has been noted in about fifty thousand books, articles, and historical society newsletters, the Confederate statues erected around the nation in the early 20th century were part of a conscious effort by Southern sympathizers to rewrite the reasons for the war to make it sound as if the Confederacy fought for a cause more noble than what it actually wanted, which was the right to practice slavery.

Shoot, Arlington Cemetery acknowledges this on its own website, which maybe Pete Hegseth could have someone read for him and explain the definitions of any big words he doesn’t understand:

The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery ... Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war ... The image of the faithful slave, embodied in the two figures on the memorial, appeared widely in American popular culture during the 1910s through 1930s[.]

The statue was designed and sculpted by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Jewish Virginian who served in the Confederate Army. (As a Jewish Virginian ourselves, yr Wonkette says BIeahhhh.) Ezekiel was an avid supporter of the “Lost Cause” revisionist view of the war. When he died, he was buried at the base of the monument.

Notably, Ezekiel’s descendants were all in favor of removing the statue after the infamous neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017. In a letter to the Washington Post, they noted that the monument “intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws,” and suggested the thing be put in a museum that made all this clear.

Nice Time! VA Gov Northam Goes Full General Sherman On Confederate Monuments

Pete Hegseth is too much of a dunce, or a racist, or a racist dunce, to understand what Ezekiel’s family said. We’re guessing when the monument is restored — a process that will allegedly cost $10 million taxpayer dollars, but so what, at least that money isn’t going to feed hungry schoolchildren or something equally woke — there will not be any acknowledgement or explanation of its history and original purpose.

This is why you do what Charlottesville did and melt down your Confederate monument so it can’t be pulled out of storage and used in this bad-faith way by people who probably think the US would be better off if the South had won the war. Or you can follow the example set by the city of Richmond, one-time capital of the Confederacy, which put the Confederate statues that once lined its famous Monument Avenue into a museum, where both their history and the history of the movement that brought them down can be fully told.

In fact, a few of those statues are currently being sent to Los Angeles to be part of an exhibit of toppled Confederate monuments from around the country. It’s not a laudatory exhibition. In fact, it’s actually the sort of “learning” Pete Hegseth claims putting the so-called Reconciliation Statue back up in Arlington will accomplish.

You do not honor history or learn it by glorifying the losers. If you did that, there would be statues of Nazis in parks and town squares and cemeteries all over America, and a couple of our military bases would be named stuff like Fort Hitler. We will grant you, though, that Pete Hegseth probably doesn’t see a problem there.

Losers glorifying losers. That seems about right for the Trump administration.

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