A part of the “Reconciliation Monument” that’s been restored at Arlington National Cemetery.
On August 5, Pete Hegseth, secretary of the Department of Defense (DOD), tweeted:
I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture—often referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument”—will rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site. It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it.
The “Reconciliation Monument” depicts and honors Confederate soldiers marching off to defend and extend a system based on the brutal, centuries-long enslavement of Black people… a system that allowed the wholesale torture and rape of the people it enslaved and the sale of their children to unknown places, often never to be seen again. A key part of the sculpture shows the “faithful mammy” taking care of the “master’s” baby… and another supposedly “faithful” slave marching off with “the master” to war… to defend his own enslavement!
Nowhere are the scars from whipping and torture. And nowhere to be found are the hundreds of thousands of slaves who broke free, who ran from the plantations to freedom, and then demanded to join the Union Army to destroy that system. Those heroes died out of all proportion to their numbers.
But instead, Pete Hegseth honors the horrific system of slavery and the war criminals who marched off to kill and die in its defense.
Reconciliation—in the Service of Empire
Arlington National Cemetery is the largest military cemetery in the country. It is where veterans of U.S. wars have been buried since the end of the Civil War and it is visited by between three to four million people a year. The placement of this statue in Arlington in 1914 culminated a decades-long effort by the U.S. rulers to reintegrate the slaveholders they had fought in the Civil War into the mainstream of the American ruling class and culture. This was a campaign to “put the country together again” after the Civil War—in order to better contend as an imperial power around the world.
Under the protection of federal troops after the Civil War—Black people had won the right to vote, own land, and so on. (These troops included some of the Black soldiers who fought to be allowed into the Union Army during the Civil War.) But even these rights were constantly under attack—both political and physical. The protection the troops provided, limited as it often was, was critical to any of the rights that existed for Black people. This was the 10-year period known as Reconstruction.
But in 1877 Reconstruction was reversed. “Redemption” and then “reconciliation” would mean that federal troops would be pulled out of the South as Black people were violently stripped of the vote… as Black people were horrifically lynched by the scores and hundreds every year by hysterically violent mobs of white people… and as anti-Black segregation in every single part of southern life would be upheld as “the law of the land” by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Reconciliation” would send those troops to exterminate the Native peoples in the “westward push” of U.S. capitalism, to violently crush the strikes of the newly emerging working class, and to periodically invade Mexico and to subjugate Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines in service of imperialist empire. And they would be used in World War I, to battle with their European rivals over division of the world.
By the time this poisonous and distorting "Reconciliation Monument" was planted in Arlington in 1914, Black people were getting banned from federal civil service jobs in Washington, DC by decree of the new Confederate-loving president Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a fanatical racist who went so far as to premiere and drool all over the disgustingly racist, pro-KKK film Birth of a Nation, which portrayed Black people’s liberation from slavery as a total disaster and Black people themselves as subhuman beasts who had to be violently suppressed.
The myth of the faithful, contented slave was key to justifying all this and it permeated American culture, from Arlington to Hollywood. Just go look at Gone with the Wind, if you can do so without puking—the Hollywood “classic” that used to be revived every few years. All this in the service of welding white America back together to contend for domination of the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa and against their European rivals.
The Army and the Society
Armies concentrate the social relations and values of the society they defend. So from its inception, the U.S. military—like the society which it serves (and whose values it concentrates)—has been a racist institution, dedicated to the defense and extension of white supremacy and permeated with racism. These armed forces remained segregated until 1948. Even after desegregation, they gave Black and other people of color the shit end of the stick. But by the late 1960s, Black GIs had become a leading force in the political resistance, refusal to follow orders, and outright rebellions that took place among the U.S. troops in Vietnam.
In part to deal with the aftermath of Vietnam and in part to deal with an increasingly “multicultural” world and society, the armed forces were forced to make some adjustments. By the 1990s the Black general and war criminal Colin Powell was made the new public face of the army, while other Black people—along with women of all nationalities—were allowed to rise through the ranks to positions of leadership. In 2020, when the uprising against the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor rocked the entire society, Mark Milley—then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—along with the Secretary of Defense refused to go along with Trump’s demand that the troops fire on protesters. This was at least in part out of fear of losing the loyalty of the troops, over 40 percent of whom were non-white.
The Trump regime—and especially Trump II—represents something different. The fascists now on top of this system fervently believe that the U.S. can only contend in today’s world as an openly white supremacist, male supremacist, and immigrant-hating society—all held together by a fanatical Christian fascism. Again, the cultures and social relations within armies concentrate the social relations of the society—and in this case, Hegseth and Trump are on a rampage to radically and repressively transform those cultures and values especially in the armed forces... as part of, and to help forcefully carry through, their imposition on all of society.
To do that, they have purged Black officers like CQ Brown, who had been commander of the Air Force and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They purged Admiral Lisa L. Fagan, the woman who had headed the Coast Guard. They have purged all trans people, and spitefully denied them any separation benefits like pensions, GI Bill, etc. (The even further glorification of rape culture is beyond the scope of this article.) And they have slandered every other non-white, non-male, non-straight in any position of authority as a “DEI hire,” while putting in a dangerous, vicious and mindlessly-obedient-to-Trump moron as Secretary of Defense.
Fascist Erasure of History
As for “erasing history,” this accusation comes from a regime that is systematically purging the entire history of the oppression and resistance of Black people, women, LGBT people and others from every website, school, park, museum, university, and any other institution it can control or bully. In March the Associated Press reported that “26,000 images and online posts on various government websites had been flagged for deletion by the Department of Defense as part of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) purge.” They changed the name of the Harvey Milk—a ship named for a pioneering gay activist and city councilman of San Francisco who was murdered by a reactionary.
The re-implantation of this racist “Reconciliation” Monument was followed one day later by the National Park Service announcement that it was restoring a statue of Confederate brigadier general Albert Pike in Washington, DC, and three days after that Trump sent troops to DC to patrol Black neighborhoods and chase down Brown immigrants.
Listen to and watch Bob Avakian's social media messages.
All this further proves the point from Bob Avakian’s social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #113, “The Trump MAGA fascists would have been on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War, fighting to maintain, and expand, slavery”:
After the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, these Trump/MAGA fascists would have been with the Ku Klux Klan, with its repeated lynchings and other terror to reinforce open segregation and brutal discrimination.
And he goes on to conclude this message as follows:
Things are moving fast—the fascists in power are determined to quickly overwhelm, divide, crush and demoralize all those who would stand up against them.
Every decent person, in rapidly growing numbers, needs to be mobilized, and to mobilize others, quickly becoming millions rising up, united in their determination to bring about a political situation where this regime can no longer remain in power.