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Last Friday, Donald Trump responded to a grim jobs report by firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A few days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that a statue commemorating the Confederacy would be returned to Arlington National Cemetery, after its removal in 2023.
One is not merely a distraction from the other — both are in fact an indelible part of Trump’s fascist impulse to rewrite history.
“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’ — will be rightfully returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth crowed on social media. “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
There is a critical difference between acknowledging the nation’s history and celebrating its worst moments. In Germany, they don’t erase their shameful Nazi past, but that doesn’t mean they’re erecting hagiographic statues commemorating Nazi war criminals.
While on the subject of war criminals, the National Park Service announced on Monday that the statue of Albert Pike, a northerner who fought for the Confederacy as a brigadier general, would return to its position of honor just a mile away from the White House.
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Pike’s statue was toppled, defaced, and burned on June 19, 2020, which is also Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the end of slavery in the US. That was also the year when many Confederate memorials — and even Trump, himself a living Confederate monument — were finally removed from positions of prominence. George Floyd’s murder had triggered a supposed long overdue “racial reckoning,” but this proved short lived. As Richard Pryor once said, “Remember the revolution, brother? We lost.”
Five years later, Trump is back in power and he’s rolling back decades of hard-fought progress for all minorities. These Confederate memorials are the most obvious and glaring symbol of what the United States of MAGA truly values. It’s even worse when you unpack their true history and what it means for today.
The Lost Cause endures
Tellingly, Hegseth didn’t refer to Arlington Nation Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial by name. Instead, he claimed that Confederate soldier Moses Ezekiel’s sculpture was “often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument.’” This is untrue. Ezekiel was a proponent of the Lost Cause myth, which argued that the Confederacy’s motivation and goals were noble, heroic, and not at all centered on keeping human beings in bondage. Ezekiel insisted he “never fought for slavery, but for states' rights and for free trade.”
The Confederate Memorial was a project spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a fact Hegseth fails to mention. The UDC strongly pushed the Lost Cause narrative, which included historical revisionism regarding the horrors of slavery. As recently as 2018, the UDC website claimed that “slaves for the most part were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.” Ezekiel’s statue features a stereotypical image of a Black woman handing a baby over to a Confederate soldier. Anyone with a passing awareness of antebellum history understands how offensive that is.
A note from Aaron: Enjoying this article