On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., added language to the annual defense funding bill. Warren’s amendment would order the Pentagon to rename all military …
On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., added language to the annual defense funding bill. Warren’s amendment would order the Pentagon to rename all military bases currently named for Confederate Civil War generals.
The bases include many of the most famous in America. Among them: Fort Benning in Georgia, Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Many of the men who fought and won World War II were trained at these bases.
But Warren’s amendment goes farther than that. Warren would require the desecration of war graves. This country is filled with national cemeteries that honor Americans who fought and died in our wars. Many of those cemeteries hold Civil War soldiers from both sides and contain monuments to their sacrifice.
Those Civil War soldiers, blue and gray, are buried alongside one another for a reason. One side was right, one side was wrong. But when it was over, they were all Americans. Allowing them to lie in the same cemeteries allowed this country to heal its deepest fissure.
Healing is the opposite of what Elizabeth Warren wants to do now. She has no time for that. Warren profits from hatred and division, no matter how mindless. How many dead Confederate soldiers owned slaves or even supported slavery? Warren doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.
The Massachusetts Democrat wants to humiliate these soldiers more than 150 years after they died, and humiliate their descendants now. In Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, there is a memorial to Confederate troops. Warren’s amendment orders the Army to destroy it.
This is vandalism. But it’s worse than that. Healthy societies do not destroy own their history. A country is the sum total of its history, good and bad. Without it, you have no country, just a collection of banks and retail outlets.
This is obvious, but somehow it’s not obvious to Senate Republicans. They support Warren’s amendment.
