A monument to Confederate soldiers is scheduled to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery by the end of the week.
The removal comes in response to legislation passed by Congress, and amidst efforts in recent years to take down symbols honoring slaveholders and Confederate leaders.
In 2021, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Defense to look at removing “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” commemorating the Confederacy.
Arlington’s Confederate Memorial offers a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to a report prepared by a commission set up in response to that legislation. The report notes that an inscription promotes the “Lost Cause” myth, “which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.”
Good. It never should’ve been there in the first place. Fuck every single one of those Confederate traitors.