Retired U.S. Army General and former CIA Director David Petraeus on Tuesday called for the removal of the names of Confederate figures from military bases nationwide.
Petraeus wrote in an op-ed for The Atlantic that “It is time to remove the names of traitors like Benning and Bragg from our country’s most important military installation,” a reference to bases named after Gen. Henry Benning in Columbus, Georgia, and Gen. Braxton Bragg in Cumberland County, North Carolina.
[…]
It gives me considerable pause, for example, to note that my alma mater, West Point, honors Robert E. Lee with a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks, the last of which was built during the 1960s. A portrait of Lee with an enslaved person adorns a wall of the cadet library, the counterpoint to a portrait of Grant, his Civil War nemesis, on a nearby wall.
We do not live in a country to which Braxton Bragg, Henry L. Benning, or Robert E. Lee can serve as an inspiration. Acknowledging this fact is imperative. Should it fail to do so, the Army, which prides itself on leading the way in perilous times, will be left to fight a rearguard action against a more inclusive American future, one that fulfills the nation’s founding promise.
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Petraeus’s remarks come after the U.S. Marine Corps ordered the removal of all Confederate paraphernalia from Marine bases around the world.
The Friday statement from the U.S. Marine Corps read:
The Confederate battle flag has all too often been co-opted by violent extremist and racist groups whose divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps. Our history as a nation, and events like the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, highlight the divisiveness the use of the Confederate battle flag has had on our society.
Last Thursday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced a statue of Robert E. Lee will be removed “as soon as possible” from Richmond’s Monument Avenue.
The statue, which sits on state property, will move to storage while Northam’s administration works “with the community to determine its future,” the governor said at a news conference where the announcement was met with extended applause.
Northam made the decision after days of angry protests in Richmond and across the country over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck while he pleaded for air.
“You see, in Virginia, we no longer preach a false version of history. One that pretends the Civil War was about ‘state rights’ and not the evils of slavery. No one believes that any longer,” Northam said.
The decision came a day after Richmond’s mayor, Levar Stoney, announced he will seek to remove the other four Confederate statues along Monument Avenue, a prestigious residential street and National Historic Landmark district.
All confederate monuments in Jacksonville, Florida, will soon be taken down, Mayor Lenny Curry said Tuesday at a protest outside City Hall.
“I hear you,” the mayor told demonstrators prior to the march that was organized by Leonard Fournette of the Jacksonville Jaguars, according to Action News Jax.
“Yesterday, there was a Confederate monument in the park. Today, it’s gone, and the others in this city will be removed as well,” he said.
Curry added that he was in conversation with the Cultural Council about where the monuments would be placed and had been thinking about the removal for “some time.”
“We’ve got to find a way to come together. We’re not going to agree on everything — that’s just not human history, human nature. We’ve got to find common ground,” he continued.
Saturday, Curry tweeted that these were serious times and leaders would be remembered for how they acted:
Tuesday morning, officials removed a confederate soldier monument from Jacksonville’s Hemming Park that was placed there in 1898, according to First Coast News.
“The monument, one of the few things downtown that survived the Great Fire of Jacksonville, has been removed amid the protests and rallies across the country after the death of George Floyd,” the article read.
Later, Seber Newsome, a member of Save Our Heritage Florida, expressed disagreement with the decision to pull the statue down and said there was “nothing in that monument that promotes slavery.”
“It talks to the soldier of Florida. American veterans. Confederate veterans. Our veterans. My ancestors did not own one slave,” Newsome explained.
Despite some pushback, former President of the City Council Anna Lopez Brosche praised Curry’s decision and said the city could “begin the process of healing.”
“I appreciate Mayor Lenny Curry’s executive action to remove the Confederate monument from Hemming Park, and I am grateful for this day in Jacksonville,” she wrote in a statement.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
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A statue of Bolshevik communist despot Vladimir Lenin has been erected in Germany– as statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other historic figures are torn down in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the wider West.
Lenin, born Vladimir Ulyanov, was the inaugural leader of what later became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, after his Bolshevik faction failed to win a democratic majority in the All-Russian Constituent Assembly but came out on top in the brutal civil war which they plunged the Russian Empire into in 1917.
Despite posing as a champion of national and ethnic minorities and their right to self-determination in the early period of his revolution, factions which attempted to govern themselves autonomously in the Ukraine were ruthlessly crushed, and he later invaded neighbouring countries such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Poland.
Nevertheless, the long-dead foreign dictator is being honoured in the German city of Gelsenkirchen with a statue, a 1950s relic of the former Soviet vassal state of Czechoslovakia — even as statues of historic Westerners are being torn down across the world amind the now-global Black Lives Matter unrest.
Hungarian PM: ‘The Spirit of Marx, Lenin, and the Re-Education Camps’ Lives on in the EU https://t.co/nOmkbrK055
“The time for monuments to racists, anti-Semites, fascists, anti-communists and other relics of the past has clearly passed,” declared Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) chairwoman Gabi Fechtner in a triumphant statement.
“Lenin was an ahead-of-his-time thinker of world-historical importance, an early fighter for freedom and democracy,” she claimed.
The new monument stands besides a large MLPD billboard which alongside a stylised image of Lenin’s face, declares “give anticommunists no chance!”.
The raising of the statue has caused widespread disgust among leading conservatives, both in the former Soviet satellites of Central and Eastern Europe and in the West proper.
“Statues of Jefferson Davis, Gen. Lee, Columbus, Washington, Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Gen. Grant and Saint Junipero Serra all torn down while a statue of Lenin is unveiled in Europe,” lamented U.S. Congressman Steve King.
“This IS a war on Western Civilization. Lincoln is likely next,” he added.
Abraham Lincoln has already been targeted at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London, England, however, with vandals heedless of his status as the President who led the war to free the slaves — and was assassinated for doing so — heavily defacing his monument in Parliament Square, along with that of British wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
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