Southern Democrats fought the American Civil War to protect slavery from President Abraham Lincoln and the newly-formed Republican Party. No honest person who has reviewed and taught the relevant evidence would dispute as much.
Nor, however, should any honest person dispute the fact that those same tyrannical pro-slavery Democrats of the 19th century would find kindred spirits in their 21st-century woke counterparts.
On Monday morning, freshly-confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to signal an immediate extinguishment of the vile woke spirit that resulted in, among other things, the renaming of U.S. military installations under former President Joe Biden.
In accordance with the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, an eight-person Naming Commission issued a final report recommending “new names for nine military bases,” as well as “the disposition of all Confederacy-affiliated and named Department of Defense assets on those bases.”
As a result, for instance, Fort Benning, Georgia, became “Fort Moore,” and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, became “Fort Liberty.”
Speaking to the Pentagon press on Monday, Hegseth used the old names.
“Every moment that I’m here, I’m thinking about the guys and gals in Guam, in Germany, in Fort Benning, in Fort Bragg,” Hegseth said in a clip posted to the social media platform X.
Those comments seemed particularly noteworthy because they came less than 30 seconds after Hegseth specifically mentioned destroying wokeness.
“And today there are more executive orders coming, that we fully support” he said. Indeed, the first such order mandated “removing DEI.”
.@PeteHegseth gives his first statement to the Pentagon press. pic.twitter.com/7oievd0fFp
— Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 (@kristina_wong) January 27, 2025
Hegseth’s choice of words did not escape the attention of one excited female veteran on X.
“ARE WE ALSO CANCELLING THE WOKE DEI MILITARY INSTALLATION NAME CHANGES?” she wrote, using all caps for emphasis.
At the 50 second mark, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth referred to:
Fort Benning (now referred to as Fort Moore)
Fort Bragg (now referred to as Fort Liberty)ARE WE ALSO CANCELLING THE WOKE DEI MILITARY INSTALLATION NAME CHANGES?! 👏🏼 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/BmYT5VXPHp
— Heatherheather007 (@LibertyValkyrie) January 27, 2025
Of course, one must understand why patriotic Americans should feel so strongly about destroying wokeness, especially in the military.
(Spoiler: It has nothing to do with love of the Confederacy)
For starters, in its final report, the 2021 Naming Commission explained why it had targeted certain bases for renaming.
Fort Benning, for instance, “was named after Henry L. Benning, a lawyer, ardent secessionist, bitter opponent of abolition, and senior officer in the Confederate Army. He is on record as saying that he would rather be stricken with illness and starvation than see slaves liberated and given equality as citizens,” the report read.
Should the “Fort Benning” and “Fort Bragg” names be restored?
Likewise, the report described Braxton Bragg, namesake of Fort Bragg, as “a slave owning plantation owner and senior Confederate Army officer,” generally regarded as inept, “temperamental, a harsh disciplinarian, and widely disliked in the pre-Civil War U.S. Army and within the Confederate Army by peers and subordinates alike throughout his career.”
In other words, service in the Confederate cause, distinguished or otherwise, did not in itself merit expulsion from institutional memory. Benning and Bragg committed the additional sins of not having the right views or temperaments.
Surely the reader can see where that sort of strident moralizing about the past ultimately leads.
At the core of modern wokeness lies a belief in one’s own moral superiority. And that conviction leads woke activists to make relentless war on everything that does not fit their view of how the world should be.
In this case, they did not seek nuance. Instead, they sought to eradicate everything related to the Confederacy.
And that makes them far more dangerous than the memories of those long-gone Confederate officers.
The renaming of U.S. military bases, for instance, bore a striking resemblance to the 1960s Cultural Revolution in China, when Communist dictator Mao Zedong unleashed legions of Chinese young people, his so-called “Red Guards,” to destroy everything old and thus make way for a new Communist utopia in which every Chinese man and woman acknowledged himself or herself as subject to the Maoist state alone.
Moreover, Americans knew that about China at the time.
“The traditional big Chinese family apparently is gone, too. Cramped living quarters and social conditions today dictate a small family composed of husband, wife and one to three children,” The New York Times wrote in 1971.
Chinese Communists destroyed the traditional family on purpose. Americans knew this and yet still fell prey to Maoist wokeness, which reached its apex in the Black Lives Matter orgy of destruction in 2020, as well as in the DEI-inspired “anti-racism” of that broader, hideous era.
Conversely, sensible and patriotic Americans can see Benning, Bragg, and the Confederacy for who and what they were.
On some level, of course, those original base names reflected the ugly racial attitudes of the segregation era.
But they also reflected a key element of the post-Civil War experience: reconciliation. After all, those Southern men who fought the Civil War returned home vanquished, but they also returned home as Americans.
Moreover, what should posterity make of Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, for instance, a close confidante of Gen. Robert E. Lee and one of the Confederacy’s most capable commanders, who after the war joined the Republicans and even commanded African-Americans as part of the New Orleans Metropolitan Police Force?
Does the woke mandate to destroy everything related to the Confederacy include the eradication of Longstreet’s memory? Surely not, for we cannot constantly judge history by the fashion of our own times.
Finally, one hardly must add that the obsession with renaming military bases overlapped with the Biden administration’s catastrophic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. Thus, even if the issue of renaming bases did not primarily involve cancerous wokeness, the military still should have other priorities.
In short, whereas strident woke activists regard their own sense of moral superiority as a license to destroy everything old (China-like), sensible and patriotic Americans like Hegseth prefer tradition, humility, and nuance to government by self-righteous tyrants.
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