With Americans in the streets calling for racial equality, only the stupidest racist could possibly think this is a good time to defend white supremacists. But never underestimate Donald Trump’s talent for desecrating the presidency.
His latest impulse is to wax indignant at the prospect of renaming the 10 U.S. military bases that currently honor the memories of notorious Confederate officers. His own Army secretary is open to the idea – rightly so, because purging the Confederate taint would be a symbolic thumbs-up for our best egalitarian values. Indeed, retired General and ex-CIA chief David Petraeus thinks it’s a great idea: “The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention.”
Take one guess who isn’t paying attention.
Trump decreed yesterday that his regime “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations…These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.”
This guy couldn’t score an easy lay-up if he were 11 feet tall.
Maybe Trump has no clue that the bases are named for traitors who fought for slavery by trying to kill as many Americans as possible. If so, he could’ve enlightened himself by thumbing for knowledge on his phone. He would’ve swiftly learned, for instance, that Brigadier Gen. Henry Benning (of Fort Benning fame), delivered this secession speech two months before the war began:
“If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished…Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?…We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. That is the fate which abolition will bring upon the white race.”
If Trump were to read up on General Robert E. Lee (of Fort Lee fame), he’d quickly learn that Lee was a brutal slave owner. Three slaves escaped in 1859, and after they were recaptured, here’s what happened – according to a subsequent account from one of the slaves, Wesley Norris:
“(W)e were immediately taken before General Lee who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty. We were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”
Hey, c’mon. There’s very fine people on both sides.
Not all 10 Confederate leaders were as openly vicious and racist as Lee and Benning, but they all swore to defend the Confederate Constitution, which declared – right there in Article I – that no law shall ever be enacted “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” And Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens declared, on the eve of war, that the traitorous government’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.”
Indeed, General John Bell Hood (of Fort Hood fame) acknowledged in a speech that “slavery…was the secret motor, the mainspring of the war.” And General John Brown Gordon (of Fort Gordon fame) is widely believed by historians to have been a postwar leader in the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan.
But let’s briefly set aside (as if it were possible) the racial factor. Trump’s main argument is that the names on those “legendary Military Bases” signify “a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” He apparently doesn’t know that most of those Confederate generals were…to use his most derisive word…LOSERS!
At worst, most of them were bad battlefield tacticians; at best, they were LOSERS! at best. General Braxton Bragg (of Fort Bragg fame) screwed up the Battle of Chattanooga so badly that he resigned from the Confederate Army; according to historian Peter Cozzens, his officers so detested his incompetence that “Bragg’s removal or their transfer were the only alternatives to an unbearable existence.” John Bell Hood lost the battle of Atlanta to Union Gen. William Sherman; then he went to Tennessee and lost there, losing roughly half his troops in Nashville. Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk (of Fort Polk fame) was killed while the Confederates were losing Atlanta. Lt. Gen A. P. Hill (of Fort Hill fame) was killed while the Confederates were losing the siege of Petersburg.
Leave it to Trump to tweet his support (knowingly or not) for racist losers. All of which prompted Paul Eaton, a retired major general and combat leader in Bosnia, Iraq, and Somalia, to release this statement yesterday:
“Donald Trump made it official. Rather than move this nation further away from institutionalized racism, he believes we should cling to it and its heritage, by keeping the names of racist traitors on the gates of our military bases. These bases were named long after the Civil War was over, by whites who wanted to fight back against progress towards racial equality. Donald Trump stands shoulder-to-shoulder with them, and against the ideals that the United States Army stands for.”
Yesterday, the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee voted to require the Pentagon to rename those 10 bases. Will Trump budge, in the spirit of racial reconciliation? David Petraeus writes: “The way we resolve these issues will define our national identity for this century and beyond.”
Trump’s instinct (his only instinct) is to keep pandering to his reactionary white base, but now we have the news that NASCAR has banned all displays of the Confederate flag. So think about that for a moment:
Trump is now to the right of NASCAR. I detect a ray of hope for America.
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The graphic today: From left to right, Bragg, Benning, and Lee.