Stationing the military in a US city (not to mention against the wishes of the city's mayor and the state's governor) is another unspeakable outrage. But the effort to coopt the military for white supremacy, which seems to be the agenda for this stage of the hostile takeover of the US, takes other terrible forms, too. We know about the ways the unqualified Secretary of Defense gratuitously fired generals who weren't white men. We know he has ordered the erasing of the military's long history of racial and gender inclusion.
And we knew that he was cynically restoring the names of military bases which had been stripped of the names of Confederate generals in response to the belated reckoning of BLM, dodging the law by finding other veterans who happened to have the same names to name them after instead - not that Bragg, that Hood, that Lee... nudge nudge wink wink.
I hadn't thought about the veterans whose names they were using to skirt the law; my bad. This is desecration of the memory of the dead. But the absolute obscenity of this became clear to me today on reading about the president's explicitly championing Confederate names at a military base yesterday (in front of a hand-picked military audience). I read that to rename a Virginia base originally named after Confederate general A. P. Hill they are stealing the names of three other veterans. Renamed Fort Walker two years ago after Civil War surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient Mary Walker, it is now to be named (nudge nudge wink wink) after three figures who fought in North Carolina for the Union: Pvt. Bruce Anderson from New York, 1st Sgt. Robert A. Pinn and Lt. Col. Edward Hill from Michigan. Call them "A. P. Hill" for short. Nudge nudge wink wink.
I'm at a loss for words to express my outrage at this. These were men who fought to defeat the Confederacy, now coopted to commemorate a Confederate general? Two of them just to provide initials for this travesty?! Grinding these men's names up to make a Confederate golem is horrifying, even before we learn that First Sergeant Pinn served in the Colored Infantry. How many of those nudging and winking know of this desecration, smile at the South sneakily rising again? Shameless, disrespectful of the dead and so vile vile vile ...