“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” — George Orwell in “Nineteen Eight-Four.”
Like ISIS and the old Soviet Union but using unionized city workers, Madison erases history when it cannot be rewritten.
Mayor Paul Soglin’s unilateral decision to tear down a plaque at Forest Hill Cemetery memorializing the Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war, far from home so long ago, is being hailed in all the Left-thinking places as a courageous gesture –comparable to Rosa Parks on that Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. But much more cheaply. Next to go is a larger stone naming the deceased, “erected in loving memory” by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Bring on the jack hammers!
The free speech hecklers at our universities have nothing on Mayor Soglin.
Soglin is “a leader who has taken the high ground,” exults Comrade John Nichols, in his full dress uniform as Party Historical Revisionist.
Actually, it was folks like General Vilas and Colonel Hegg who took the high ground in the Civil War. Mayor Soglin has done nothing more than desecrate the burial ground of the mostly low-ranking grunts from the southern states who shivered and died a miserable death at Camp Randall. All for easy brownie points.
Is it not instructive that the Union soldiers who fought, captured, and guarded them chose to give these 140 boys and men a proper burial?
Their small and simple grave stones are a magnitude lesser than a statute, say, of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy and a slave owner. Or even of General Lee, riding high on Traveller.
Yes, the plaque that Soglin is trying to send down the memory hole describes these dead as “valiant” — but so did General Grant. O.K., “unsung heroes” may be a little over the top, but the monument contained no defense of slavery, no brief for oppression, no mandate for tyranny. Read the “hateful inscription” in full.
Flowers marked where the explanatory plaque once stood in the photo at left.
The large stone at front center (left photo) is next to go. It merely explains the
provenance of the memorial: the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Flowers adorned each southern boy’s gravestone
on Sunday (8-20-17) four days after Soglin’s desecration.
Madison’s monument to Communism
Tyranny and Oppression? That describes the memorial stone standing at James Madison Park, just off E. Gorham Street. It is a monument to the slavery of Communism, erected on City of Madison property. It is dedicated to the International Brigades, volunteers who fought on the side of Communism during the Spanish Civil War from 1936-39.
Madison Mayor Soglin, if you seek freedom, if you seek justice for the people of Madison, if you seek emancipation, come here to this park. Mr. Soglin, go to James Madison Park. Mr. Soglin, tear down this monument! Tell it to Mayor Soglin.
Nichols and his fellow revisionists are never so candid as to call it a monument to Big C Communism. They always refer to the International Brigades as having fought against fascism.
Indeed, Comrade Nichols celebrated one of those Communist partisans as a “premature anti-fascist”, after the death eight years ago of a superannuated Bolshie by the name of Clarence Kailin. The linked article pictures Kailin laying red roses at Madison’s Monument to Communism. The old guy died a committed Stalinist, never having recanted his devotion to totalitarianism.
Let’s understand the Spanish civil war. In his Wall Street Journal book review of a life of Franco, historian Michael Seidman records that the leftist government that took power in 1936, before Franco’s intervention, “unleashed … church burnings, looting, the collectivization of private property, and the physical harassment of rightists and Catholics.”
I’ll rely on Wikipedia here: “The International Brigades represented Comintern and Joseph Stalin’s commitment to provide assistance to the Spanish Republican cause (with arms, logistics, military advisers and the NKVD). Republican volunteers who were opposed to “Stalinism” did not join the Brigades but formed the separate Trotskyist faction POUM, which was a mix of Spaniards and foreign volunteers. Historians and veterans of the battalion estimate that between 50 and 80% of the battalion were actively communist.”
Volunteers poured into Spain to defend the Republic, among them the writer George Orwell, who fought with the anti-Stalinist POUM. From his experiences, Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia, which sits on the Stately Manor bookshelf.
The historian historian Raymond Carr writes:
The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936–39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist ‘line’, especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man.
Orwell himself wrote of the Communist crackdown, “No one who was in Barcelona then … will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs ….” Again, not Franco, but the Soviet-led and NKVD-monitored International Brigades, of which, Kailin’s so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade (surely, a screaming example of Communist expropriation) was a member unit.
Orwell’s experience with big C Communism in Spain led to his withering rebuke of totalitarianism in Animal Farm (1944) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (written in 1949).
For further study: Chicago Tribune writer John Kass suggests “While we’re toppling offensive symbols, what about the Democratic Party?”
“You can’t say the Democratic Party wasn’t the slavery party. It’s historical fact.”
Consider also that Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese-American citizens. Woodrow Wilson was a notorious racist; a fan of Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the newly revived Ku Klux Klan.
25 responses to “Mr. Soglin: Tear down this monument to Communism!”
Please don’t tell them that Confederate spy Belle Boyd is buried in the Dells.
And Tom Jefferson’s son is buried in Madison.
Odd you would include that quote from 1984. Did you cut and paste from the trump, bannon, conway playbook? So many hypocrites, so little time.
Where do you see hypocrisy here?
Don’t go all conway on us, splat. The use of alternative facts is one of the big drivers of the trump agenda. Successful, no. But certainly consistently played.
Always the dissembling. Do you support Mayor Soglin’s plan to trash the plaque citing the provenance of site and (soon, apparently) the big stone naming all 140 soldiers interred in Confederates’ Rest? Yes or no, Baldy?
I just sent Soglin a note asking him to explain the difference between his desecration of a cemetery and the acts of vandals who periodically topple headstones in Jewish cemeteries. Not that I’m expecting an answer.
dave:
I don’t give a rats patoot if anybody takes down CSA monuments. Taking down the names of the individuals is silly. Monuments to invaders (Lee etal) may be worthy of removal. But history is still history. Having said that, remember that REL was a traitor, lead hundreds of thousands on both sides to their death, was a slave owner, and lost the war (that alone should have been reason enough for trump to take down the statue). If that were today, and the General was Kelly, Powell or Mattis, they would be tried for treason and executed. And you would have cheered.
What is really disturbing is your use of the Orwell quote, seeing as alternative facts are the MO for the current cast of clowns in the WH. A smart guy like you should have figured that out by now.
So, should Abraham Lincoln have hung General Lee from a lamp post? No, Lincoln wanted to bind up the nation’s wounds, not pour salt in them. (“With malice toward none, charity for all.”) The South could have (and considered) waging a decades-long guerrilla war. Lincoln and Grant prevented that.
No, I think Lincoln, Grant and Lee (after the war) did the right thing. But that doesn’t change what Lee and the CSA did 1861-65. Leave the headstone for the individual, but don’t make idols out of leaders of what become the Cult of the Lost Cause. They were still traitors to the US.
Does the plaque and stone at Forest Hill make the dead POW soldiers “idols”? Is Soglin doing the right thing?
If this quote is accurate then I’d say those folks are being made into idols.
“The larger monument at Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery is not a Civil War monument. It was installed over 60 years after the end of the war. It is slab of propaganda paid for by a racist organization on public property when our city was inattentive to both the new form of slavery propagated by the donors with the Black Codes and to the meaning of that despicable fixture honoring slavery, sedition, and oppression”.
I see no “desecration of burial ground” here, just the removal of a plaque containing some questionable hyperbole erected by southern sympathizers; the graves and their stones are undisturbed. Why was the plaque there at all? These men, poor souls, did take up arms against their country.
What is profane to you is sacred to others.
Be tolerant of that.
You should have said the graves and stones are undisturbed FOR NOW. Does anyone seriously trust the PC fanatics directing the anti-Confederate crusade to stop at statues and plaques?
As for the charge of taking up arms against the country, what’s your policy on the many statues erected to John Brown, the rabid abolitionist who tried to incite a slave rebellion for the purpose of OVERTHROWING THE U. S. GOVERNMENT–whose treasonous efforts were thwarted by one Robert E. Lee, then an officer in the Union Army?
Hey, Old Commie, er Baldy – You were asked a question. Answer it!
No commie here, silly sarah. Just don’t spend all day waiting for folks to respond. Perhaps you have nothing better to do. I do.
Baldy has a problem with anything specific.
His rule, apparently, is “post something in haste, weasel away from it at leisure.’
Sure would be a shame if something were to happen to that Commie monument in James Madison (soon to be renamed Sojourner Truth) Park. Something that would require only a hammer and chisel and a few minutes of one’s time. Just sayin’ ….
Hammer and sickle?
Gary, we’ve seen that Communist Fist in Madison often but it was blue? Remember?
No one did more to end the warfare than Lee. He told his men to honor their paroles. They did.
Soon after the war an elderly black man went to the communion rail and knelt. No one in the Richmond Episcopal Church moved. This had never happened, no one knew what to do. Several minutes passed until an elderly white man knelt next to the black man. Time started up again and everyone received communion.
The white man was Robert E. Lee.
He also held the Medal of Honor for personal bravery shown when he was a Lt. in the Mexican War.
Yes all communist monuments should be torn down, since that cause was even more vile and bloody than the US Civil War (which was waged in support of an evil, fundamentally un-American cause, but was still central to American history, unlike the Spanish Civil War). However, of Mayor Soglin and other profs are serious about racial healing, one thing they should do immediately is rename Malcolm Shabazz High School. Malcolm X was a stone cold racist hate monger for most of his adult life. He’s responsible for spreading more vicious racial hate than any of the unfortunate Confederates who died in Madison. What on earth is his name doing on a MMSD building, at an institution supposedly dedicated to learning? To advance racial solidarity and historic literacy, it should be renamed Frederick Douglass High School.
A local stooge for Stalin and his proxies in Spain fought for Libertad according to the monument. Is there a constant irony alarm going off in the park?
[…] The reporter noted that just one month earlier, the Werkes had called for the removal of this monument to Communism, for that is what it is. (“Mayor Soglin, tear down this monument.”) […]