“A Confederate memorial is to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in the coming days,” the Associated Press reports, as “part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities.”

For years, I’ve been of two minds about the movement to remove these memorials.

On one hand, I generally object to the idea of “government property” being used for such purposes. In fact, I object to the very idea of “government property,” but if there’s going to be such a property claim I want its allowable uses and purposes to a least be very narrowly defined. So yeah, take down the memorials — all of them, not just the Confederate ones.

On the other hand, I’m a fan of history, and the memorials in question illustrate the history of (and the history following) America’s single greatest and most violent convulsion, a “Civil War” resulting in several hundred thousand deaths.

Arlington National Cemetery is part of that history. It’s situated on land confiscated from Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and several hundred Confederates lie among the Civil War dead buried there.

While the 1914 monument erected to those Confederates bears certain features the present generation may find offensive (e.g. a slave following his “owner” to war), it also bears the inscription “they have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” It is, in fact, a monument to reunification, not division, and to peace, not war. What’s not to like about that?

What was the Union premise for the war? That the United States was “one nation, indivisible.”

If that premise is correct (I don’t believe it is, but IF), then the Confederate dead are American dead, and precisely as entitled to  American honors and memorials as the Union dead.

During the Mexican War, later Union general and US president Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his fiancee: “If we have to fight, I would like to do it all at once and then make friends.”

The post-war era didn’t really accomplish that. After “Reconstruction,” the south largely recreated the former slave system in all but name, leaving its demolition to the civil rights movement of a century later, and to this very day, southern “Lost Cause” revisionists and revanchists keep the flames of Confederate sympathies burning.

But the Union, not the Confederacy, won that war — a war it fought on and for the premise of a single America including the former Confederacy and former Confederates.

Desecrating the graves of the Confederate dead, denying them commemoration on land seized from their most esteemed commander, sends exactly the opposite message. It’s an attempt to preserve, not end, the divisions the war was all about.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“More than one country has descended into riot, revolution, coup or civil war territory over disputes about the integrity of its elections,” I wrote in 2016. “Think it can’t happen here? Think again.”

At that time, Donald Trump was busy making preemptive excuses (“we are competing in a rigged election”) for his expected loss in the 2016 presidential election. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, played the same game, whining that her prospective loss raised  “national security issues” because the rigging gear was Made in Moscow.

Seven years later, American politics remains awash in “rigged election” rhetoric.

That rhetoric usually ignores the obvious, “rigging” by the nation’s two “major” political parties, which work overtime to prevent third party and independent candidates from even appearing on ballots. Instead, Democrats lean heavily into complaints of Republican “voter suppression,” while Republicans claim large-scale Democratic “voter fraud.”

As an outsider and anarchist who believes the US is in its period of terminal decline, I can’t bring myself to care very much which of those “major parties” runs the show or what dirty tricks it uses to get and keep the job.

On the other hand, few of us, no matter how pessimistic or cynical, really like the idea of riot, revolution, coup and civil war. Like God in the old saying, those things don’t care if you believe in them — they’ll wreck your day without regard to your political sentiments.

Two presidential elections after I called out that potential, the “rigged election” tune seems to be segueing seamlessly into its second verse: The advent of the strongman.

Even as he cracks wise about it and muses that it might just be for “one day,”  former president and current Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s recent campaign schtick leans heavily into some Americans’ fear of — and others’ longing for —  a totalitarian dictatorship, complete with revenge prosecutions of political enemies and mass roundups/detentions of immigrants and malcontents.

Trump’s likely opponent, incumbent Joe Biden, sticks more to themes of “democracy” and “the soul of America” when on the stump. But he’s given the imperial presidency he inherited a steroid injection. He’s already on the job of  revenge prosecutions (of, among others Trump), bolstering the immigration police state, and instituting censorship in the name of “fighting disinformation.”

It’s difficult, at this point, to envision a freer, more peaceful, and more prosperous America within the confines of the existing political system. We’re sliding down the pole of history toward tyranny, as most polities do, and we’ve reached the portion of the pole that’s greased.

If we end up with a man (or woman) on horseback, our rightfully fraying faith in elections will be the horse. Politics will end up breaking us, unless we break it first.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Sound advice from US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT): “As a rule, Americans shouldn’t trust any bill so large that it has to be delivered by handcart.” He’s referring to the latest “National Defense Authorization Act,” which weighs in at more than 3,000 pages.

Stopping at “Americans shouldn’t trust any bill” would improve Lee’s rule, but he’s a politician, so let’s give him some (cough) Lee-way and credit him with a good start.

There’s plenty of bad stuff crammed into the latest NDAA, not least renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which should really be called the “Illegally and Unconstitutionally Spying on Americans Act.” But as usual when it comes to NDAAs, I prefer to focus on the over-arching badness of the thing.

According to the congressional conference report on the bill, it “allocates $841.4 billion to the Pentagon, $32.4 billion to the Department of Energy and $438 million for other ‘defense-related activities.'”

That’s $1.3 trillion, or nearly $3,900 from each American adult and child, to maintain a gargantuan military machine that has about as much to do with “national defense” as the latest reboot of Frasier has to do with the original Cheers.

At present, the US armed forces include more than 1.3 million active duty troops and about 800,000 reservists.  That’s about the same level as 50 years ago, when the US was just extricating itself from the Vietnam quagmire, when various automations (such as drones) were in their infancy, and when warm infantry bodies were a much bigger factor in war-fighting compared to today’s emphasis on air power.

In theory, at least, the US is at something called “peace” these days. Instead of fighting its own wars, it mostly farms them out to proxies like Ukraine and Israel, or at least “partners” with indigenous puppet regimes for manpower (e.g. Afghanistan).

And in truth, the US has few if any “defense” worries apart from the blowback its direct and proxy misadventures tend to culminate in. No other power in the world, let alone the western hemisphere, possesses the ability  to invade, conquer, and occupy a United States with so much as 1/10th of its current military capabilities.

The US “defense” budget isn’t about “defense.” It’s equal parts corporate welfare, workfare for poor and middle class youth who need money for college,  and “mad money” for politicians to get their megalomaniac on, trying to run the rest of the world as viciously and incompetently as they run their own little piece of it, with.

Which explains why it will pass in something like its current form. Lobbyists and politicians see lots of money — lots of YOUR money — and they want it. Ideally, all of it.

As I explain every time an NDAA bill comes up, remember that “defense spending” could be slashed by 90% without significant negative impact on “the national defense.”

Having remembered that, what to do with the knowledge? I guess you could call “your” congressional representatives, but that won’t do any good. They’ll keep blowing that money … as long as you keep giving it to them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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