Guest post by Lawrence Wilkerson (Colonel, U.S. Army - retired), Member of the Advisory Board of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
(Reprint from LA Progressive)
Mikey Weinstein, the fiery, combative leader of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), stirs a lot of pots. Since I took the place of slain, former U.S. Navy SEAL, Glen Doherty, killed in Benghazi in 2012, on the MRFF's Advisory Board, all of the pots Mikey's furiously stirred have merited the whipping. But none more than the present one concerning Nazi grave markers in two cemeteries now under the responsibility of the U.S. Veterans Administration, the "VA."
One Jewish-American summed it up emphatically in an email to Mikey: "The headstones were wrong on Day 1. They are wrong today. They will be wrong tomorrow and the day after."
Indeed. The argument, allegedly being advanced by the VA, that the gravemarkers in the Ft. Sam Houston National Cemetery (Texas) and the Ft. Douglas Post Cemetery (Utah) were there when the VA took over responsibility for the cemeteries, and that in the 1940s the Army approved them, simply doesn't pass muster. Preserving that sort of sordid, divisive history is not something the German state itself condones, and certainly should not be rationalized by the America that refused Jews sanctuary in 1940 and only belatedly, after seeing the utter horror of the Nazi Death Camps, "did the right thing."
Not doing the right thing again in the future is a possibility so pregnant with possibility under the present regime in Washington, that all decent human beings amongst us should shudder at any provocation to do so, let alone one as blatant and "officially approved" as this one. Whether in Brunswick, Georgia, in the Michigan capitol building, or at the Virginia statehouse, the evidence is too stark to ignore. Racism, hate-filled rhetoric, and anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, as all scholars of these hateful phenomena reluctantly acknowledge today. Such hateful developments require positive action, not subtle encouragement.
The Jewish-American who emailed Mikey also suggested that the only meaningful actions available to the VA are: (1) to replace the gravestones, minus the swastikas and praise of Der Fuhrer (cost about $300 each), or (2) move each entire grave and gravestone to another place of interment (a bit more expensive but within the means of a $240 billion VA budget). Why, when a situation is so completely intolerable and corrective action so completely clear, is there objection?
This gentleman sent dozens of photographs to MRFF, corroborating his points. And, fearful of blowback from the much-vaunted "chain of command" like so many of our clientele at MRFF, this gentleman asked for action. By all measures of common decency, of the sanctity of American war dead, and out of respect to those who died in the Nazi Death Camps or under the hated swastika and its posterity -- he should get what he demands.
History, and the preservation thereof, is apparently the principal plea of the VA. And this "bow to history" occurs at the expense of the insult so rendered to all the hundreds of GI graves in the cemeteries and, even more galling, to those family members and friends who might visit, like the gentleman who brought the situation to the attention of the MRFF in the first place.
No. Move the graves. Preserve history at another place unsanctioned by the U.S. Government and unsanctified by the blood of real patriots.