CLARENCE PAGE: Don’t let the war on woke lull us all to sleep

Clarence Page warns that the nation’s ongoing culture war risks lulling Americans into complacency, pointing to recent actions by the Trump administration as stark reminders that historical memory remains contested. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking amid a pause in the administration’s focus on Iran, announced the reinstallation of a Confederate memorial that had been removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023. The decision, he said, reverses a congressionally driven effort to strip Confederate names and images from military bases and related sites. History buffs may recall that the sculpture, created by Moses Ezekiel and often referred to without irony as “the Reconciliation Monument,” was taken down as part of that mandate. Hegseth dismissed the removal, declaring on X, “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don't believe in erasing American history — we honor it.” Critics argue that his framing of “honoring” history is problematic. Last year Hegseth issued a controversial directive to erase all content concerning race and sex from the cemetery’s website. He echoed an old adage, stating, “History is written by the winners,” while suggesting most Americans would prefer national monuments, museums and markers to tell the full story rather than a selective one. When the original monument was taken down, Arlington replaced it with a marker explaining that the work presented “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Those depictions included a Black female “Mammy” figure and a Black male in uniform described as “a faithful negro body-servant pursuing his young master” — a phrasing attributed to Col. Hilary Herbert, the ex‑Confederate veteran who chaired the committee that installed the monument