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Do not adjust your calendars. You may have seen images this week of Confederate statues coming down in Richmond’s capitol grounds, and thought we had slipped back in time to the tumult of 2020, but no. Rather, the commie Commonwealth of Virginia is still tearing down American history in the year of our Lord 2026.
As bad as the removal of all of these monuments has been, this particular round of damnatio memoriae on Friday, captured in its illiberal net the statue of a man named Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, whose work provided a major contribution to the Geneva Convention, the global gold standard of wartime humanitarian rules.
McGuire served as a Confederate surgeon for almost the entirety of the Civil War, saving countless lives. One life he failed to save was that of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who died under the doctor’s care. A Jackson statue also came down on Friday.
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Once again, the good Dr. McGuire could not save Stonewall.
It was under Jackson’s command in 1862 that McGuire established a new humanitarian principle of warfare that we still have with us today, not just in the United States, but across the world.
In May 1862, after the First Battle of Winchester, 6 Union army doctors were captured. It was then that McGuire convinced a reluctant Jackson to release them, and established, with Northern agreement, the Winchester Accord, after which both sides released doctors as non-combatants.
McGuire himself would be released by the North under the accord in 1864, and would go on to be present for the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.
The Winchester Accord would be adopted by the Geneva Convention, offering protection to medical personnel in wars that they still enjoy today, and yet, despite all of this, his statue was toppled, just like all the others.
As usual, the destroyers of monuments brook no nuance in their march to destroy American history. If you wore the wrong uniform, your statue has to go and you have to be disgraced.
According to Democratic state Senator Mike Jones, McGuire’s statue had to be removed because, “I remembered seeing white only, colored only pictures in my mother’s scrapbook, and so to have that as a visual and then for these things to remain to remind this area of what took place, I think it’s wrong.”
I’m sorry, but the fact that Jones is made uneasy by metal statues because they remind him of racism that occurred 70 years ago is the kind of silly claptrap that should have been left in the madness of 2020, and yet here we are.
Allow me to go a bit further and argue that if you took the accomplishments of every person involved with having McGuire’s statue removed, they would not begin to equal his contributions to the humanization of modern military conflict.
It really is incredible. Day and night, night and day, the progressive left goes on and on about alleged war crimes committed by Israel, or the United States, and yet in their ignorance and simple-mindedness they are defaming a man who played a key role in creating the definitions of those very alleged crimes.
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The same people who freak out with hair afire when the Trump administration tries to make the Smithsonian museums just a skosh more patriotic, are perfectly happy tearing down a statue of a man whose work saved thousands, maybe millions of lives.
Democrats will insist that unlike in 2020, when mobs just tore statues down willy-nilly, this decision went through a process run by democratically elected officials, and sure. But we all know that there is never a conservative on the blue ribbon panels they create to destroy Southern heritage.
The very slight silver lining in all of this is that McGuire’s statue, as well as the other two removed on Friday, will be moved to battlefield sites by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation.
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A spokesperson for that vital organization said, “Preservation is more about the future than the past … At the core of all we do is the belief that our shared history can unite the people of our nation; that there is strength and inspiration for our own times to be found in the struggles of the past.”
Hear Hear.
But those statues belong where they were, in the place of honor the capitol originally provided.
Make no mistake, reports of the demise of Woke 1.0 aren’t just exaggerated, they are nonsense, as Friday’s statue removals prove, and our fight against this anti-historical intolerance must not wane, but rather grow in its strength and dedication.
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