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The Arlington National Cemetery website has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Native American, Black, Hispanic, and female service members buried in the cemetery. Only White males remain.

  • lewdian69@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 days ago

    Who are the actual employees doing this and why are they going along so fervently? Like, I know an order has come down from on high but what middle manager told which low level employee to actually do this and didn’t just delay or interpret it as narrowly as possible? What the fuck is going on?

    • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      27·
      6 days ago

      Their answer would be, “I’m just doing my job”. And I get it, but you gotta draw the line somewhere, right? Like before the ovens start up?

      • Miles O'Brien@startrek.websiteEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        “just doing my job” isn’t really relevant when your job is literally destroying democracy to assist a fascist neo-nazi regime

        Yes, quitting “in protest” is an option, but why do that when you can just collect a paycheck and be a shitty as possible at your job until you get fired?

        “oh sure thing boss I’ll get right on this deletion thing” 6 days of fucking around on the fediverse later, websites still unchanged “oh yeah I’m working on it, top priority!”

        I get fear of retribution if they figure out you’re doing it on purpose to sabotage efforts but like… How many people are actually bothering?

        I can’t imagine someone in the firing squad trying to say “I was just doing my job”, it’s not the same thing as the guy working in the lunchroom. The only difference in my opinion is the firing squad kills people and the guy at the computer kills information, democracy, morality, common sense etc…

        You can’t say you were just doing your job when your job is “destroy this information”

        Yes, it’s “just a small part” but even the Great Wall of China is made of smaller bricks/slabs. The whole can’t exist without the separate pieces.

        I’m a little rambly, apologies. I hope I’ve made a coherent point.

    • courageousstep@lemm.eeEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      I can speak a little bit from an education perspective, like why a lot of universities are acquiescing to federal orders.

      Right now, the philosophy at a lot of large universities is that it’s better to survive in some capacity to be able to educate young people (academic freedom is still allowed in classrooms, my university keeps insistently reminding faculty), than be shut down and shot and be unable to educate anyone at all. Also, they have thousands of employees relying on them for a paycheck to feed their families.

      I’m still pissed at the loss of minority support systems. Students feel betrayed at the loss of gender neutral housing. There is righteous anger brewing. I’m part of the LGBT community, and seeing my community silenced as an organizational body and deleted from ongoing research boils my blood and makes me want to burn everything down.

      But deep down, I get it. We have to keep educating youth about the true history of the USA, keep teaching them about how science works, keep exposing small town 18-year olds to other races and cultures to open their minds to empathy. If we don’t, we’ll have an entire generation that only has right-wing propaganda to teach them about the world.

      Higher ed administration has a lot of weight on their shoulders. They of course side with minorities morally, ethically, and as human beings. It’s a really hard place to be in.

      I’m wondering if this perspective is driving anyone in federal departments, as well.

    • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      6 days ago

      People are legit afraid of not only losing their jobs but being sued and/or blacklisted from future jobs. Corporations are scrambling to figure out what new rules actually applies to them and are just doing the safe thing so their company doesn’t get sued or shut down. They are hearing that simple word searches are being used to focus on companies doing anything that sounds like DEI. In the military, we are being told not to use the word trans in any sense right now… even in technical terms like trans-sonic and trans-orbital. Because some jackass is just grepping for verboten words to find organizations to focus on. We have stopped celebrating Women’s History Month, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, etc. Those have absolutely nothing to do with DEI, but leadership here is so afraid of having the Eye of Elon pointed at them. They have thousands of people under their command, whose lives are their responsibilities. They don’t want to do this, but they are trying to protect their team.

      It’s much like when a child has an abusive parent and does everything to avoid being noticed. They try to fly as far under the radar as possible so that the attention isn’t focused on them.

      • thanks AV@lemmy.worldEnglish
        19·
        6 days ago

        Famously when the nazis demanded obedience they did so not by making laws outright banning speech. They simply made sure that nobody in any position of power would risk drawing attention and behave accordingly “of his own will”

        Its brilliant that a hundred years later people with access to any human in the world just… do the exact same shit Germans did.

        From They Thought They Were Free, the Germans 1933 - 1945

        […] "I gave them French and English literature, more so than before, although to do so was one of those vague betrayals of the ‘new spirit’; still, it had not been specifically forbidden. Of course, I always said, to protect myself (but I said it in such a way that I hoped the students would see through it), that the foreign works we read were only a reflection of German literature. So, you see, Herr Professor, a man could show some—some independence, even, so to say, secretly.” “I understand,” I said. “Many of the students—the best of them—understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today.”

        […]

        "Tell me, Herr Hildebrandt, what about [Shakespeare’s]Julius Caesar?”

        He smiled very, very wryly. “Julius Caesar? No … no.”

        “Was it forbidden?”

        “Not that I remember. But that is not the way it was. Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
        102·
        6 days ago

        Not just sued and put on a shitlist: Outright listed as an enemy of the state to the masses of fox news watching gun nuts.