VA Axes Secret Plan To Hide Iconic V-J Day Photo Over Lack Of ‘Inclusivity’

The Federalist ^ | 3/5/23 | Shawn Fleetwood

[Impala64ssa]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) abandoned plans Tuesday to remove an iconic World War II-era photo from its facilities due to an alleged lack of “inclusivity.” The move came following backlash that emerged immediately after the decision was leaked earlier that day.

In a memo issued last Thursday, VA undersecretary RimaAnn Nelson requested agency officials remove the “V-J Day in Times Square” photo from all Veterans Health Administration facilities, in compliance with the VA’s goal of “maintaining a safe, respectful, and trauma-informed environment.” Taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945, the iconic photograph depicts a Navy sailor kissing a female stranger during the Victory over Japan Day celebration in New York City at the end of World War II.

In her memo, Nelson claimed the picture represented a “non-consensual act,” and argued that allowing its presence in agency facilities “is inconsistent with the VA’s no-tolerance policy towards sexual harassment and assault.” She further asserted that while the photo’s placement in VA buildings “was initially intended to celebrate and commemorate the end of World War II and the triumphant return of American soldiers,” views on “historical events and representations evolve.”

“Recent discussions have highlighted concerns about the non-consensual nature of the kiss, prompting debates on consent and the appropriateness of celebrating such images in today’s environment,” Nelson wrote. “To foster a more trauma-informed environment that promotes the psychological safety of our employees and the Veterans we serve, photographs depicting the ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ should be removed from all VHA facilities.”

“This action reflects our dedication to creating a respectful and safe workplace and is in keeping with our broader efforts to promote a culture of inclusivity and awareness,” she added.

The X user known as EndWokeness posted the leaked memo Tuesday morning, generating widespread backlash and condemnation of the VA and its ludicrous decision. This prompted VA Secretary Denis McDonough to issue a statement on X, with a caption accompanying the V-J Day photo reading: “Let me be clear: This image is not banned from VA facilities — and we will keep it in VA facilities.”

While McDonough did not say whether the memo was legitimate, The Military Times confirmed its authenticity late Tuesday morning. Agency officials reportedly told the outlet the document “should not have been sent out and was formally rescinded on Tuesday,” but “did not provide details of whether senior leaders were consulted on the matter ahead of Nelson’s memo.”

Two unidentified officials who spoke with the Associated Press also verified the memo as authentic

[Robert DeLong]

Pink Oink.

Tooting the horn for inclusion. 🙂

[rlmorel]

That statue was in San Diego. My wife had gone to a conference, and I went along with her.

One day when she was attending her conference, I took the rental car and was driving aimlessly around over near Coronado, and near what looked like an old, overgrown civilian airfield, fenced off with barbed wire chainlink fence, I saw helicopters with guys rappelling out of it on long ropes, probably SEALS training, so pulled over, got out and just watched for about an hour with my binoculars.

It wasn't until later that I wondered if anyone had been looking at me (this was after 9/11)

This is unrelated, but I hope you will indulge me!

It reminded me of a time, probably around 2004, when I was down in Maryland to meet up with the DC Chapter of Free Republic for a protest, and I decided to take a ride over and see if an old base I grew up on was still there.

It was an old Naval communication station about five miles from Andrews AFB, (NAVCOMMSTA WASHINGTON DC) and I drove around for a while looking for the long, straight tree-lined road to the Main Gate (it wasn't on any maps I could see). When I found it and drove up, the Main Gate shack was gone, but there was an unmanned card swipe unit, but the barrier was raised, so I just drove on the base.

It still looked kind of the same, but there were absolutely no humans around anywhere. Totally deserted.

I don't think I am alone in this...I have always had an odd attraction for deserted and decrepit structures and facilities of all kinds. There is something stark, deserted, and lonely about those places that has always touched a hidden part of my soul. Perhaps at some level, it reminds me of where we, as humans all eventually go, degrading and slowly returning to dust and disrepair.

Anyone who has spent any time on military installations knows, there are always those kinds of things on nearly every base. Old buildings, broken windows, doors ajar, and so on.

I grew up on military bases, and as a kid, spent considerable time probing remote, unused parts of them, entering long abandoned buildings, exploring, smashing things, and so on.

As long as you didn't light the place on fire, nobody cared. If you were caught in them, you were often just told to leave and not go in there. Next time you went back, there might be a padlock on the door where one had not been before, and the message was clear.

On this particular base, in its heyday, it was part of the MoonBounce Program (before satellite communication) and was one of the five bases that facilitated communication between Washington DC and our forces on the other side of the world by actually bouncing the communications off the moon and relaying them over there. This moonbounce technology was state of the art, until we began getting communications satellites into orbit in the 1960's. When my dad arrived there on his last duty station before retirement, that

When I was there, the giant parabolic antenna which seemed like it was about 100 feet across, was obsolete and unused, and we would get on the top of the building and climb around on the antenna...kind of like giant monkey bars...really dangerous.

I was not a particularly bright kid, and I was oblivious to the danger of climbing around on it, being 50-100 feet off the ground, where a fall would likely have been fatal. If we had been caught climbing around on it, there surely would have been hell to pay, especially since my dad was the XO on the base, but it was an untravelled part of an obsolete base nearing closure.

The only one who would have ever seen us there would have been Old "Pop" Soule, a civilian security guard who manned the Main Gate when there was a small shack there, and would drive a gray, Navy issue pickup truck around the base a couple of times a day. He even drove around at night, and when I used to camp on a remote part of the base with the Boy Scouts, we would sometimes be up when it was dark out, walking the dirt perimeter road around the base, and would see headlights coming. We weren't doing anything wrong, but instinct took over and we would all fly pell mell into the woods and, laying flat on the ground in the dark, watch Pop Soule drive by in his truck. I think that was his life. I think he just did that job all the time.

One time, a friend and I walked by and began poking around the abandoned windowless concrete building that the huge antenna was built on top of, and we found the padlock on the door was broken, so we went inside. There were some old desks, fluorescent lights stacked (which we promptly destroyed, holding them in our hands like huge, pre-Star Wars light sabers that would explode when we hit each other or the wall with them) and we began to pull huge pieces of asbestos pipe plaster off the pipes and threw it against the walls, which caused it to explode, completely covering and immersing us in white clouds of...asbestos powder.

That will probably kill me someday. We were rambunctious 14 year old brats...but...the building was a wreck anyway! My dad would have killed me if he found out we were screwing around in there!

When I went back there and drove around that abandoned base in 2004, it looked quite similar to when I lived there 1971-1973. I even found my family's old house next to the base water tower, front yard dug up, door ajar. I went inside and took pictures, which sadly, I lost over the years.

When I went up to where the giant antenna had been, it was, along with the building my friend and I had terrorized, was gone, removed apparently in 1986. I was going to explore further, but saw a camera on a pole, and decided I had enough and left.

A few years later, maybe around 2008 or 2010, I decided to go back and see what it was like, and maybe take some pictures to replace the ones I had lost.

As I went up the long, arrow-straight road, I saw a sign "DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY COUNTERTERRORISM UNIT".

I gulped.

At the end of the long road, there was no longer a card swipe entry gate, but a gigantic, structure that the road went straight into, two or three stories high on each side of the road, with what appeared to be thick bullet-proof glass spanning from structure to structure, also two or three stories high, and I could see uniformed figures under fluorescent lights inside.

I had the creepy feeling I was being watched by dozens of unseen eyes and cameras, and I thought that to do a u-turn in the middle of that narrow access road might have been...well...unwise.

So I pulled up to the gate, and a uniformed (non-military) guard walked over and the conversation went something like this:

---

ME: (Nervously) I, uh, used to live here when I was a kid, and I had come on the abandoned facility to look around a few years ago, but...I guess that probably isn't going to be possible now.

GUARD: (Tight lipped hint of a smile with no humor or mirth, silently shakes his head side-to-side in the negative)

ME: Okay. Can I turn around?

GUARD: (Wordlessly points in the direction I need to go to turn around)

---

And that was it. As I drove away, again, with that creepy feeling my back was being watched by dozens of unseen eyes and cameras, I thought about the old adage which, in this case, was true: You can't go home again.

On a side note, before I had gone down to Washington the second time, my brother and I had been looking at old Navy Base site on Google Earth, and had seen a satellite image of the area, the fire tower and our old house was gone, there were other changes, and in the region where there used to be an old athletic or football field near where the parabolic antenna used to be we saw what looked like a small airfield with complicated taxiways or maybe even a large go-cart track...but it was too small to be an airfield, and why would someone put a large go-cart track there? We were both puzzled.

Then, a year or two later, when I went back and looked at it again on Google Earth, the satellite image on Google Earth had changed. It looked like this again:

It now showed the base as I had first seen it, you can even see the access road the main gate complete with small trees on each side in the upper left corner of the image. It is a desolate, uninhabited place, with the old fire tower still there along with our old house (you can see the shadow of it near the pin showing our house, pointing towards the 11:00 direction)...and the small airfield or go-cart track was gone, and the old football field area was still there instead, and I realized:

They had gotten rid of the image my brother and I had seen, and replaced it with an older view before they build the Homeland Security station there.

And the small airfield/large go-cart track we had seen on the vanished image had been a course to train drivers. The old photo had shown it with four way stops, roundabouts, parking lots, highway lanes, all manner of places where cars would go, and sometimes...need to take evasive or defensive maneuvers. We just had not made the connection.

Someone made a mistake allowing that newer photo to appear on Google Earth, but as with all things monitored by lidless eyes, things eventually catch up.

[Hot Tabasco]

My wife and I..

...and the chiropractor the next day.

[Churchillspirit]

It will soon be illegal for a white man to mate with a white woman....

[rlmorel]

Heh, boy, how things have changed!

HUSBAND: Honey, look! I just took this picture of our new baby boy as he exits the birth canal! WIFE: (panting) But I wanted a girl! HUSBAND: We can fix that!

[rlmorel]

Egad! I didn’t pick up on that resemblance!

[rlmorel]

Lol! She did better than I did!

[moovova]

My wife’s grandmother had a good-sized farm in SC. I remember seeing cotton, corn, tomatoes...all picked/harvested by the extended (Caucasian) family. Tough job. One of her uncles used to “convert” pigs to bacon, sausage, etc. The sausage and bacon were sold out before the pigs were even slaughtered. Good stuff on a hot biscuit.

I think it’s a housing development now.

[Tymesup]

Didn’t know that a 50 foot fall was likely fatal, although it’s not highly likely.

There was something fascinating about watching a fluorescent bulb explode. Scary how often they slipped out of people’s hands and right out the windows.

[rlmorel]

It probably would have been fatal, because if you fell, there were multiple heavy steel tubular support structures, and you would probably hit every single one of them on the way down.

The equivalent of falling out of a tree and hitting every ugly branch on the way down, except instead of possibly cushioning or slowing you down like a flexible tree branch would, you would hit every member with full force causing you to tumble in every direction.

When you are young, sometimes you don’t think of that. When I was in the Navy, we made a port call to Alexandria, Egypt, and they had tours out to the Pyramids.

This was back in a time when you were allowed to climb on them, and many sailors did. The blocks at the bottom were larger, IIRC you had to hoist yourself up on the first few, but after that, you could kind of climb them.

The problem was, as you went further up, the stones became progressively rounded and crumbly, with grit and sand on them.

I got a few levels up, and in a flash of realization, understood that if I slipped, I was going to go all the way down the side of that pyramid and get killed, if not badly hurt. I gingerly climbed down, and that was that.

I have heard that a tourist was killed in just this fashion some years ago, and they banned climbing it after that on the basis that they were precious antiquities.

[rlmorel]

It probably would have been fatal, because if you fell, there were multiple heavy steel tubular support structures, and you would probably hit every single one of them on the way down.

The equivalent of falling out of a tree and hitting every ugly branch on the way down, except instead of possibly cushioning or slowing you down like a flexible tree branch would, you would hit every member with full force causing you to tumble in every direction.

When you are young, sometimes you don’t think of that. When I was in the Navy, we made a port call to Alexandria, Egypt, and they had tours out to the Pyramids.

This was back in a time when you were allowed to climb on them, and many sailors did. The blocks at the bottom were larger, IIRC you had to hoist yourself up on the first few, but after that, you could kind of climb them.

The problem was, as you went further up, the stones became progressively rounded and crumbly, with grit and sand on them.

I got a few levels up, and in a flash of realization, understood that if I slipped, I was going to go all the way down the side of that pyramid and get killed, if not badly hurt. I gingerly climbed down, and that was that.

I have heard that a tourist was killed in just this fashion some years ago, and they banned climbing it after that on the basis that they were precious antiquities.

[Elsie]

there are always those kinds of things on nearly every base.

Lots of old stuff around the Green River / Moab area

Part of the White Sands Launch Facility

[rlmorel]

You know what I’m talkin’ about!

[Elsie]

Strange, as I WENT BACK WITH GoogleEarth using the timeline and I can not see the things you describe.

Just incremental changes over the years...

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7474434,-76.854414,214m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

[Elsie]

You gotta be weird - like me!

[Elsie]

Twenty years ago I went to Chichen Itza.

The ‘stairs’ on that pyramid were about 2 feet tall.

I went up on hands and knees and came back down the same way.

Good view from the top though.

[rlmorel]

Fascinating. That was at least 14 years ago that I last looked. I never went back and looked again after I grabbed that screen capture.

That picture does not at all match what I saw from behind the wheel of my car!

I have no explanation. I could be wrong, but I kept those memories in my mind and related them often, so I they never went stale. But that is not at all what I recall.

My only explanation is that it isn’t what it is actually there. I certainly don’t put anything past my government these days.

Not after the last eight years.

[Albion Wilde]

Oh, my, your post brought me such nostalgia for the old days in the Carolinas. Still love me some pig meat gravy on a nice fluffy biscuit.

[Albion Wilde]

bump to rl’s post 62 for later

[Elsie]

Well, there’s no StreetView there...