Maj. Gen. Charles Rogers removed from defense website for bravery while black
"It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."
-- Opening line of Orwell's prescient 1984
Thank you to Colin Povey for pointing out one of the latest Orwellian acts of the current administration: removing a medal of honor winner Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers from the defense-dot-gov website. Why? No reason was given. We can only guess. But because the government website altered the word "medal" to "deimedal" in their page URL the clear implication is Rogers was removed because the man was black and therefore no longer considered worthy of his honor and position. 《Insert explicative here》.
From the Gaurdian article (which I've easily verified from multiple other sources):
"Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.
According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/16/defense-department-blac…
I've verified with web-archive-dot-org (an incredible resource that takes snapshots over time of basically the entire internet, so that once on the internet it's a thing forever) that as recently as March 5, 2025 the defense-dot-gov website did indeed have a page honoring Rogers, but by March 15, 2025 it was gone. The gov URL, which is in the Guardian piece, (either with or without the word "medal" replaced with "deimedal") now returns a "404 page not found" message.
This is right out of Orwell's 1984 where the government rewrote history texts to remove inconvenient references. And it's just one countless examples.
If you've not read Orwell's "1984" and Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here" read them both now because we're way past 1984 and it IS happening here. Both are available for free (for now anyway)
https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.240835
https://archive.org/details/itcanthappenhere00lewi_0/page/n5/mode/1up
https://web.archive.org/web/20250305165958/https://www.defense.gov/News…