In an age when memorials, statues and monuments across the nation are being defaced with Black Lives Matter messages and anti-police jargon, here's a new...and rather odd...one to add to the list.
Police are still looking for the culprit in the weekend vandalism of a memorial commemorating the some 500 Mecklenburg County, N.C. residents who died fighting in World War II.
Local reports say the 20-foot memorial wall, located in a cemetery in Charlotte, was spray-painted with the communist hammer and sickle and the phrase “Glory to the day of heroism June 19, 1986.” The phrase is likely in reference to The Shining Path, or the Communist Party of Peru, an armed group that led a revolt in Peru in the 1980s. On June 19, 1986, later known to supporters as “The Day of Heroism” nearly 250 members of the Shining Path were executed in a prison massacre.
WBTV reports whoever vandalized the WWII monument also sprayed yellow paint over the inscription, “Dedicated to the memory of the Mecklenburg heroes of World War II who made the supreme sacrifice that you might live in liberty, freedom and peace.” The wall lists the names of local residents who died in the war, and commemorates another 1,500 or so people whose bodies were temporarily held at the nearby depot on their way to their final resting place.
It's not the first time the little-known phrase from a largely defunct movement has been used to deface a U.S. monument. A statue of a doughboy in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, was defaced with the slogan over Memorial Day earlier this year.