“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Most nations attempt to rewrite history or simply bury profoundly negative historical facts. That between 1830 and 1850, the U.S. federal government force-marched 16,000 Native Americans (Cherokee, Muscogee [Creek], Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw), from Tennessee to North Carolina to reservation lands west of the Mississippi, where at least 4,000 died along the way, is an ugly page of our history that is often disregarded in our school textbooks. The massacre of hundreds of African Americans, a very successful upper middle class, in 1921 Tulsa lay buried for almost a century before the fact began pouring out. The racist Dixiecrats, the severe repression of Black Americans in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period, the Jim Crow laws and the nascent and lately increasingly blatant discrimination against minorities of color are underplayed if not totally ignored. One Texas textbook actually referred to slaves as “immigrants.”
Japan has been equally callous in its denials of murderous rampages in its conquests in Asia, from Korea to China. Japan did nothing wrong according to its textbooks, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. The 1937 murder, pillaging of and rape in Nanking (see photo above), for example, “never happened.” Contrast these denials and deflections with Germany’s reaction to its own horrific past.
Germany’s Nazi period, particularly in the 1930s until surrender in 1945, produced the horrific genocide that murdered where between 11 and 16 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews (literally two-thirds of Europe’s entire Jewish population). Between 1904 and 1908, Germany also slaughtered tens of thousands of African natives in their colonial holdings in Southwest Africa. Yet German textbooks fully describe both genocidal periods, and German youth cannot graduate from high school without taking a very graphic tour of a former concentration camp, and in May of this year, Germany also agreed to create a €1.1 billion fund to be paid over 30 years as reparations for their African genocide.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, racism continues to be denied and buried under the rug under bizarre notions of “critical race theory” (honestly reporting classes of Americans who practiced severe racial and ethnic discrimination) or “cancel culture” efforts (where, for example, removing a statute of a notorious slave owner is considered by some on the right as unpatriotic even as it reminds current generations of Black Americans of how their ancestors were denied basic humanity). It seems that right-wing America is hell-bent on erasing significant pockets of racial injustice, literally banning such teachings from public American classrooms, even as historical awareness of these injustices has increasingly been documented and brought to public attention. The consequences are the continuation of racial injustice without meaningful efforts to right this wrong.
Writing for the June 9th New Yorker, David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and the author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” reminds us: “In April, the Department of Education called for a renewed stress, in the classroom, on the ‘unbearable human costs of systemic racism’ and the ‘consequences of slavery.’ In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a formal letter, demanding more ‘patriotism’ in history and calling the Democrats’ plan ‘divisive nonsense.’ Like all great questions of national memory, the latest history war has to play out in politics, whether we like it or not. This is especially true as we limp, wounded, from the battlefields of the Trump era, when facts were nearly rendered irrelevant.
“History wars follow patterns. The subjects at their core usually carry visceral meaning for large swaths of the public. The disputes quickly invoke curricula, creeping into school boards and state legislatures with increasing stakes. The combatants then employ a kind of existential rhetoric, with all sides declaring surrender unacceptable. Political teams are chosen, and the media both fuels and thrives on the contestation. Authorities, whether in academia, libraries, or museums, try to fight for up-to-date research and interpretation. The politics of knowledge and the emotional attachments to country threaten to sweep up nearly all before them. Finally, someone declares victory, whether by creating or removing a monument, cancelling or curating an exhibit, or writing a book about a triumph of historical engagement. ‘Good’ history can be both a result and a casualty of these wars.
“Some of these battles never quite end. (The endurance of the Lost Cause ideology, which argues that the South fought not for slavery but for sovereignty, is one example.) But the broader problem is that, in the realm of public history, no settled law governs. Should the discipline forge effective citizens? Should it be a source of patriotism? Should it thrive on analysis and argument, or be an art that emotionally moves us? Should it seek to understand a whole society, or be content to uncover that society’s myriad parts? The answer to all of these questions is essentially yes. But this is where the history wars, old and new, merely begin. We call them wars because they matter; nations have risen and fallen on the success of their stories.” As red states trip all over themselves to ban “critical race theory” and “cancel culture” efforts by means of statutory mandate, you really have to wonder how long it will take to repeal the First Amendment.
I’m Peter Dekom, and hiding or denying shameful national policies on insures that we are destined leave these injustices unsolved, another egregious shameful act.
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