History is There for the Rewriting

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" 

George Santayana

For many, history is an inconvenient truth. For example, after WWII, Japan denied their genocide in China, a denial that continues through to the present day: “For the city of Nanking, the months between December 1937 and March 1938 were so brutal that the word ‘nightmare’ doesn’t begin to cover it. Mainstream historians estimate that between 250,000–300,000 people died, many of them women and children. Often, the victims were first beaten, raped, or both. Many also witnessed the horrific murders of their loved ones.

“However, some Japanese historians believe that the events in Nanking have been blown out of proportion. They contend that these acts were simply the usual killing and looting that happens during war… The events in Nanking aren’t the only episode in Japanese history that some are trying to hide. The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform started speaking out in the 1990s about textbooks that painted Japan as an aggressor during the years around World War II. They believe that such a characterization must be eliminated if Japan is to regain its sense of national pride.

“Many Japanese fear that today’s students will no longer respect their ancestors after they learn about the atrocities that were committed. A pamphlet put out by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform goes into astounding detail on why history needs to be rewritten.” ListVerse.com, January 5, 2016, exploring major attempts at rewriting history. The site provides this common American view: “Ask most people why the US fought a civil war, and they’ll probably answer that the country was fighting over whether slavery should be legal. But even today, many schools in the Deep South teach students that the Civil War was about states’ rights and constitutional law.

“In 2011, the Pew Research Center found that about half the people they surveyed thought the Civil War had been fought over a difference in opinion about constitutional law. Although Lincoln gave speeches about slavery dividing the country, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) has made a hugely successful run at rewriting that history.” Clearly a vision that has only grown stronger in most recent times.

How many Americans are aware of the forced march of Indigenous Peoples (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, etc. in the 1830s) from the Southeastern part of the United States to be “resettled” in numerous “reservations” in the Southwest? It is estimated that this “Trail of Tears” involved over 100,000 human beings and that 15,000 perished from the journey. Or that between “1942-1946, about 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated from their homes to live in government-run camps… Thousands were children and the elderly. Several prisoners were shot and killed by guards. “More than half were US citizens - anyone with more than 1/16 Japanese ancestry was eligible for internment, which meant that if you had one great-great grandparent who was Japanese, you could be rounded up from your home and sent to live miles away.” BBC.com, February 21st. 

As our recent bout with extreme anti-Asian attacks on innocent American citizens based upon a Trump motivated focused of blame for COVID-19 on China (“Kung-Fu Virus,” “Chinese Virus,” “Wuhan Virus” suggests, it doesn’t take much of a surface scrape of our history of anti-Asian sentiments – take a look at the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for example – to draw racist ire from White Supremacists. 

Among too many conservative Americans, many of whom still hold the Confederacy dear, systematic racism in the United States ended with the civil rights cases and legislation in the 1950s and 60s, stopping a horrific anti-Black American Jim Crow era that had lasted for almost a century. But the ugly statistics and swept-under-the-table-murders, from no-knock warrant killings of innocent Blacks to clearly unjustified police and “concerned citizens’” killings of Blacks without consequences, finally saw the light of day as smartphone and CCTV videos repeatedly and frequently brought a significant array of tangible proof of recent horrors and missteps of the criminal justice system. 

The BLM movement, the largest and most peaceful (with a very few exceptions) political protest in our nation’s history, is held as vastly worse than the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the government, impose a losing candidate as president by means of a violent attack on our legislature to prevent certification of the winning candidate. What has now become a plank in the Trump-led Republican Party, an essential part of their “culture war” as their major political vector, is the attempt to ban teaching and books from public schools, public libraries and even some public colleges and universities that provide facts supporting the notion that we have a long way to go still to erase systematic racism from this country. Donald Trump’s reconfigured Republican Party has legitimized racism and empowered racists.

Schools have become our most significant political battleground. See my February 3rd Teachers – America’s Frontline Soldiers in Social, Medical and Political Issues blog. Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America and author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All,” writing for the February 20th Los Angeles Times, delves further into this latest American and most anti-democratic attempt to rewrite history: “Since January 2021 more than 150 bills have been introduced in 39 states that would restrict the teaching of certain curricula, mostly on issues of race and gender. Of these bills, more than 103 were introduced since the start of 2022. Twelve have already become law. Roughly two-thirds of the bills target K-12 schools, with the rest focused on higher education, libraries and state agencies. Sixty-two include mandatory punishments for those who violate the bans.

“Initially, most of these measures used the misnomer of ‘critical race theory’ in an effort to push back against teachings thought to overemphasize the role of race as the driving force in American history and culture. But more recently introduced restrictions reach beyond any single concept.

“South Carolina’s House Bill 4605 seeks to protect students from any material that might cause ‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’ on account of their ‘race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, heritage, culture, religion, or political belief.’ Such language, common to many of these bills, is dangerous. It is impossibly broad, opening the door to eliminating an endless range of works and topics. It also undermines one of the very aims of education, which is to help students move beyond their existing assumptions about the world.

Most book bans target works by and about people of color as well as LGBTQ subjects and storylines. Florida’s Polk County ‘quarantined’ 16 books, including Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ and ‘The Bluest Eye,’ based on complaints from a group called County Citizens Defending Freedom. And as the calls for book banning increase, so does the vitriol that accompanies them: Last fall two Spotsylvania, Va., school board members called for books banned in the county to be burned… Although some of the arguments being made today — about protecting innocent students from corrupting ideas — echo traditional motives for book banning, the current crusade has a more sinister cast.

“The spiking numbers — what the American Library Assn. has called an ‘unprecedented volume’ of book challenges including more than 155 unique ‘censorship incidents’ between June and November 2021 — indicate that something organized is afoot. In many cases the new bans are not simply spontaneous initiatives by local citizens. Conservative donors, think tanks and organizers have been drafting and shopping model laws, lobbying legislators, recruiting parent and community activists, and providing playbooks on what to get banned and how.” 

Teachers face fines, discharge and discipline. School districts face defunding. Bounty-hunter parents are sometimes even statutorily encouraged to filed lawsuits reaping financial rewards for the effort. The battlelines have expanded beyond race… to anyone not reflective of White traditional Christian values. See also my February 8th The Real Target of Banning CRT in Public Schools – Diversity blog. Is this truly what has become of modern America?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems as if democracy is under attack on so many levels that it is difficult to understand how it can survive.