History is What We Say It Is

                                     

                                                                                                  NAZI Gestapo: “Papers please!”

       

History is What We Say It Is

America Can Do No Wrong

“The new Florida standards you [AP] write about are appalling. History should never be rewritten to match the politics of the day, as history has valuable lessons to teach.” 

November 12th email from Mitzi Trumbo, daughter of screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, imprisoned and blacklisted during the anti-communist Red Scare fomented by disgraced Senator Joseph McCarthy, post-WWII.

“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology… This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” Trump statement accompanying his March 27th executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history… remove improper ideology… [and] prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

For my readers, you know I am a history buff. I very much believe in the admonition from 19th century philosopher, George Sanayana: “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” Today, there are vast swaths of the United States where anything negative in US history, particularly involving white Americans, is simply being banned or erased. School districts and public libraries in red states have banned books depicting slavery as oppression or the annihilation of Indigenous peoples (including taking their lands) as shameful. Including Andrew Jackson’s abrogation of treaties with such peoples followed by his horrific force-march of thousands of Native Americans from their eastern homelands into unfamiliar the western plains, the infamous Trail of Tears.

African American war heroes from all of our wars are disappearing from books and exhibits while traitors to the Constitution, champions of dehumanizing slavery willing to overthrow the US government, are heralded; statues of Confederate leaders are restored and revered. Imagine if Europe followed our model. Hitler’s statue and those leading the Nazi death camps would be proudly displayed in European cities?! Nowhere in Europe can you find such “memorabilia.” In Germany, public high school students are required to visit preserved concentration camps with lots of grim reminders and photographs. It is not uncommon for those students to break down into sobs.

But in Trump’s America, as a Versailles-like grand ballroom is replacing the East Wing of the White House, roughly a third of Americans see this erasure of America’s darkest hours as a necessary proof of patriotism, and that those who oppose this wholesale effort to cleanse our mistakes are un-American “vermin” who should themselves be erased. The latest such effort, ironically led by a graduate with a history BA from Yale University, is Governor Ron DeSantis, who leading a whitewash in the ultra-rightwing historical revision for Florida public schools.

“The standards approved Thursday [11/12] for middle and high school students by the Florida Board of Education include instruction on the use of ‘ ‘McCarthyism’ as an insult’ and how using the terms ‘red-baiter and Red Scare’ is identified with ‘slander against anti-communists.’

“The standards soften decades of criticism of former U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led a political movement to root out what he labeled communism in government, the civil rights movement and artistic communities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The public inquisitions, ideological loyalty tests and firings of that period are widely viewed as a shameful chapter in U.S. history.” Mike Schneider, writing for the November 15th Associated Press.

If you think about all those horribles that have happened as nations have pushed even elected leaders to new autocratic forms of governance, what imagery do you see? Soldiers marching into their own cities and rousting their own citizens, anonymous government officials demanding papers and arresting people who look like they’re criminals or undesirables, transporting them to distant “detention centers,” unsanitary, inhumane while being denied access to a full and fair legal system with impartial judges? What lessons are we not learning? What historical wrongs are we repeating? And where does loyalty to a single human being trump due process, free speech and those other fundamental constitutional rights?

In a government gone rogue, who in the current Trump administration are the functional equivalents of extreme versions of what we could become? Who might become our future Heinrich Himmler, who was second in power to Hitler, Hermann Göring, who was a leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state, Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda and a fervent follower whom Hitler selected to succeed him as chancellor, or Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister and chief negotiator of various treaties? We’re certainly not there… yet… but why do senior administration figures and those state officials, who follow along, choose practices and models that were used in other totalitarian regimes (real and wannabe) in their ascent to power? Can it be they never studied history… or for those who majored in history, that they very much want the same totalitarian state they actually did study?

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those who are enjoying their newfound power to lord it over others, can they remotely understand it might be like for them if the roles were reversed?