Rewriting history

M. Gessen, NY Times - “We live in a country with an unpredictable past.” This was a saying among the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. We never knew which part of our history would be obliterated next.

Now Americans, too, live in a country with an unpredictable past. Two months into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, in which he directed officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A very incomplete list of things that have happened since that order was issued: The National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens”; and on July 24, Trump issued a new executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”

Re-evaluating history has the potential to change a people’s future by changing its self-understanding. It can unite people in a genuinely new project. And then there is the rewriting of history, which is crazy-making. The Soviet Union repeatedly forced the whole country to unlearn what was already widely known. In the 1950s, after Joseph Stalin died, the Communist Party denounced his “cult of personality” and some of the extent of his terror. A decade later, it reversed itself, exiling or imprisoning authors who wrote about the crimes of Stalinism. The same process was repeated when the Soviet Union collapsed. Vast amounts of information about Soviet terror emerged; under Vladimir Putin that knowledge has been forced back into oblivion.

Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to know about the history and legacy of enslavement. What his executive orders really promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance. Trump appears to believe that the job of museums and memorials is to instill “pride in the hearts of all Americans,” as one of the executive orders put it. /