Lust for conquest and wealth — behind the enslavement of Africans and the Native American genocide — is sidelined to tell the story of the valiant struggle by European pioneers to build the greatest nation on earth.
President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology.
History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism.
The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold.
Historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson, will be social archetypes whose darker actions, including the decision to re-segregate the federal government and oversee one of the most aggressive campaigns of political repression in U.S. history, will be ignored.
In the America of our Trump-approved history books — I have read the textbooks used in “Christian” schools so this is not conjecture — equal opportunity for all exists and has always existed. America exemplifies human progress. It has constantly improved and perfected itself under the tutelage of its enlightened and almost exclusively white male rulers. It is the vanguard of “Western civilization.”
The great leaders of the past are portrayed as paragons of courage and wisdom, bringing civilization to the lesser breeds of the earth. George Washington, who with his wife owned and “rented” more than 300 slaves and oversaw brutal military campaigns against Native Americans, is a heroic model for imitation.
The dark lust for conquest and wealth — which lay behind the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans — is sidelined to tell the story of the valiant struggle by European and Euro-American pioneers to build the greatest nation on earth.
Capitalism is blessed as the highest freedom. Those who are poor and oppressed, who do not have enough in the land of equal opportunity, deserve their fate.
Those who fought injustice, often at the cost of their own lives, are disappeared or, as with Martin Luther King Jr., sanitized into a banal cliché, frozen forever in time with his “I Have a Dream” speech.
US Marines at the literally whitewashed memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Ezekiel R. Kitandwe/Released)
The social movements that opened up democratic space in our society — the abolitionists, the labor movement, the suffragists, the socialists and communists, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements — are disappeared or ridiculed along with those writers and historians, such as Howard Zinn and Eric Foner, who document the struggles and achievements of popular movements.
The status quo was not challenged in the past, according to this myth, and cannot be challenged in the present. We always had reverence for our leaders and must maintain this reverence.
“Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser presciently warned.
Trump’s executive order begins:
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”
Authoritarians promise to replace bias with “objective truth.” But their “objective truth” is about sacralizing our civil religion and leadership cult.
The civil religion has its sacred sites — Mount Rushmore, Plymouth Rock, Gettysburg, Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Stone Mountain, the huge bas-relief that depicts the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
It has its own rituals — Thanksgiving, Independence Day, President’s Day, Flag Day and Memorial Day. It is patriarchal and hyper patriotic. It fetishizes the flag, the Christian cross, the military, guns and Western civilization, a code for white supremacy.
It justifies our exceptionalism and right to global dominance. It links us to a Biblical tradition that tells us we are a chosen people, a Christian Nation, as well as the true heirs of the Enlightenment. It informs us that the powerful and the wealthy are blessed and chosen by God. It feeds the dark elixir of unbridled nationalism, historical amnesia and unquestioning obedience.
There is proposed legislation in Congress calling for the carving of Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, making Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, putting Trump’s face on new $250 bills, renaming Washington Dulles International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport and amending the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term.
An education system, Jason Stanley writes in “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” is “the foundation upon which a political culture is built. Authoritarians have long understood that when they wish to change the political culture, they must begin by seizing control of education.”
The capture of the education system, he writes “is not only to render a population ignorant of the nation’s history and problems but also to fracture those citizens into a multitude of different groups with no possibility of mutual understanding, and hence no possibility of mass unified action. As a consequence, anti-education renders a population apathetic — leaving the task of running the country to others, be they autocrats, plutocrats, or theocrats.”
Fourth of July celebration Friday, July 3, 2020, at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, S.D. (Official White House Photo/Andrea Hanks)
At the same time, despots mobilize the supposedly aggrieved group — in our case white Americans — to carry out acts of intimidation and violence in support of the leader and the nation and to exact retribution. The twin goals of this anti-education campaign are paralysis among the subjugated and fanaticism among true believers.
The uprisings that swept the nation triggered by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery not only decried institutional racism and police brutality, but targeted statues, monuments and buildings commemorating white supremacy.
A statue of George Washington in Portland, Oregon was spray-painted with the words “genocidal colonist” and torn down. The headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which spearheaded the erection of monuments to confederate leaders in the early part of the 20th century in Richmond, Virginia, was set on fire.
The statue of newspaper editor Edward Carmack, a supporter of lynching who urged whites to kill the African-American journalist Ida B. Wells for her investigations into lynching, was ripped down. In Boston, a statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded and statues of the confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, along with one of the racist former mayor and police chief of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, were removed.
Princeton University, which had long resisted calls to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of public policy because of his virulent racism, finally relented.
Monuments are not history lessons. They are pledges of allegiance, idols to the white ancestor cult. They whitewash the crimes of the past to whitewash the crimes of the present. Owning up to our past, the goal of critical race theory, shatters the myth perpetuated by white supremacists that our racial hierarchy is the natural outcome of a meritocracy where whites are endowed with superior intelligence, talent and civilization, rather than one that is engineered and rigidly enforced.
Blacks in this racial hierarchy deserve to be at the bottom of society because of their innate characteristics.
It is only by naming and documenting these injustices and working to ameliorate them that a society can sustain its democracy and move towards greater equality, inclusion and justice.
All of these strides towards truth and historical accountability are to be reversed. Trump singled out for attack exhibits at The Smithsonian Institution, The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park.
He promises to “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.” He demands monuments or exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)” be removed and the nation “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
The executive order continues:
“It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. (Frank Schulenburg/Wikimedia Commons)
The attacks on programs such as critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion as Stanley points out “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally being included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or an unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”
The goal is not to teach the public how to think, but what to think. Students will parrot back the mind-numbing slogans and clichés used to buttress power. This process strips education of any independence, intellectual inquiry or self-criticism. It turns schools and universities into indoctrination machines. Those who resist being indoctrinated are cast out.
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Oppressors always erase the history of the oppressed.
They fear history.
It was a crime to teach enslaved people to read. The ability to read meant they might have access to news of the slave uprising in Haiti, the only successful slave revolt in human history. They might learn of the slave revolts led by Nat Turner and John Brown.
They might be inspired by the courage of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. They might have access to the writings of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists.
The organized struggle, vital to the history of people of color, the poor and the working class to secure equality, along with laws and regulations to protect them from exploitation, are to be fully shrouded in darkness.
There will be no new investigations into our past. There will be no new historical evidence. There will be no new perspectives. We will be forbidden from excavating our identity as a people and a nation.
This calcification is designed to deify our rulers, destroy a pluralistic, democratic society and inculcate personal and political somnambulism.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This interview is from The Chris Hedges Report.
Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Erasing history in the USA has been going on for a long time. Did you know that 1000 years ago, over 100,000 man-made earthen mounds graced the North American landscape east of the Mississippi, and some to the west? Big ones. The Smithsonian (which has done much to cover it all up since about 1900) put that # at 150,000. Graham Hancock threw the million # at it. I ran into this reality when I went to study for a book project. I love archaeology and history, so it was a slap in the face when I realized how ignorant I had been. It is true that US school systems do not promote American “pre-history”. The ancestors of the current Native Americans have been conveniently ignored.
What goaded me into an in-depth study was the art from the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures–Gorgeous! The art from any society always represents the nature of the culture. In the 1800’s, the Smithsonian funded over 2200 digs in the Ohio valley, but some of what they found was uncomfortable, and ran contrary to the Eugenics ideology they coveted in the early 1900’s.
Thanks for this excellent perspective. I live in Texas — a former slave state and traitor that joined the Confederacy. Texas makes a poster-child example for Chris Hedges: it continues to sanctify the Alamo and worship the white supremacists who died there. hxxps://medium.com/@idember/alamo-heroes-died-for-freedom-to-own-slaves-6b191b9f634c
Stanley is not, as Arendt, or Willhelm Riech or R. Palme Dutte were, a real scholar of fascism. I come here from the school which believes that fascism is a tool of the ruling class, to be used when the regular crises of capitalism make their aesthetic liberalism inconvenient. There’s one line in particular I’d like to take out and examine so we can explore what we mean here: You quote Stanley as writing “And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving.” to which I would point to OJ Simpson, and ask whether race as perceived by our country at large is a greater factor in determining material outcomes for people than class, wealth, and their residues. The critique of the ‘meritocracy’ cannot, and will not come from people so aligned with the Democratic Party, people so mainstream and, for lack of a better term, un-radical. We can cultivate our understanding of these things more carefully so that the short, brutal sentences you give us (which we appreciate) are able to flower the bolder.
This is an important point. Trump must be understood in the context of the long (and bipartisan) neolib/neocon trajectory that produced him. It is unfortunate that Chris cites Stanley as a moral authority. Anyone who has read or seen Stanley’s depiction of the current Ukraine conflict will be provided with an excellent example of “erasing history.”
DEI and Critical Race Theory did nothing to increase education in our schools, historical or otherwise.
What Hedges is saying is certainly true; the details of the world’s history can, and likely will, be rewritten to the benefit of totalitarian plutocracy, but the actual large pattern movements of human action and biophysical systems are immune to the twisting of a detail. There is no pleasure or solace in that observation; humanity is almost certainly ‘in for it’ as our actual indiscretions (regardless how they might be spun) play out their consequences.
I see a species of animal life that made exquisite obsidian cutting tools 10,000 years ago as the highest art and technology and that today designs and builds spaceships and mechanical brains rivaling the squishy ones…in essentially no geological time and with no regard for the consequences to life on this little planet; that some of us would misuse our history and harm millions or billions (those numbers, in themselves, their own drama), so some how in this perspective today’s indiscretions aren’t especially surprising.
Our history in all its different aspects must be our teacher so that we evolve ever into more deeply human human beings. Therefore, all aspects of our history need to be known and available to all. There is already a great deal of our history that is still hidden. The government, whose only task should be to protect our rights, has no business “teaching” history or putting up monuments. All teaching and recording of history belong to the realm of our cultural freedom as human beings—ideally, we would have universities and schools completely free from government interference and led by educators who understand and value cultural freedom in all its different manifestations, including besides education, medicine, religion and judicial proceedings.
“Authoritarians promise to replace bias with “objective truth.” But their “objective truth” is about sacralizing our civil religion and leadership cult.”
This abstract argument can be made about many specific historical contexts: certainly about Soviet authorities sacralizing Marx, Lenin, and Stalin … just as certainly about about ecclesiastical Christian authorities in the post Roman world sacralizing that itinerant charismatic Jewish preacher, Jesus, and the hitherto less than universal God of Abraham.
Viewed through the lens of this abstract argument, human history can seem to have a quality of “eternal recurrence” enough to make the spirit of Friederich Nietzsche smile.
As a Marxist I do not support critical race theory or DEI, viewing both things as false “equality”. The only true social equality is to be found in socialism, according to which all humans are equal regardless of race, gender, color, language, country of origin, religion or any other factor. CRT and DEI are in reality a tool of the oppressor class to disguise their intention to keep the working class divided and powerless. Apart from that, this article tells the truth about history and the fascistic takeover of the country.
I take your point, but CRT and DEI, in their original intent, were simply tools to accomplish some of the ‘true social equality’ you attribute as a goal of socialism. What needs to be realized is that any actual active process can be perverted; rejecting a useful action because it is misused belies the need for vigilance in its use….and that is what has been uniformly missing, the sort of public vigilance that could restrain the misbehavior of those given political and economic power.
My understanding of ‘critical race theory’ is that it precisely orients Black struggle with class struggle. Is that just my imagination?
Nations and states are an artificial construct.
That’s a great quote from Hannah Arendt, so much so that I’ve been searching for a page reference. I haven’t found it yet, but I have come across something else, perhaps equally pertinent for our times.
“Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions, but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong.”
Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, (Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism) Harvest Book, p. 3. 1951 (1968)
Are you familiar with the simian example of Arendt’s poignant observation? In a chimp colony, a somewhat lower on the social hierarchy male discovered that running around wildly banging a large cooking oil can gained attention and, for a time, he attained alpha status. While a trivial example it does suggest some essential similarity to the clearly far more impactful ‘oil can banging’ of our sociopathic narcissists.
This government makes it very easy to see what they favor. What ever it accuses their opposition of doing, being, is exactly what they are. It is reiterated many times in this article by Hedges. I think it is almost impossible for negativity to describe anything other than it’s own negativity in our projected psychology.
A common mistake of those claiming to be God’s chosen people is to overlook what God’s choosing requires-servanthood to the needs of our fellow human beings, having reverence for kindness and helping the least among us achieve their very best, based not on what the dominant culture dictates, but on the talents given by a loving creator God. Despots and dictators strive to remake creation in their own narcissistic image. Any human being claiming ultimate wisdom or authority immediately commits fraud and deception and is not to be trusted in such grandiose claims. Justice, kindness and humility are the eternal hallmarks of true integrity.
The common mistake is believing in a deity.
Yes
Yes! This seems to be the fundamental error of Jewish Zionism that Jewish Judaism decries, ie, the Jewish Zionists ‘don’t act right’.
The article includes uncomfortable verities but unfortunately is geared against others and a bit too politicized, eschewing the neutrality the topic deserves. These truths predate the purported “revolutionary war” and the problems illustrated seem to have been fellow travelers in our evolution as a species of collectives led by the few.
“You can’t be neutral on a speeding train.” — Howard Zinn
“I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.” — Antonio Gramsci