Maybe I’m biased by the recency, and recalling the horror of watching it as it happened, but I’m trying to come up with a more blatant Orwellian effort by the US government to rewrite history.
I realize that Trump/the White House is not the entire US government. How successful do you believe this attempt will be among what portions of the populace?
Virtually every US textbook for the last century and a half has rewritten our history of slavery, Indian genocide, and imperialism into forgotten, less awful or even positive history. The accomplishments of women were barely footnotes. Use of force to put down union activity was celebrated. Race riots were spun into the actions of malcontents. Literal fascists in Congress had their support of Nazis ignored when the war broke out. I could, sadly, go on all day.
Believing that a recent event is unique, more important, or wouldn’t be tolerated in the past is extremely common, an aspect of presentism. Everybody does it to some extent on some subjects. Governments, though, try to whitewash their pasts whenever possible. The swing to bring that history back and make it properly equal to what is usually reported is mostly from the last half century and is used as a definition of “woke.” Those who long to bring the country back to the “good old days” pine for the filtered history that didn’t make their ancestors and their policies look as bad as we now know them to be. Trump is absolutely blatant about this wish, especially when it applies to him.
Not to defend them, but a lot of the backlash is because a lot of the more recent historical efforts are essentially puncturing cherished myths and origin stories for entire communities, and no people anywhere really take very kindly to that sort of thing.
There’s also that certain Millennial/Gen-Z all-or-nothing, no-shades-of-gray attitude about everything that says that some historical figure who might have been a slave owner, or whatever other ugly thing is now and forever a bastard who should be expunged from the historical record and/or reviled, instead of celebrated, with certain caveats. I mean,someone like Thomas Jefferson can be a great man who we celebrate as a national founder AND a slave owning asshole who fathered illegitimate children on his slaves. It’s entirely possible to recognize both as valid.
I’ve personally been caught by this- at my alma mater, there’s a big statue to one of the early presidents of the school, who essentially saved the college and set it on the path to become what it is today. He was also from a prominent land and slave owning family, was a Confederate general, and was Governor of Texas in the 1880s before becoming university president. The statue is because of his efforts as university president, not the stuff before. But because he fought for the Confederacy, some students want to remove the statue, which I think is absurd. It’s not celebrating his Confederate service, it’s celebrating his service to the university itself.
So I can see how that sort of attitude can rub a lot of people the wrong way. That said, Jan 6 was clearly an insurrection; we’ve got video footage coming out our ears and tons of records. This is not trying to puncture a cherished mythological event, it’s blatantly trying to rewrite history
I’m a strong proponent of this thinking. But I’m also an old white man. People who have been ignored, scorned, and oppressed for hundreds of years have the right to judge. White kids in college maybe not so much, but my college years were under Nixon and we had, let’s say, some strong opinions then.
I will nitpick your point that the lies about history are reserved to “essentially puncturing cherished myths and origin stories for entire communities.” Everything bad that has ever happened in America has historically been stricken from textbooks or completely restructured to sound better, big and small. All governments rewrite history and the majority buys in because it benefits them. 1/6 is not being bought by the majority. Trump and MAGA are trying to lie about this event, but if that lies gets into textbooks America will have fallen and it will be one of a million lies, many much worse.
I acknowledged that I might be biased by recency, but I don’t know that greater examples have been noted. I consider the rewriting of J6 different from genocide, slavery, etc, as it is the blatant misrepresentation of a single event that was widely televised. As opposed to a reinterpretation of a protracted series of events and relationships.
Oh no, I wasn’t trying to say that the lies about history are only the puncturing of cherished myths, just that I can see why many people would react very negatively when that’s done.
There’s plenty of straight-up whitewashing of history done all over the place; the US is hardly unique in that regard.
That’s what I was trying to get at too; everyone SAW 1/6/21 happening live, and now they’re trying to literally gaslight us (not the disagreeing that so many call gaslighting, but the real thing) and say it was something that it wasn’t.
that reminds of the “cancel culture” towards US Grant because of his alleged treatment of Native Americans, and him owning one slave, ignoring his role in freeing slaves by his victories
Another distinction between ‘past interpretations of historic eras’ (such as those that @Exapno_Mapcase references) and the current “January 6 website”, besides the fact that the latter concerns a single event rather than an ongoing situation (like slavery), is that this particular effort to rewrite history is being perpetrated by a sitting Administration. It’s not just an ongoing effort by a government dominated by one party to present a slanted view of a past era, such as we can see with various Republican pronouncements characterizing FDR’s policies negatively, or Democratic tendencies to remind people which party committed the Watergate-related crimes.
Efforts to reinterpret slavery, or the era of displacement of native peoples across the USA, have been made by historians and others involved with presenting history, such as museum staff or town councils.
By contrast, this is an effort by one President’s people, to take one event and promulgate lies about it. Examples:
Democrats “staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election.”
The site also declares that a USCP officer “murdered” Ashli Babbitt “in cold blood.”
It accuses the US Capitol Police of police of “deliberately escalating tensions” and turning “a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”
It states that Mike Pence, by refusing to derail the statutory Jan 6 process, committed an “act of cowardice and sabotage.”
Very much aside from “presentism,” this does qualify for @Dinsdale’s OP “most blatant rewriting,” given that it differs from past reinterpretations of history both by being specific to one event, and by being presented by an administration.
That was true- to some extent- until moderately recently. I was helping a couple kids with their homework and i have to say their social studies and History textbooks verged upon “woke” covering the history of slavery, black & womans studies and so forth.
Now, the history textbooks when i was in HS were more tame. Yes, slavery was mentioned as the main cause of the Civil war, (This was in CA, not the old South of course) and it was made clear slavery was an evil institution, but not a long of info or details.
Before say 1800- 1830, when the Abolitionist movement became important, people didnt really consider slavery as all the "bad’- sometimes it was considered a “necessary evil” and Jefferson and his ilk really thought American Slavery would just die out on it s own. They could not imagine the Cotton gin and it’s truly massive impact on Slavery in the South. I mean the great Greek philosophers all lived in slave societies, yet we look upon them as great thinkers, early scientists, and philosophers.
Judging people of the past by todays ethics will come back on us some day, when the people in 2060 talk about how evil we are for slavery with dolphins and Chimps
Grant owned at least one slave, given to him as a wedding gift. Grant freed him as soon as he could- within a year.
No, but at the same time it’s a little bit absurd to get all het up about a statue on a college campus for the university’s fourth president who effectively saved the university and set it on the path to where it is today, because the man served as a general in the Confederate Army. Not a slave owner, at least not that is clearly documented, and someone who had already done a rather good job as governor before becoming university president.
I mean, yes it is a black mark against him that he fought for the Confederacy. But he wasn’t a huge plantation owner or anything like that- he was a Texas Ranger, then a Confederate general, then Governor of Texas, then President of Texas A&M.
I guess the way I look at it is that I’m sure that a lot of today’s military people aren’t bad, and they don’t deserve to get shit on in the future, just because Trump happens to order them on assholish foreign adventures to sink Colombian boats or whatever else remains to happen. Just like the guys under Bush weren’t assholes for obeying orders to invade Iraq or wherever else. But people 160+ years later are sure willing to judge people by 2025 standards and castigate them.
Well… I don’t think I’m ready to castigate the German rank and file in WWII for serving their country. The SS, sure, but not the regular German Army/Navy/Air Force. They weren’t much if any more aware of anything that was going on than our military was in Vietnam, Iraq, or any other wars.
And I’ll add that there was a long tradition in Europe of massacring Jews so it would be wrong to apply our 2025 sensibilities to that time in the past.
That about right?