YOUR
COMMENTSAs the boundaries of the unthinkable become
normalized, historical consciousness is replaced by manufactured
forms of historical amnesia and ignorance. As white supremacy
becomes entrenched at the highest levels of power and in the
public imagination, the past becomes a burden that must be shed.
Disparaging, suppressing or forgetting the horrors of history
has become a valued and legitimating form of political and symbolic
capital, especially among the Republican Party and conservative
media. Not only have history’s civic lessons been forgotten,
but historical memory is also being rewritten, especially in
the ideology of Trumpism, through an affirmation of the legacy
of slavery, the racist history of the Confederacy, American
exceptionalism, and the mainstreaming of an updated form of
fascist politics.
Theodor Adorno’s
insights on historical memory are more relevant than ever.
He once argued that as much as repressive governments would
like to break free from the past, especially the legacy of
fascism, “it is still very much alive.” Moreover,
there is a price to be paid with “the destruction of
memory.” In this case, “the murdered are …cheated
out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can
offer them: remembrance.” Adorno’s warning rings
particularly true at a time when two-thirds of young American
youth are so impoverished in their historical knowledge that
they are unaware that six million Jews were murdered in the
Holocaust. On top of this shocking level of ignorance is the
fact that “more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the
Holocaust.” Historical amnesia takes a particularly
dangerous turn in this case, and prompts the question of how
young people and adults can you even recognize fascism if
they have no recollection or knowledge of its historical legacy.
The genocide inflicted
on Native Americans, slavery, the horrors of Jim Crow, the
incarceration of Japanese Americans, the rise of the carceral
state, the My Lai massacre, torture chambers, black sites,
among other historical events now disappear into a disavowal
of past events made even more unethical with the emergence
of a right-wing political language and culture. The Republican
Party’s attack on critical race theory in the schools
which they label as “ideological or faddish” both
denies the history of racism as well as the way in which it
is enforced through policy, laws, and institutions. For many
republicans, racial hatred takes on the ludicrous claim of
protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in
which racism persist in American society. For instance, Republican
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida stated that “There
is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race
theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each
other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”In
this updated version of racial cleansing, the call for racial
justice is equated to a form of racial hatred leaving intact
the refusal to acknowledge, condemn, and confront in the public
imagination the history and persistence of racism in American
society
Bolstered by a
former president and a slew of Vichy-type politicians, right-wing
ideologues, intellectuals, and media pundits deny and erase
events from a fascist past that shed light on emerging right-wing,
neo-Nazi, and extremist policies, ideas, and symbols. As Coco
Das points out given that 73 million people voted to re-elect
Trump, it is clear that Americans “have a Nazi problem.”
This was also evident in the words and actions of former president
Trump who defended Confederate monuments and their noxious
past, the waving of Confederate flags and the display of Nazi
images during the attempted coup on the Capital on January
6th, and ongoing attempts by the Republican Party legislators
to engage in expansive efforts at enabling a minority government.
America’s Nazi problem is also visible in the growing
acts of domestic terrorism aimed at Asians, undocumented immigrants,
and people of color.
Historical amnesia
also finds expression in the right-wing press and among media
pundits such as Fox News commentators Tucker Carlson and Sean
Hannity, whose addiction to lying exceeds the boundaries of
reason and creates an echo chamber of misinformation that
normalizes the unspeakable, if not the unthinkable. Rational
responses now give way to emotional reactions fueled by lies
whose power is expanded through their endless repetition.
How else to explain the baseless claim made by them, along
with a number of Republican lawmakers, right-wing pundits,
and Trump’s supporters who baselessly lay the blame
for the storming of the US Capitol on “Antifa.”
These lies were circulated despite of the fact that “subsequent
arrests and investigations have found no evidence that people
who identify with Antifa, a loose collective of antifascist
activists, were involved in the insurrection.”
In this case,
I think it is fair to re-examine Theodor W. Adorno’s
claim that “Propaganda actually constitutes the substance
of politics” and that the right-wing embrace of and
production of an endless stream of lies and denigration of
the truth are not merely delusional but are endemic to a fascist
cult that does not answer to reason, but only to power while
legitimizing a past in which white nationalism and racial
cleansing become the organizing principles of social order
and governance.
In the era of
post-truth, right-wing disimagination machines are not only
hostile to those who assert facts and evidence, but also supportive
of a mix of lethal ignorance and the scourge of civic illiteracy.
The latter requires no effort to assess the truth and erases
everything necessary for the life of a robust democracy. The
pedagogical workstations of depoliticization have reached
new and dangerous levels amid emerging right-wing populisms.
It is not surprising that we live at a time when politics
is largely disconnected from echoes of the past and justified
on the grounds that direct comparisons are not viable, as
if only direct comparisons can offer insights into the lessons
to be learned from the past. We have entered an age in which
thoughtful reasoning, informed judgments, and critical thought
are under attack. This is a historical moment that resembles
a dictatorship of ignorance, which Joshua Sperling rightly
argues entails:
The blunting of
the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of
connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil;
possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether
pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.
It is clear is
that we live in a historical period in which the conditions
that produced white supremacist politics are intensifying
once again. How else to explain former President Trump’s
use of the term “America First,” his labeling
immigrants as vermin, his call to “Make America Great
Again” — signaling his white nationalist ideology–his
labeling of the press as “enemies of the people,”
and his numerous incitements to violence while addressing
his followers. Moreover, Trump’s bid for patriotic education
and his attack on the New York Times’s 1619
Project served as both an overt expression of his racism and
his alignment with right-wing white supremacists and neo-Nazi
mobs. Historical amnesia has become racialized. In the rewriting
of history in the age of Trump, the larger legacy of “colonial
violence and the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans”
are resurrected as a badge of honor.
America’s
long history of fascist ideologies and the racist actions
of a slave state, the racial cleansing espoused by the Ku
Klux Klan, and an historical era that constitutes what Alberto
Toscano calls “the long shadow of racial fascism”
in America are no longer forgotten or repressed but celebrated
in the Age of Trump. What is to be made of a former President
who awarded the prestigious Medal of Freedom to a blubbering
white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, conspiracy theorist,
and virulent racist who labeled feminists as “Feminazis.”
In this case, one of the nation’s highest honors went
to a man who took pride in relentlessly disparaging Muslims,
referred to undocumented immigrants as “an invading
force” and an “invasive species,” demonized
people of color, and recycled Nazi tropes about racial purity
while celebrating the mob that attacked the Capitol as “Revolutionary
War era rebels and patriots.” Under the banner of Trumpism,
those individuals who reproduce the rhetoric of political
and social death have become, celebrated symbols of a fascist
politics that feeds off the destruction of the collective
public and civic imagination.
William Faulkner
once stated “The past is never dead. It’s not
even past.” In its updated version, we live not only
with the ghosts of genocide and slavery, but also with the
ghosts of fascism—we live in the shadow of the genocidal
history of indigenous inhabitants, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow,
and systemic police violence against people of color. And
while we live with the ghosts of our past, we have failed
to fully confront its implications for the present and future.
To do so would mean recognizing that updated forms of fascist
politics in the current moment are not a rupture from the
past, but an evolution. White supremacy now rules the Republican
Party and one of its tools of oppression is the militarization
and weaponization of history. Fascism begins with language
and the suppression of dissent, while both suppressing and
rewriting history in the service of power and violence.
In the age of
neoliberal tyranny, historical amnesia is the foundation for
manufactured ignorance, the subversion of consciousness, the
depoliticization of the public, and the death of democracy.
It is part of a disimagination machine that is perpetuated
in schools, higher education, and the corporate controlled
media. It divorces justice from politics and aligns the public
imagination with a culture of hatred and bigotry. Historical
amnesia destroys the grammar of ethical responsibility and
the critical habits of citizenship. The ghost of fascism is
with us once again as society forgets its civic lessons, destroys
civic culture, and produces a populace that is increasingly
infantilized politically through the ideological dynamics
of neoliberal capitalism. The suppression of history opens
the door to fascism. This is truly a lesson that must be learned
if the horrors of the past are not to be repeated again. Fortunately,
the history of racism is being exposed once again in the protests
that are taking place all over the globe. What needs to be
remembered is that such struggles must make education central
to politics, and historical memory a living force for change.
Historical memory must become a crucial element in the struggle
for collective resistance, while transforming ideas into instruments
of power.
