You
should not honour men more than truth.
Plato
DEATH OF
MEMORY IS DEATH OF DEMOCRACY
Democracy
cannot survive without memory or it runs the risk of
turning itself into an authoritarian state. It requires
citizens to confront injustice, to learn from the crimes
of the past, and to imagine futures that do not repeat
them. William Faulkner’s warning still resonates:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
In America today, history itself has become a battleground.
The ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy
remain with us, shaping institutions and social life.
As Angela Davis reminds us, we live with these ghosts
every day. The real question is whether we choose to
acknowledge them, or to erase them. For when a society
turns away from its own horrors and promotes forms of
historical amnesia, what kind of culture is normalized?
What political order emerges from the silence of
forgetting? Under Trump, we have already been given
a terrifying answer: a society organized around violence:
against immigrants, Black people, youth, students, dissidents,
women, the unhoused, and all those who fail the regime’s
loyalty test to white Christian nationalism.
As sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman observed, our times are not marked simply
by the fading of collective memory, but by “the
aggressive assault on whatever memory remains.”
That assault takes the form of book bans, censorship,
intimidation of educators, and the replacement of critical
history with patriotic myth. Kimberlé Crenshaw
has noted that the panic over “critical race theory”
was never about pedagogy, it was an attempt to whitewash
slavery and racism from the national narrative. The
suppression of historical memory produces not only ignorance
but moral paralysis. As Robert Jay Lifton warned, erasure
of the past creates a psychic numbing, a diminished
capacity to feel and act against injustice. Forgetting
is never neutral. It is a political strategy. Under
the Trump regime it has become a central element in
a war against democracy, informed citizens, the truth,
and rationality. Put bluntly, it has become a central
tool in the weaponization against literacy, knowledge,
consciousness, and critical agency.
This is
domestic terrorism, rooted not only in incendiary words
but in their violent translation into state policy.
It is the organized weaponization of fear, the calculated
deployment of intimidation and cruelty to hollow out
democratic life and silence dissent. It is a deliberate
assault on citizens, on institutions, and on every idea
that refuses to bow before authoritarian power. As John
Ganz observes, under Trump, citizenship ceases to be
an inalienable right; it becomes a conditional prize,
a privilege dispensed at will. In Trump’s hands,
it is both gift and bludgeon, “a transferable
and revocable commodity,” bestowed on the loyal
and withheld or revoked from the condemned. Wielded
as a threat, it enables the regime to deport, to banish,
to resurrect the ancient horror of statelessness, expelling
individuals not only from the nation but from humanity
itself. In this sense, Ganz is right: Trump’s
assault on citizenship is not merely reactionary; it
bears the unmistakable mark of fascism, the totalitarian
logic that decides who counts as human and who may be
erased.
Appropriating
Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, domestic
terrorism is where political power thrives by reducing
human life to disposable, expendable objects. Under
the Trump regime, this takes the form of a violent,
racialized project that merges capital accumulation
with the subjugation of marginalized groups. His policies—driven
by a toxic mix of racial hierarchy, xenophobia, and
the celebration of violent histories—create a
society where certain lives are deemed unworthy of protection
or consideration. This regime operates on a death drive,
relentlessly attempting to eliminate both the lives
and futures of those who resist or defy its vision.
In this environment, the space for dissent shrinks,
historical amnesia thrives, leaving only room for those
willing to submit to the dominance of a fascist, authoritarian
regime.
This war
on memory is not just theoretical; it takes concrete
form in the attacks on institutions that hold our collective
history. Under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, memory,
let alone history itself, is under siege. What we face
is not neglect but an orchestrated assault fueled by
a systemic violence of forgetting, and the whitewashing
of the past that echoes the darkest traditions of fascism.
For Trump, any reckoning with slavery, Jim Crow, or
the long arc of racial violence is treated as an unforgivable
stain on America’s story. Equally intolerable
are the histories of resistance, by workers, Black communities,
women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, all of which he
and his allies disparage as “woke” ideology.
As journalist Dean Blundell recently observed, “In
recent days, he has attacked the Smithsonian Institution
as ‘out of control,’ insisting its museums
focus too much on ‘how bad slavery was.’
His administration has ordered a 120-day review of eight
Smithsonian museums and hinted that funding could be
used as leverage to ‘get the woke out.’
The message lands with the subtlety of a hammer: make
the story brighter, or else. This is not a debate about
one label or a curatorial tone. It’s an attempt
to police memory.” The policing of history is
not incidental; it is central to Trump’s authoritarian
project and nowhere is this clearer than in his attack
on the Smithsonian.
March 2025,
Trump signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian
Institution, declaring its exhibits were corrupted by
“improper ideology.” Trump argued that the
“Smithsonian museums were ‘out of control’
and “painted the country in a negative light,
including about slavery.” The language of the
order feigned neutrality, but the intent was unmistakably
authoritarian: to sanitize the nation’s cultural
memory. For Trump, As the White House “focused
on seven museums for their exhibits and messaging,”
the chilling effect was immediate. References to Trump’s
two impeachments quietly vanished from an exhibit on
the “Limits of Presidential Power.” What
had been a straightforward record of checks on executive
abuse was erased in real time, as though history itself
could be made to serve the whims of power.
This was
no isolated act of censorship. Trump has repeatedly
sought to bend the past to his will, recasting the violent
January 6th insurrectionists as “hostages,”
stripping diversity and equity programs of content that
celebrated Black history, and encouraging allies to
push bills that would defund schools for teaching that
the nation’s founding documents were entangled
with slavery. The thread binding these assaults together
is clear: the authoritarian logic of erasure. Memory
is to be disciplined, history domesticated, truth is
subordinated to the spectacle of Trump’s political
theater. What is at stake is not simply the content
of museum exhibits or school curricula, it is whether
democracy itself can survive without an honest reckoning
with its past. As history warns us, fascist regimes--from
Hitler’s book burnings to Franco’s cultural
purges--have always begun their reign of terror by waging
war on memory. The thread uniting these efforts is the
logic of erasure: history must serve power, never truth.
The Trump
era’s assault on memory recalls, in chilling ways,
the memory politics of Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi officials
staged massive book burnings, consigning to the flames
the works of Jewish authors, feminists, Marxists, and
anyone deemed “un-German.” These were not
just acts of censorship, they were spectacles of purification.
Fire was the ritual through which dissent was eradicated
and mythic unity forged. Schools and universities were
purged of Jewish and oppositional voices, textbooks
rewritten, and history recast as propaganda for the
racial state.
The United
States has not replicated those bonfires, but the spirit
is unmistakable. Books by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin,
and Margaret Atwood are being pulled from libraries.
Governors stage press events around banned books, turning
censorship into political theater. Viral videos of parents
denouncing “divisive concepts” in classrooms
circulate widely, feeding the illusion that banning
history is an act of protection.
The attack
on the Smithsonian, the banning of books, the silencing
of universities, and the stigmatization of “woke”
as a code word for racial justice and historical truth
all make visible how white supremacy fuels the cleansing
project of authoritarianism. The assault on memory and
historical consciousness connects strongly with a wider
pedagogy of repression and the attempts on the part
of MAGA ideologues to turn public and higher education
into crude laboratories of indoctrination. In one particular
instance, this project takes a particularly grotesque
form, as with Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters requiring
applicants from “liberal states” to pass
an anti-woke test before teaching. These assaults on
memory are also an assault on critical thinking, critical
pedagogy, and civic literacy. It is crucial to view
them as anything but isolated. They are part of a systematic
effort to weaponize education, culture, and memory to
manufacture a fascist subject, passive, obedient, and
stripped of critical thought. Primo Levi warned that
“wherever you begin by denying the fundamental
liberties of mankind and equality among people, you
move towards the concentration camp system.” Forgetting,
he argued, is the first step toward barbarism. The lesson
of Nazi Germany is that erasing memory is not collateral
to authoritarianism, it is central to it.
THE BURDEN
AND DUTY OF MEMORY
At the
heart of Trump’s war on memory lies an act of
pedagogical terror, a poisoning of history and the transformation
of culture into a blunt instrument of indoctrination.
To resist this death of memory is to recognize that
the fight for democracy cannot be separated from the
fight over history, over culture, and over the economic
forces that shackle both under gangster capitalism.
To defend truth is to defend freedom; to erase history
is to pave the road to authoritarianism. Trump’s
censorship of the Smithsonian, his bans on books, and
his whitewashing of slavery are not mere cultural disputes.
They are weapons aimed at the very life of democracy.
Culture is never simply a mirror of society; it is a
battlefield that shapes how we imagine the world and
our place within it. In a time when neoliberalism and
fascism bleed into each other, culture becomes the decisive
ground where narratives of domination collide with possibilities
of resistance. Authoritarians seek to turn it into a
machinery of obedience, silencing dissent and numbing
consciousness. Yet culture also holds the fragile, indispensable
power to ignite memory, nourish critical thought, and
keep alive the hope of resistance.
At the heart
of this project lies a war over culture and consciousness.
Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, warned
that every political struggle is also a struggle over
pedagogy, over who shapes the common sense of a society.
Paulo Freire reminded us that education is never neutral--it
either nurtures liberation or reinforces domination.
Trump’s pedagogy of repression seeks nothing less
than a populace severed from memory, stripped of critical
thought, and rendered compliant to authoritarian power.
What is at stake is not simply the narcotic of censorship
and erasure, but the calculated use of state terrorism
to fashion a fascist subject, anti-intellectual, morally
hollow, obedient to authority, and emptied of democratic
agency. The United States has become a warfare state,
where the instruments of militarization and the machinery
of control no longer remain at the edges of empire but
are turned inward, disciplining culture, stifling memory,
and colonizing everyday life under the banner of “law
and order.” What once was unleashed abroad in
the name of empire now circulates within, producing
citizens as enemies and culture itself as a battlefield.
War should be a warning; under Trump it has become theater,
a grotesque spectacle where cruelty parades as civic
virtue.
If democracy
is to endure, memory must be defended with the same
ferocity as freedom itself. Yet remembrance alone is
not enough. What is required is a critical culture that
binds past and present, a pedagogy that transforms historical
consciousness into collective action. The ghosts of
Auschwitz, of Jim Crow, of January 6th, remain with
us, not as abstractions but as urgent reminders of the
abyss that awaits when memory is erased. Our responsibility
is to teach, to narrate, and to reimagine, so that memory
itself becomes an act of resistance. Only by turning
remembrance into struggle can we block the return of
barbarism and reclaim democracy as a living, unfinished
experiment in freedom. Only through mass movements of
organized resistance can we dismantle the machinery
of ignorance, disposability, and death that now threatens
the remnants of American democracy.
In the end,
culture remains the decisive ground where radical democracy
either withers under authoritarian rule or is reborn
as the terrain of resistance and hope. What is clear
is that the Trump regime does not merely flirt with
fascism, it embodies it, hurling the United States over
the abyss. And that abyss stretches far beyond American
borders. Trump arms Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal
who wages genocide against the Palestinian people with
impunity; he aligns himself with dictators like Russia’s
Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s
Javier Gerardo Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele,
and others who traffic in repression, violence, and
cruelty. The warfare state is drenched in blood. Resistance
is no longer a choice; it is a necessity that sears
the conscience, demanding action.
Charlotte
Delbo, an Auschwitz survivor, pleaded in A Prayer
to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive:
“You who are passing by, I beg you, do something…to
justify your existence…because it would be too
senseless after all for so many to have died while you
live doing nothing with your life.” Her words
reverberate through time, transcending the horrors of
a specific moment in history, and call us to a moral
reckoning we cannot ignore. The choice before us is
unambiguous: silence or resistance, complicity or memory,
barbarism or democracy. The weight of this decision
cannot be overstated. The time to act is now, for what
is at stake is not just our collective humanity, but
the very survival of democracy itself.
also by Henry Giroux
Education
in Dark Times
Childcide
in Fascist Theocracies
The Corporate Firewall Against Truth
Assassins of Memory
Not Joe's But Our Collective Memory Issues
The
Politics of Emergency Time
Hijacking
Freedoms
America
at the Crossroads
Gangster
Capitalism
Historical
Amnesia in Age of Capitalist Apocalypse
The
Inequality of Freedom
The
Nazification of Education
Killing
Fields in Age of Mass Shootings
The
Pedagogy of Resistance
The
Death of Ethics
Banning
Books
Homage
to Paulo Freire
Plague
of Manufactured Ignorance
Racial
Cleansing and Erasing History
Plague
of Historical Amnesia
Recovering
from Trumpism
Tribute
to Noam Chomsky
The
Ouster of Trump
White
Supremacy in the Offal Office
The
Plague of Inequity
Covid
and our Embattled Society
Trump
and the Corona Death Waltz
Neoliberal
Fascism
The
Terror Unforseen
Interview
of H.A.Giroux
The
Normalization of Fascism
The
Public Intellectual II
Bertrand
Russell: Public Intellectual
Thinking
Dangerously in Dark Times
Democracy
in Exile
Authoritarianism
in America
Violence:
US Favourite Pastime
Losing
in Trump's America
In
Dark Times Teachers Matter
The
Age of Civic Illiteracy
Exile
and Disruption in the Academy
What
Society Produces a Donald Trump
From
School to the Prison Pipeline
Orwell
& Huxely
American
Sniper and Hollywood Heroism
Selfie Culture
The
Age of Disposability
In
the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Killing
Machines and the Madness of the Military
The
Age of Neoliberal Cruelty
The
Politics of the Deep State
Challenging
Casino Capitalism
Crisis
in Democracy
America's
Descent into Madness
