https://hartmannreport.com/p/that-sign-in-front-of-the-smithsonian-0ee
"“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls
the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984
It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along
the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian
system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate
information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White
House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of
July.
The Council itself was packed with Trump leftovers from rightwing think tanks
and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute,
and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.
It claims that the Museum of American History has displays that cover the
fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery along with the positive
role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it
finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and
museum curators:
“…have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and
scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward
extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and
discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males,
Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has
little to no historical relevance.”
Wild, over-the-top bullshit complaints that our museums are accurately
portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire
than it seems.
Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten
his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can
use it to reprogram the future.
Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule,
typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of
history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful
heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent
America as an exclusively white Christian nation.
In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s
picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively
their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history
as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto)."
Via Frater Chaos and Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
