Those who study history know that there is a long tradition of attempts to change the story of our past. I certainly saw it during my career in historic preservation. While no one knows where the first preservation project took place, the first one for which we have records according to my friend and colleague Grace Gary may be the restoration of the Great Sphinx of Giza. A son of the pharaoh at the time supposedly had a dream where the Sphinx itself told him that if he restored the monument, he would become the next pharaoh.

Since Thutmose IV had to kill his older brother to take the throne, the story of the dream is usually seen as an attempt to bestow legitimacy on his reign. He also put a marker on the monument as his way of influencing how he would be viewed by the future.

It is fair to say that historic preservation has, from its very beginnings, been tailored to serve present-day purposes and also to shape how the future views the past.

Rewriting the story of what happened is as old as history itself. Some attempts—-such as state-sponsored erasure—-are more malicious than others. Those who care about understanding our world have continually pushed to broaden and deepen our knowledge, even in the face of significant rewritings of the past. Today we are in another of those periods.

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (2024) by Jason Stanley is a powerful and timely work. Stanley literally wrote the book on understanding fascism, and here he uses his family’s experience in 1930s Germany as a touchstone for a deeper dive into the tools of totalitarianism. Stanley explains in urgent and crisp writing how critical examination of a nation’s history and traditions is discouraged in authoritarian countries. This has happened across the world for centuries, has been underway locally now for more than a few years in parts of the United States such as Florida, and is now a feature of the new regime in Washington. That authoritarian regimes “often find history profoundly threatening” is a key lesson of the past century. By providing multiple perspectives on the past, a robust study of history undercuts one of autocracy’s key tools: the unquestioned voice of the leader. We lose those perspectives at our peril.

It is through exposure to multiple viewpoints that “citizens learn to regard one another as equal contributors to a national narrative.” Citizens in a democracy also learn that history is always under construction, open to collective reflection, new ideas, new evidence, and new perspectives. “History in a democracy,” writes Stanley, “is not static, not mythic, but dynamic and critical.”

In seven chapters, Stanley walks the reader through the fascists’ plan to rewrite our past and destroy our educational systems to support the mythical narrative of the strongman. We saw it last century in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union and we see it during our own time in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and—most disturbingly—in the United States.

One only has to turn to the news media to see the evidence of this all around us. The Department of Defense removed pages about Native American Iwo Jima veteran Ira Hayes—then restored one, with changes to remove references to his ethnicity. That is only part of a broader project to bleach American military history until no trace remains of Jackie Robinson, Medgar Evers, Colin Powell, Charles Calvin Rogers, Civil War nurses, and Navajo Code Talkers. As one comedic pundit described it, this purge is designed to remove traces of “all those dastardly DEI heroes, spreading the dangerous myth that people who are not white and male can achieve things.” *

We should make fun of these actions, but we should also understand that they are deadly serious. Southern enslavers tried to shape history to serve their purposes, and their descendants continued that effort with the Lost Cause narrative throughout the Jim Crow era. Nazi Germany erased history to justify invasions of neighboring countries. In this century, “Russia bans Ukranian history in order to gather the Russian population’s support behind its colonial ambitions.”

“In this powerful book, Jason Stanley deftly interweaves his family’s experience under Nazi rule with a far-reaching, lucid explanation of why authoritarians hate honest history. A must read to understand how much truth telling matters for multiracial democracy to withstand the siege.”

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

Stanley’s father, who like his mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, became a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. In his scholarship, Manfred Stanley wrote about a type of education that might serve as an alternative to the false stories favored by the right wing in America. “Civic friendship” is a requirement for a modern political community that takes democratic values seriously. This isn’t a call for “unity” in our educational system. “The challenge is the more difficult one of bringing people to the point of understanding the objective historical and existing conditions of groups with whom they have had no personal life experience.”

Erasing History is a book well worth reading. As Congressman Jamie Raskin has written about Stanley’s work, “He leaves us with the sense that those who fight for the past can save the future.”

More to come . . .

DJB

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*After significant pushback by the public, many of those pages have been restored, although usually with changes to, among other things, hide any discussion of gender or ethnicity.

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Image by blom3 from Pixabay