Posts Tagged ‘revisionism’
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”*…
As the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore unpack the ways in which in Trump administration is working to control the country’s future by bulldozing its past. They open with a recounting of the marking of the 250th birthday of the Army (and of Donald Trump’s birthday) last June: several thousand came to watch the military parade; an estimated 5 million Americans held counter-protests…
… spectators had lined up for hours to get inside the security perimeter. Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year. When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation…
But the parade was simply a warm-up…
… So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-Cola, and General Mills…
… America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.
Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
The semiquincentennial is just one part of the commander in chief’s broader campaign to harness the mechanisms of the federal government to enforce his preferred version of the nation’s history and culture—a Trumpified presentation of America’s past and present. On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the administration even rolled out a taxpayer-funded webpage seeking to recast the day’s events as a patriotic effort to protest “the fraudulent election.” Three weeks later, Trump’s FBI seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and other election material from Georgia’s largest county. “TRUMP WON BIG,” the president declared the next morning. “Crooked Election!”
Since his inauguration last year, Trump has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center—reshaping its artistic programming, installing a MAGA-dominated board that claims to have renamed it in his honor, and then closing it for renovations. He’s railed against “OUT OF CONTROL” museums that he insists are too focused on “how bad Slavery was.” He has successfully pressured the Smithsonian Institution to review displays to ensure “unbiased content” and has extracted significant concessions over what top universities teach students. At his direction, the National Park Service has altered or removed scores of exhibits at parks and historic sites on topics including slavery, Native Americans, climate change, and even fossils. Trump acolytes are also leveraging federal dollars to stop local librarians and educators from sharing content they dislike.
Under the pretense of stamping out “woke” ideas and promoting patriotism, the White House is attempting to mandate uncritical acceptance of its own take on the American story, one that celebrates the martial feats of mostly white men and an imagined religious and ideological conformity that minimizes the fights, tribulations, and dissenters who have defined the country. It’s an effort that flies in the face of American ideals—and reality.
“In a pluralist democracy, there are invariably conflicts of values,” says Alexander Karn, a Colgate University historian who has written about the 250th anniversary. “To deny that messiness by seeking to erase the perspectives that don’t flatter a dominant group or help create a triumphal history is anti-egalitarian and, therefore, anti-democratic.”
Instead, Karn argues, “the road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and thoroughgoing way.”
Which is not the road we’re on…
[Friedman and Moore supply much more detail on the revisionist (in some case, “suppressionist”) efforts underway, and their relationship to the MAGA agenda. They conclude…]
…Rallies that celebrate a simplified, sanctified historical narrative have long been a favorite tool of autocrats. “Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past,” says Karn, the Colgate historian. “When a dictator is intent on creating or sustaining a hierarchical social order, he will see to it that history abides.”
The military parade through Washington four days later proved to be a clumsy prelude for Trump’s very real efforts to deploy troops, along with heavily armed federal agents, on the streets of even more cities—often against the wishes of local officials. To justify sending the National Guard to Portland, the president made false claims about widespread violence, perhaps because Fox News repeatedly re-aired violent footage from 2020 as though it were part of the 2025 anti-ICE protests.
Since August, the Labor Department’s DC headquarters has displayed an America250-branded banner with a Mao-style image of Trump above the words “American Workers First.” The spectacle drew attention when National Guard members deployed by Trump were photographed beneath it—an image that captures the authoritarian ethos of his second term.
The troops, supposedly dispatched to Washington to fight crime, are now staying on in connection with the semiquincentennial. In an October court filing, the DC attorney general revealed that Guard leaders were planning for a prolonged deployment. “We know that America250 occurs this summer, and that will be a factor in determining the future of the mission,” a Guard commanding general wrote in an email included in the filing. In January, Trump officially extended the DC operation through the end of 2026, even as he bowed to court rulings blocking him from unleashing the armed forces on other parts of the country.
That Trump’s enthusiasm for the domestic use of troops is merging with America’s 250th festivities is almost too easy a metaphor. To celebrate the anniversary of a war sparked in part by the quartering of soldiers in US cities, the administration is lengthening a military occupation vehemently opposed by the local population.
A quarter-millennium later, amid “No Kings” protests and an unprecedented executive power grab, the arguments against tyranny that inspired American independence are alive and pressing. It seems worth asking whether America250 will celebrate the ideals of the country’s founders—or those of the monarch they rebelled against…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Trump’s War on History,” from @dfriedman.bsky.social and @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social in @motherjones.com.
* George Orwell, 1984
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As we face the past, we might send heliocentric birthday greetings to Galileo Galilei, the physicist, philosopher, and pioneering astronomer; he was born on this date in 1564. Galileo (whom, readers will recall, had his share of trouble with authorities displeased with his challenge to Aristotelean cosmology), died insisting “still, it [the Earth] moves.”
Draft of Galileo’s letter to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice, in which he first recorded the movement of the moons of Jupiter– an observation that upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth. (source)
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won”*…
Aditya Narayan Sharma on how the Hindu right distorted Gandhi…
Even outside India, it can be difficult to escape the cult of Mohandas Gandhi, the lawyer, thinker, and politician who helped liberate the nation from British colonial rule in 1947. The praise ranges from the anodyne (Gandhi is a “hero not just to India but to the world,” per Barack Obama) to the ironic (“really phenomenal,” according to Burmese political prisoner turned genocide defender Aung San Suu Kyi) to the surreal (“I am Gandhi-like. I think like Gandhi. I act like Gandhi,” declared New York City Mayor Eric Adams). Seventy-six years after his death, Gandhi is not only an icon of Indian independence, but a uniquely potent international symbol of peace and nonviolence. Gandhi has been, at one point or another, as historian Vinay Lal puts it, the “patron saint” of “environmentalists, pacifists, conscientious objectors, non-violent activists, nudists, naturopaths, vegetarians, prohibitionists, social reformers, internationalists, moralists, trade union leaders, political dissidents, hunger strikers, anarchists, luddites, celibates, anti-globalisation activists, pluralists, ecumenists, walkers, and many others.” Everyone, it seems, has endorsed the honorific coined for him more than a century ago: Mahatma, Sanskrit for “great soul.”
Within India, Gandhi graces every banknote and is plastered on billboards and painted on walls alongside busy thoroughfares. His bespectacled face looms over big cities and small towns alike. Countless schools, universities, roads, and public spaces are named after him. In 2013, the government of Bihar, India’s poorest state, spent several million dollars building the world’s tallest Gandhi statue, casting him in a shimmering tower of bronze with two grateful children by his side. Public figures fight to outperform one another at Mahatma-loving, something of a national sport: in 2021, one representative viral video captured a regional party leader clinging to a bust of Gandhi and sobbing. But Gandhi’s ubiquity masks the fact that among political actors, commentators, intellectuals, and a growing swath of the general public, his reputation is far from settled.
The lead-up to a general election this spring — in which the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is likely to beat out the centrist Indian National Congress Party and be reelected for a third straight term — has brought dueling visions of Gandhi to the fore. Congress, which was helmed by Gandhi himself on the road to independence, still hopes to capitalize on its historic connections to the Mahatma, but the efforts of its increasingly ossified leadership are falling flat. Meanwhile, the BJP pays lip service to Gandhi’s brand while vigorously working to counter his core values, including, most crucially, his lifelong pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity. The far-right fringes go even further than the official party line: in some circles, Gandhi is belittled, mocked, burned in effigy. This confused state of affairs suggests that a reckoning with the competing narratives swirling around Gandhi is long overdue. Even as he has been flattened into an ill-defined figurehead by liberals and centrists, his complex legacy is being appropriated — and at times desecrated — by India’s seemingly unstoppable right…
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It is dangerous, ultimately, to cede criticism of Gandhi to the Hindu right. Many Indians, myself included, admire our founding fathers for their grand, if imperfect and patchily implemented, vision of a secular and pluralist country. Nevertheless, the kernel of truth behind the right-wing critique of Gandhi is that the republic was founded by patrician Anglophone elites, and its core institutions do reflect the worldview of a small, affluent group who were, in many crucial ways, disconnected from the material and spiritual realities of the people they governed. Contemporary India has severe socioeconomic, caste, gender, and regional inequalities, in part as a legacy of this paternalistic cohort’s work. But that’s a starting point for politics, not a dead end. Look a little deeper, and opponents of the BJP will find not only flaws but also invaluable resources in Gandhi’s writings, particularly his distinctively Indian formulation of secularism that stands a real chance of resisting Hindutva. And in an era of rising religious violence, Gandhian pacifism itself may be more relevant than ever: it’s no longer a set of bland phrases from history books, but an urgent directive. Beyond shallow paeans to the forgotten values, Gandhi’s message could be deployed against his killer’s ideological heirs, if only someone were willing to do it. No one — politician, citizen, or intellectual — can seriously claim to inherit Gandhi’s values until they take him down from his pedestal, rescue him from both the glibness of liberal idol worship and the humiliation of Hindutva slander, and re-engage with the great thinker himself. That is surely the only fate befitting the man we once called Bapu, or Dad…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Character Assassination,” from @AdityaNSharma in @thedrift_mag.
See also: “Prime Minister Modi Is Disarming the Opposition Ahead of India’s National Elections.”
* “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.” – Mahatma Gandhi
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As we resist self-rewarding revisionism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1602 that an ur-engine of the colonialization from which Gandhi led India was born: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or The Dutch East India Company, as it’s known in the Anglophone world) was incorporated. It was a response to the English (later, British) East India company, on which it was modeled, up to a point.
Generally considered the world’s first trans-national corporation and the first publicly to issue stocks and bonds (and the first company to be ever actually listed on an official stock exchange), it began with a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade. The VOC also prefigured the mega-corporation of today in that it had quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies. Considered by many to be the largest and most powerful corporation in history, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals (including the British) in international trade (and many nations in power) for almost 200 years.
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