In his 1949 dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, the agency through which the ruling Party controls history, memory, and “reality.” The Party’s ominous slogan proclaims, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
1984, which drew parallels to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, was Orwell’s stark warning about the danger of wide-scale denial and whitewashing of important historical facts to serve the interests of those in power. Control of the past can determine what is (or isn’t) taught in our schools, drives public opinion, and shapes public policy, all of which are essential to control the future. In 1984, “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
It may sound alarmist to compare the US with Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state. Yet, there’s no hiding the fact that the Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s history, seeking to purge parts of the historical narrative that shine a light on America’s darkest periods. It’s imperative for Jewish organizations to join with the African American community to speak out in protest before it’s too late.
Why we must fight Trump's rewriting of history
On August 12, the White House announced it would conduct a comprehensive review of exhibits, including online content, at eight prominent Washington, DC-based Smithsonian museums, which President Donald Trump has denounced as “out of control” for focusing too much on “how bad slavery was.” The museums will be required to “celebrate American exceptionalism and remove divisive or partisan narratives.”
The announcement follows Trump’s March executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It reads, “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology.” The irony of that claim should be lost on no one.
Noted historian Clarissa Myrick-Harris of Morehouse College, a historically Black campus in Atlanta, Georgia, called the executive order “an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed, or that Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racial violence against Black communities, families, and individuals ever occurred.”
Among the “objective facts” that have been “replaced” are Confederate statues. Thus, in August, the Trump administration revealed that it is planning to restore two Confederate monuments that were removed in the wake of the George Floyd protests five years ago. One is a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike that stood near the White House until it was toppled by protesters.
The other, a monument ordered to be returned to Arlington National Cemetery by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, represents a sanitized depiction of slavery. A Latin inscription on the statue lauds the “noble Lost Cause,” a late 19th-century movement that portrayed the Southern states which seceded from the Union as heroic, while minimizing the centrality of slavery as a cause of the Civil War.
Earlier in the year, Hegseth was busy purging, not restoring. He had a web page honoring Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play Major League Baseball, removed from the Defense Department website as part of an effort to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion content. The page recounted an incident in 1944 when Robinson was arrested for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus. It was restored only after an outcry from civil rights advocates.
The attempted erasure of history should resonate strongly with the Jewish community. In the last two years, we have witnessed the denial by pro-Hamas sympathizers of the atrocities of October 7, even when confronted with video footage shamelessly taken by the terrorists themselves.
Equally alarming, Holocaust denial and distortion have become increasingly prevalent both in the US and in parts of Europe, from gross minimization of the numbers of Jewish victims to efforts (e.g., in Poland and Hungary) to deny complicity in the Holocaust.
Given Trump’s war on history, it’s hardly a stretch to believe that a US Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit describing the State Department’s callous and antisemitic indifference to the plight of Europe’s Jews – the antithesis of what Trump means by “American exceptionalism” – could end up on the to-purge list.
The administration would do well to learn from the example set by Germany. The Germans haven’t run from their shameful history. On the contrary, the Holocaust is taught extensively and memorialized throughout the country because they don’t want to repeat the sins of the past.
History should inform and inspire us. That Americans are willing to reconcile ourselves with the darker periods of our past is what makes America exceptional. If, by contrast, Trump’s Orwellian revisionist history is allowed to advance unimpeded, the lie will become the truth, and our fragile democracy will be history.■
Robert Horenstein is chief community relations and public affairs officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.