The Denial and Whitewashing of History

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

Censorship, the burning and banning of books and the persecution/murder of writers have been despicable crimes perpetrated by the human race through the ages. The first such recorded atrocity was in 213 BCE, during the Qin dynasty, when Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of books and the live burial of scholars in order that he may remain on his throne.

The obliteration of the Grand Library of Baghdad by the marauding Mongols in 1258; the destruction of Aztec and Mayan manuscripts during the Spanish colonization of the Americas; the burnings of Catholic manuscripts in England after Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church; the use of books seized from the US Library of Congress to burn the US Capitol during the War of 1812; Nazi book burning of communist and Jewish manuscripts “subversive to or representing ideologies opposed to Nazism”; and, closer to home, the complete destruction, in 1981, of the Jaffna Public Library allegedly by government-sponsored Sinhalese mobs, who set fire to one of the biggest libraries in Asia, containing over 97,000 irreplaceable books and manuscripts.

Though the three-decade long ethnic war in Sri Lanka took the lives of tens of thousands of Sri Lankans and caused incalculable destruction to valuable property and resources, history will rank the burning of the Jaffna Library as the greatest atrocity in a conflict replete with atrocities.

These are but a few of the more egregious instances of destruction of books and manuscripts, representing efforts by kings, tyrants, invaders and politicians to destroy historical records, traditions and cultures of civilizations, to seize lands and rule as conquerors. They may have silenced some, they may have destroyed others, but they are all destined to fail. As Heinrich Heine, one of Germany’s greatest poets, wrote, “When they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people”.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution enshrines freedom of speech, and guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly and petition. Many American classics have been “challenged” in the USA during the past two centuries, but their suppression has not remained in force because of the guard-rails provided by the First Amendment. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was challenged and suppressed from 1859 for its theories on evolution, which went against Christian beliefs of Divine Creation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are all examples of American classics that have survived spurious challenges of censorship.

The Trump-owned Republican party is now showing a trend towards racism and anti-Semitism, using censorship and suppression in an attempt to rewrite the nation’s history of genocide and slavery, and to deny the horrors of the holocaust.

Critical Race Theory (CRT), also known as the 1619 Project, fancy names of what we used to study as plain “History”, has become a target of censorship for Republicans, primarily Governors DeSantis of Florida and Youngkin of Virginia. These Republican Governors lead the anti-CRT movement, but they are not alone. Many Republican states including Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arizona and North Dakota have all passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in their classrooms. The objective of such censorship is the obsession of the Radical Right to keep the more gory aspects of US history, including genocide and slavery, out of school curricula; in other words, to teach “selective history” as defined by the invaders and oppressors. CRT has become the latest Bogeyman for the country’s racist history and the way it has impacted its racist present.

The opponents for the dissemination of CRT argue that all white people are unfairly feared as “oppressors” or predators; while black people are all classified as “the oppressed” or victims, through the teaching of historical atrocities and discrimination committed against Native Americans and African Americans by the ancestors of the white man. They aver, against all available evidence, that systemic racism does not exist in the nation today, that CRT is largely an expedient strategy by politicians to win the minority vote. Many of them even hallucinate that the USA is an equitable democracy. They are simply unwilling or unable to remove the blind spot obscuring the fact that America is not great for everyone, that the nation has a long way to go before it becomes a democracy for all of its citizens.

Proponents of CRT submit that American children should be taught the complete history of America, warts and all, not just its grand experiment of Democracy which began in 1789. They do not acknowledge that the nation’s violent and racist past, including genocide and slavery, ultimately led to this experiment, which remains a work-in-progress.

CRT explains how systemic racism is currently the defining feature of the nation, coming to terms with the racial anomalies that exist today in police brutality, the judicial and prison systems, voter suppression and the classification of Black neighbourhoods as “ghettos”. The more we try to deny the atrocities and racial discrimination that have tormented the nation to the present day, the more likely that they will continue, unabated, into the future.

Governors DeSantis and Youngkin, who are walking the tightrope of sucking up to Trump while nursing their own presidential ambitions for 2024, have already banned the teaching of CRT in Florida and Virginia. There is little doubt that this legislation and other such attempts to camouflage and whitewash history will ultimately be overturned by even a 6/3 stacked Republican Supreme Court, as such bans are in direct violation of the First Amendment.

A school district in the State of Tennessee recently voted to ban the sale of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel titled “The Complete Maus”, by graphic cartoonist/writer Art Spiegelman. The reasons given for the ban are that the book contains “graphic use of unnecessary nudity and profanity and depiction of violence and suicide”. The only example of “unnecessary nudity and suicide” in the book is a small panel illustrating the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother in the tub, having slashed her wrists.

I guess the centrefolds appearing in magazines like Playboy, with lewd illustrations of female genitalia photographed at every possible angle in minute detail, are examples of “necessary nudity”.

And unbelievably, the “profanity” objected to in the book includes seven instances of the expletive “damn”!

Spiegelman’s graphic narrative is based on an interview with his father, a holocaust survivor, of his experiences and suffering at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and the subsequent suicide of his mother in 1968, apparently because she was unable to live with these memories after the war. Spiegelman depicts the various ethnicities in the form of animals: Jews are Mice (vermin or pests, carriers of disease), Nazis Cats (predators who prey on the Jewish mice), Americans are Dogs (who rescue the Jewish mice from the German cats). The book contains numerous graphic illustrations of hangings and other forms of violence and torture inflicted by the Nazis to subjugate and murder Jews in Auschwitz. Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning book is a graphic narrative of the atrocities of the holocaust.

Just as the banning of Critical Race Theory is a denial of the grim realities of genocide and slavery in the founding of America, the banning of a book illustrating the brutality suffered by Jews during the 1930s in Hitler’s Germany is a denial of the holocaust.

Legislation recently proposed by the New Hampshire Republican legislature also provides a nightmare of things to come if the Republicans gain control of Congress and the presidency. The proposed Bill, entitled “An Act Relative to Teachers’ loyalty”, seeks to ban public schoolteachers from fostering any theory that depicts US history or its founding in a negative light. The Bill states, “Such prohibition includes but is not limited to teaching that the United States was founded on racism”. Which it was, and there is no doubt that genocide and slavery are implicit in this concept of “racism”.

These examples of repression highlight the current racist and anti-Semitic trends shown by Trump and the Republican Party to promote such authoritarian and racist measures of censorship. If these repressive measures are ever accepted nationally, they will prove a great danger to a diverse and just American society in the future. Especially if a defeated, seditious former president or wannabe dictators like DeSantis and Youngkin take control of the presidency and Congress in 2024.

The Radical Right attempts to erase the history of America in the hope that such erasure will whitewash the sins of their white forefathers, and so falsely paint America as a universally equitable democracy. A democracy where, according to the preamble to the US Constitution, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Unfortunately, the new Republican Party intends, as the original Framers also intended, to restrict these “inalienable rights” only to white, Christian men.

The nation will overcome, in the fullness of time, the challenges of racism and authoritarianism posed by Trump and his Republican, white supremacist base. Martin Luther King’s dream, that outlines the long history of racial injustice in America, with the hope that his children will one day be “judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” has only been delayed by the death throes of white supremacy.

Just as Hitler’s dream of the birth of an ethnically pure, blonde and blue-eyed Aryan Nation never saw the light of day, so the concept of a Trump-backed Republican Party’s dream of a nation dominated by white supremacists will also be destroyed by the very history it seeks to suppress.