In the first paragraph of Project 2025, which is the operating guide for a second Trump management of the Heritage Foundation, the war lines on history are drawn: “America is now divided between the two opposing forces: the Revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American Revolution.” Three weeks after Donald Trump’s selection, the project, Mike Gonzalez, who contributed to 2025 and right -wing activist Christopher Rufo’s former staff chef Armen Toloeee, wrote about the martial maneuvers of the new administration. Wall Street Journal This was limited to the White House to yapmak making an increase in the heart of awakening ”, starting with the Smithsonian Institute and taking the control of museums back”.
During the campaign, Trump defended the ignorance of the 2025 project. “I never read it and I will never do it,” he said. It was hard to separate it. Although it is really difficult to imagine that Trump had gathered on his desk and underlined the passages on the nine hundred plus of the report, he had the “situational awareness of his prescriptions in Washington to maximize the power of the administrator, to reduce the state institutions, to punish, destroy the perceived enemies and to manage an automatically. Trump raises the 2025 project to the letter to force the judges, law firms, cultural institutions, university presidents and press barons to the ruthless obedience stances, and uses executive orders, cases and rhetoric bombs. Even Brechtian took time to the center of the cultural rebellion, John F. Kennedy to gather the Performing Arts Center.
As for autocracy everywhere, this administration demands a mystical view of a dreaming past. In late March, Trump issued an executive order called Tabilme Restoring Truth and Mental Health to American History ”. The diagnosis is for a long time between professors and curators, “a harmonious and widespread effort to rewrite the history of our nation, changes the objective realities with a distorted narrative directed by ideology rather than the facts”. Continues:
Every year, millions of Americans’ best hat every year, St. Smithsonian, whom they visit every year to see Louis’s spirit, Harriet Tubman’s shawl, a month of rock, and the ruby slippers of Dorothy, are at the center of the anger of the ruling order. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the order has a special problem with a sculpture exhibition called “The Form of Power ve and forces the view of the olmad a social structure, not a biological reality of the race.
Perhaps to question the scholarship of an executive order is rude or “revisionist ,, but curators understood correctly. As a wall text in the exhibition states, people are “genetically 99.9 percent”. Opposite view, racial essence, is not benign; It forms the basis of virulence virulence because the Jews are defined as pests Der Sturmer The claims in the white-nationalist manifesters are cursed with lower IQs.
National Afro -American History and Culture Museum – Managed until recently New Yorker Poetry Editor Kevin Young – especially for the splenic faculty. In the first period, Trump aroused admiration when visiting what was called Black Smithsonian. Afro -American struggle is a magnificent museum that represents the story of pain and success in a rich way. Daily, adults and schoolkids, Chattel slavery and Jim Crow, exhibitions about the restructuring and civil rights movement and leave American history with a deeper understanding in all its darkness and promise. However, there is no complexity in a cultural war that demands that political opponents to be branded as “awakened revolutionaries”. And according to the executive order, JD Vance, who is sitting on Smithsonian’s board of directors, will make things simple. In Zarif Orwellese, Vance is accused of leading the effort to remove it from the museum called “inappropriate ideology ..
This impulse against the police in the past is not specific to Trump administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere. History museums, which were once a feature of many Soviet cities, did not question Lenin’s life. They were Orthodox places of worship. Toprips and tea cups were sacrificed like Turin’s cover. More importantly, ideological principles were not left open to discussion. For decades, the second most important figure of the Communist Party was the leading ideologist who had the last word about what could be said and what could not be said about the undisputed history after the Secretary General.
When Mikhail Gorbachev set out to democratize the Soviet Union forty years ago, one of his bravest movements was to encourage revisionism – or better, free heterodox argument. This led to a sanctioned publication of numerous censored writers, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, explaining how Lenin started a system of labor camps from Moscow to Magadan. Such historical revelations, delayed and discussed, these historical revelations were required, but it was irreversible painful. Among the leaders in which the party was more hidden, this new liberalism-Soviet Wokeaksm was calling. Yegor Ligachev, one of Gorbachev’s rivals at the party then, He complained to me (in tones waiting for the project 2025) that when the history was removed from the party, it creates a “gloomy dur atmosphere in society. “People are longing for something positive, something that shines,” he said. “Nevertheless, our own cultural figures have published more lies and anti -Soviet things than our Western enemies.”
Ligachev, who died in 2021, lived to see that the last embers of Russian liberalism were extinguished. Vladimir Putin has no inheritance foundation, but he did it. In 2013, he complained that Russia’s short -lived historical pluralism period led to textbooks full of “internal contradictions and uncertain interpretations .. Culture War Commissioners took the clue and approved a textbook full of undisputed allegations of official history: “Russia is a country of heroes.” And “Ukraine is a Neo-Nazi State.” With the same spirit, Foreign policyA few years ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping controls the “historical nihilism” aid line, so that the citizens splashed with everyone who shared “wrong ideas and perspectives”.
Trump’s executive order about history does not fully repeat the tactics of Putin or Xi. But rhyme. ♦
