Rewriting Truth

Robert E. Lee statue on a pedestel.
Image: Public Domain

I've just finished reading Chapter 5 of Naomi Klein's book, No is Not Enough. In that chapter, she outlines how Donald Trump leverages social divides in his predominantly white, sexist, bigoted voter base and the "others," those groups who have historically enjoyed less privilege.

Klein, writing in 2017 about the rise of the MAGA movement in America, tries to paint a picture of why Hillary Clinton failed to win the 2016 presidential election. Clinton leaned into identity politics, explicitly calling out women, Black and Brown minorities, LGBTQ voters, and others who have been marginalized by the white majority. In doing so, according to Klein, Clinton alienated white, Christian voters who then cast their votes for Trump. But that's not what I found most impactful.

At one point, Klein wrote something that struck me hard. In a section titled "Racial Capitalism", she describes how America's capitalist economy "was born thanks to two huge subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people."

That rings true. 

Europeans migrating to America took land from the Native Americans. Europeans purchased stolen people from Africa, bringing them to America to be sold at a profit. The buyers of those stolen people put them to work in the fields of southern plantations, growing cotton, tobacco, rice, indigo, sugarcane, and cotton, thus making the plantation owners wealthy. And those oligarchs held all of the political power.

I'm reminded of the stories I read about the whitewashing of American history textbooks in the southern states. According to a July, 2021, interview of Chara Bohan by Jennifer Rainey Marquez on the website of the Georgia State University Research Magazine, Rewriting History, schools are teaching history using different versions of the same textbook, versions which are customized to align with the perspectives that various states wanted to emphasize, often ensuring that such history celebrates those oligarchs.

One such state perspective is cast as the Lost Cause narrative: the Civil War was a heroic, just, and noble pursuit which had nothing to do with slavery, and it needs to be memorialized with monuments and shrines. History textbooks were rewritten to paint the Lost Cause picture and celebrate its heroes.

How America rose to its economic status is effectively unseen by Trump's core voters. They buy into the myth of racial hierarchy, elevating white males to their "proper" position on pedestals over others. We see this today in Trump's second term. Web pages that described the accomplishments of Black soldiers and sailors in World War II have been removed from DoD websites. Stories of the Navajo "code talkers" have disappeared. And the tales of the Women's Army Air Corps (WAAC) have been similarly erased.

Rewriting history to suit one's political biases is little more than propaganda. As Kelly Ann Conway put it in 2017, these are the "alternative facts." 

But how is this different from outright lying?