Just this week, Florida lawmakers passed a bill that bans school lessons or workplace training that could make participants feel discomfort or guilt. That is going to make it difficult, if not impossible, to teach about events in Florida – like the massacres at Rosewood and Ocoee.
How do you avoid making students feel uncomfortable when the subject matter is white people terrorizing black people? You can’t – which is why these kinds of laws are all about whitewashing (literally) our history so that white people don’t have to contend with feeling any discomfort.
This is yet another way that right wingers are mimicking exactly what Putin did in Russia. Back in 2013, the Russian president ordered the drafting of new history books.
A call by President Vladimir Putin for a new textbook that reconciles differences over Russia’s past has left him facing accusations of copying Soviet leaders by rewriting history for political ends.
The former Soviet spy asked historians in February to come up with guidelines for new school history books that would provide a unified version of the many difficult events in Russian and Soviet history.
You might remember that, in 2018, Putin attempted to re-write the history of the Soviet Union’s massive failure in Afghanistan. Here’s what Amie Ferris-Rotman wrote about it at the time:
It is part of Moscow’s wider attempt to mold a historical narrative that fits the current ideology under Putin, whose leadership has projected the image of a strong Russia with an unblemished past.
Just this past December, Russian courts shut down the International Memorial Society, which was formed in 1989 to document Soviet-era repression. One of its founding members, Irina Sherbakova, captured why that is so significant.
The Gorbachev era brought about a frenzy of change, and people witnessed incredible events on a weekly basis: they snatched up newspapers, hung on every word broadcast on TV, and with every passing day they felt more alive and free.
Many also understood that to change the rotten Soviet system one had to know the truth about its Stalinist past…
Soon enough, in the grip of severe economic crisis, “democracy” became a dirty word for many Russians. They were disappointed, and felt reforms were never truly accomplished. Russian society succumbed to weariness and indifference. Stalinist crimes, once thought better out in the open, had turned out to be so horrific that people didn’t want to spend time thinking about them.
By the mid-1990s, nostalgia for the Soviet period started to creep in. The greyness of the Brezhnev era, with its endless queues and empty shops, started to be recalled as a peaceful, prosperous time. And gradually something that had seemed impossible during perestroika, became real: Stalin’s shadow loomed large again.
Vladimir Putin’s rise to power came accompanied by a new version of patriotism relying on “heroic” and “bright” aspects of the Soviet past. An image of Stalin as a strong leader who had ensured victory in the second world war and led a Soviet superpower re-emerged. Television propaganda again worked hard to create that image. The millions who perished in waves of political repression were pushed to the margins of collective consciousness…
It’s not that Russians have forgotten about the direct link between Stalin’s name and the political repression that affected almost every family. Rather, they don’t want to reflect on the terror, on who perpetrated it or what the rationale behind it was. They aren’t ready to acknowledge that this was the central pillar of the entire system…
It is difficult today to recall 1989 without a deep feeling of lost opportunity and shattered hope. In the early Putin years, a silent majority traded the possibility of freedom for promises of “stability”, and later for the national pride of “great Russia”, a power that draws borders around itself and feels like a besieged fortress.
I apologize for the long quote. But it struck me that Sherbakova could have been talking about what is happening now in the United States. Barack Obama was elected president on the promise of “hope” and “change.” It soon became clear that real change would require a reckoning with our past.
But before that could happen, a backlash ensued. Nostalgia about a mythical past emerged and thoughts about oppression “were pushed to the margins of collective consciousness.” The current attempts to re-write history – as we’re seeing in Florida and so many other red states – are a reminder that too many Americans don’t want to “reflect on the terror” of our past and certainly don’t want to acknowledge that racism has been a “central pillar or our entire system.”
Just as the silent majority in Russia traded freedom for the national pride of “great Russia,” we now have one party dominated by people who want to “make America great again.” Their plan is to draw literal borders around the country and make it a besieged fortress walled off from the rest of the world.
It is obvious that much of the blame for the attempts to whitewash U.S. history can be laid at the feet of leaders like Ron DeSantis and Republicans in the Florida legislature. But it is the people who cling to a mythological past and refuse to face the truth about our history that give those leaders power. Unlike Russia, we can remove them from office and pave the way for moving forward. That will require us to find the courage to reckon with our past – especially when it makes us uncomfortable. This would be a good place to start:
