Timothy Snyder, an authority on totalitarianism, draws a straight line in this article that appeared in the New York Times from Stalin’s efforts to purge history of negative facts about the Soviet Union to the current mania among Republicans to control the teaching of American history and censor shameful facts in our history.
Professor Snyder reminds us of Stalin’s brutal campaign to crush Ukraine, where nearly 4 million people died, most from starvation, after their crops were seized.
He writes:
Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic beyond Russia, and Stalin understood it as wayward and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine failed to produce the yields that Stalin expected, his response was to blame local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. As foodstuffs were extracted amid famine, it was chiefly Ukrainians who suffered and died — some 3.9 million people in the republic, by the best reckoning, well over 10 percent of the total population. In communications with trusted comrades, Stalin did not conceal that he was directing specific policies against Ukraine. Inhabitants of the republic were banned from leaving it; peasants were prevented from going to the cities to beg; communities that failed to make grain targets were cut off from the rest of the economy; families were deprived of their livestock. Above all, grain from Ukraine was ruthlessly seized, well beyond anything reason could command. Even the seed corn was confiscated.
The Soviet Union took drastic action to ensure that these events went unnoticed. Foreign journalists were banned from Ukraine. The one person who did report on the famine in English under his own byline, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, was later murdered. The Moscow correspondent of The New York Times, Walter Duranty, explained away the famine as the price of progress. Tens of thousands of hunger refugees made it across the border to Poland, but Polish authorities chose not to publicize their plight: A treaty with the U.S.S.R. was under negotiation. In Moscow, the disaster was presented, at the 1934 party congress, as a triumphant second revolution. Deaths were recategorized from “starvation” to “exhaustion.” When the next census counted millions fewer people than expected, the statisticians were executed. Inhabitants of other republics, meanwhile, mostly Russians, moved into Ukrainians’ abandoned houses. As beneficiaries of the calamity, they were not interested in its sources.
The Soviet Union and Russia now have gone to great lengths to deny the Ukrainian genocide. Russia has passed laws to make it illegal to speak or write honestly about the crimes of the Soviet Union. Snyder calls such action “memory laws.”
These Russian policies belong to a growing international body of what are called “memory laws”: government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship. Early memory laws were generally designed to protect the truth about victim groups. The most important example, passed in West Germany in 1985, criminalized Holocaust denial. Perhaps unsurprisingly, other countries followed that precedent, and banned the denial of other historical atrocities. The West German law was controversial to some advocates of freedom of speech; succeeding measures were disputed on the grounds that the Holocaust was in a special category. Yet these early laws could be defended as attempts to protect the weaker against the stronger, and an endangered history against propaganda.
The new memory laws are meant to protect the powerful, not the victims of past atrocities, by denying that such atrocities ever occurred.
Then Snyder turns to the current movement in GOP-controlled states to limit or ban teaching the history of racism because it might reduce patriotic pride or it might make some students uncomfortable.
This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws. [Editor’s note: Add New Hampshire to the list of states that have passed laws limiting what may be taught about the past.]
The particulars of these laws vary. The Idaho law is the most Kafkaesque in its censorship: It affirms freedom of speech and then bans divisive speech. The Iowa law executes the same totalitarian pirouette. The Tennessee and Texas laws go furthest in specifying what teachers may and may not say. In Tennessee teachers must not teach that the rule of law is “a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.” Nor may they deny the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, words that Thomas Jefferson presumably never intended to be part of an American censorship law. The Idaho law mentions Critical Race Theory; the directive from the Florida school board bans it in classrooms. The Texas law forbids teachers from requiring students to understand the 1619 Project. It is a perverse goal: Teachers succeed if students do not understand something.
But the most common feature among the laws, and the one most familiar to a student of repressive memory laws elsewhere in the world, is their attention to feelings. Four of five of them, in almost identical language, proscribe any curricular activities that would give rise to “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
History is not therapy, and discomfort is part of growing up. As a teacher, I cannot exclude the possibility, for example, that my non-Jewish students will feel psychological distress in learning how little the United States did for Jewish refugees in the 1930s. I know from my experience teaching the Holocaust that it often causes psychological discomfort for students to learn that Hitler admired Jim Crow and the myth of the Wild West. Teachers in high schools cannot exclude the possibility that the history of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression will make some non-Black students uncomfortable. The new memory laws invite teachers to self-censor, on the basis of what students might feel — or say they feel. The memory laws place censorial power in the hands of students and their parents. It is not exactly unusual for white people in America to express the view that they are being treated unfairly; now such an opinion could bring history classes to a halt…
The American memory laws do not usually even refer to specific historical events over which they enforce orthodoxies; in this sense they are one step more advanced than the Russian memory laws. But the moments when the new laws do venture into specificity are illuminating. “Examples of theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with State Board approved standards,” the Florida Department of Education’s new policy states, “include the denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
This is a striking repetition of the rhetorical tactic of the Russian memory law of 2014: In both, the crimes of the Nazis are deployed to silence a history of suffering — in Russia to deter criticism of the Stalin era, in Florida to forbid education about racism. And in both cases, the measures in question actually make the Holocaust impossible to understand. If it is illegal in Russia to discuss the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of nonaggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then it is impossible to discuss how, where and when the Second World War began. If it is illegal in Florida to teach about systemic racism, then aspects of the Holocaust relevant for young Americans go untaught. German race laws drew from the precedent set by Jim Crow in the United States. But since Jim Crow is systemic racism, having to do with American society and law, the subject would seem to be banned in Florida schools.
We are living through a dangerous and absurd period in which Republican-controlled states are passing laws to criminalize the teaching of factual history. But schools are not hermetically sealed boxes. Students see television, and they know they are being taught a literally whitewashed version of our history.
How many history teachers will comply and teach lies?
Snyder’s “On Tyranny” is a must read … along with Ann Appelbaum
Indeed. Every sentence Timothy Snyder and Anne Appelbaum write is a must-read.
Studying history is supposed to help future generations from repeating the mistakes of the past. Revisionist history serves to perpetuate myths when past mistakes are ignored or glossed over. How can young people learn from past mistakes that are edited out by right wing politicians? Students deserve to know the unbiased truth.
yes, the nation MUST have students who know historical truth if the goal is actual democracy
Regimented stupidity and enforced ignorance, as if we don’t have enough right wing Trumpian dolts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert who want to twist history and reality into a word pretzel.
History has always been written and “colored” by propaganda intended to make the winners look good.
The Soviet Union and Russia certainly have no monopoly on that.
“discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
The following topics might bring discomfort, but I will not stop talking about them in World History:
Europeans in migration caused a decline in population in the Western Hemisphere estimated to be between 50% and 90%. Some of this was conscious genocide, illustrated by distribution of contaminated blankets in New England during its settlement and the bounty laws in California during the latter Nineteenth Century.
King Leopold of Belgium carried out systematic torture of Congo groups in order to extract natural rubber from tropical forests.
French revolutionaries systematically murdered political opponents in the civil war in the Vendee
Pol Pot
Rawanda
The Holocaust and American restrictions on immigration prior to its implementation
Bosnia
Armenia
Stalin’s purges
I am exhausted already. I have to constantly remind the students that there were also people who pushed against these injustices, often at the expense of their own lives.
Sorry. History is not comfortable.
FYI-Here’s a position statement from The American Historical Association on the attempt to edit “divisive” material from history.https://www.historians.org/divisive-concepts-statement
Thank you, Roy. You may be arrested for teaching true facts.
History. Is. Not. Comfortable.
This could be the banner of a movement.
As opposed to false facts
Justin Jones @brotherjones said statues have more due process than people in TN. https://twitter.com/brotherjones
https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2021/5/24/22452478/tennessee-governor-signs-bill-restricting-how-race-and-bias-can-be-taught-in-schools
“Gov. Bill Lee on Monday signed a bill into law that will restrict what public school teachers can discuss in Tennessee classrooms about racism, white privilege, and unconscious bias.
The Republican governor signed the bill without comment, following its passage along partisan lines earlier this month.
The new law, which essentially takes effect with the 2021-22 school year, will allow Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn to withhold funds from schools and districts where teachers promote certain concepts about racism, sexism, bias, and other social issues that GOP lawmakers believe are cynical and divisive.
Among the 14 concepts that teachers will not be able to discuss: that one race bears responsibility for past actions against another; the United States is fundamentally racist; and a person is inherently privileged or oppressive due to their race.”
To answer your last question: Far too many, most likely the vast majority.
Hell, all the GAGA Good German type teachers have implemented the standards and testing malpractices with nary a peep of protestation, certainly none with refusing to implement harmful practices. Why would one expect them to change their attitude now?
History has been very effectively taught for over 2 centuries to accomplish the same goals as those that are passing these laws that would limit what is being taught. If that were not the case there would not be such objection to teaching history. Did historians just learn that Columbus was a ruthless murderer who even Isabel could not stomach.
Did they just learn that conditions under slavery and Jim Crow were as brutally degrading to American Blacks as Nazi Germany was to Jews and other “undesirables ” prior to mass extermination . Did we just learn that Nazi race laws had their intellectual pinning taken from American Eugenics. Or that that repression was not limited to the South. As with the anti democratic movements of today I suspect that many knew and preferred the false narratives.
History has not been taught , how much of it could be adequately covered by K-8 or 12 teachers is another question. As they would have to teach both the dominant narrative and troubling alternative narratives. When less and less time is devoted to teaching history. And the truths lay somewhere in between for some of our most famous historical figures from Jefferson and Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt…
The movement on the right to not teach history which they frame as anti CRT is really a counter offensive to the social justice movements and the threats they see to the “dominant cast” . It is far broader than just a racial threat. It is an economic threat as labor history has not been taught either. Lets see how many of Americas corporations who benefit from having race and class divisions refrain from contributing to the Republican seditionists who are sponsoring these bills. Those divisions feed a lower cast to lower income whites instead of improved food on the table .
It has been pointed out by many from LBJ and Dylan to Wilkerson that working class whites are content as long as they have a Black man to look down on.
It is not an accident Obama is followed by the Tea Party and Trumpism .
“… they came for the journalists
I did not speak out;
I was not a journalist…
…then they came for the scientists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a scientist…
…then they came for the historians,
I did not speak out;
I was not a historian…
…When they came for the teachers…”
(Apologies to Martin Niemoller)
yup
They came for the spiders
They came for the spiders
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a spider
They came for the insects
And I did not speak out
Because I am not an insect
They came for the crustaceans
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a crustacean
They came for the dolphins
But I didn’t speak out
Because I am not a dolphin
But then they came for the humans
And I still did not speak out
Because I am one of them — an alien from Planet Claire
I pledge allegiance to the best ever flag of the United States of America and to the republic, supreme and immaculate, for which it stands, one nation, one religion, indivisible except for Texas and possibly California, indivisible, indefectible, indispensable, all defensible, with liberty (wink) and justice (wink) for all (wink wink wink wink).
My country tis for me
Sweet land of liberty
Of me I sing
Land where my fathers died
After your fathers died
Killed on the mountainside
Let freedom ring
…For me
Murika, land of the tis of thee by jingo by golly by jingoism, tweedle dee, tweelde dumb, where our fathers fruited plain
Everybody sing!
Submission pursuant to an application for the position of speechwriter for Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, or Ron DeSantis
Patriotic Noise 1
Murika, land of the tis of thee,
by jingo by golly by jingoism,
tweedle dumb, tweedle dee,,
all the livelong gem of the
Jim Dandy doodle dandy,
Onward!
Where our fathers fruited plain
Everybody sing!
NB: This could also double as the new 1776 History Project Curriculum! You’re welcome, Republicans. Don’t mention it.
One nation, underdog, invisible, with liverworst and sausage for all
Teachers: it is your DUTY to disobey these laws. You owe this to democracy, to your profession, to truth, to your students, to the future.
You must, now, in response to these laws, teach your students the truth about genocide and race-based subjugation in the the American British colonies and in the United States. You must teach them about the economic and political legacies of centuries of racism and how those are expressed in the way things are now. You must teach them about systemic racism.
It is your duty, now, to do these things.
There are times that call upon us to do the right thing, to act. This is such a time.
I posted a link on OpEd News
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Timothy-Snyder-The-War-on-in-General_News-Democracy-Decay_Democracy-Destroyed_Legislators_Teaching-210709-727.html#comment791675
Remember all those battles over the common core?
They share similarities with the current debate over critical race theory. Both controversies center on what gets taught, divide along partisan lines, and traffic in misconception. But that’s where the commonalities end, writes Andrew Ujifusa in this thoughtful article on why the current fight over critical race theory is the tougher battle for educators. Readers spent more time on this piece than any other we published last week.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/why-the-critical-race-theory-fight-is-harder-for-educators-than-the-common-core-battle/2021/07?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=eml&utm_campaign=popweek&utm_content=list&M=61608541&U=365355&;UUID=0b7efaaf843601e54e3ef31aad9169d1
This was timely reading for me, as I’m just finishing Padura’s “The Man Who Loved Dogs.” The central event is the assassination of Trotsky, but the dominant theme is lies used by the state to further its political interests at every level, from co-opting rival power-groups/ nation-states to shaping historical narratives to creating and covering up the disposal of individual secret agents, 1917-1977. It is distressing to see how thoroughly Putin has re-established this practice. We need no more telling example than the 2016 arrest and massive fining of a Perm blogger who reposted the simple fact that both Germany and the USSR invaded Poland in 1939, tortuously interpreted by Russia’s Supreme Court as a breach of their 2014 ‘memory law’ against “Rehabilitation of Nazism.”
The parallels between USSR/ Russia’s thought repression and our current rush of anti-CRT-teaching laws is obvious. It’s ostensibly about promoting national unity, but that is done by denying/ not talking about – i.e., not teaching about – the power struggles of individual groups within the nation. Slavery, the Ukrainian famine in USSR/Russia, is a subject which may be described in limited ways, soft-pedaled as one of a laundry list of “challenges to America’s principles” (as the 1776 Commission coyly puts it). “Everyone was a victim, and so no one was.” “This inability to recognize a tragedy led to an inability to recognize a people.”
We’ve been through thought-police laws before. Let’s hope these are undone faster than those of the McCarthy era.
Well said, Bethree.
Oh the irony to have Koch’s Heritage Foundation oppose CRT simultaneous with Charles Koch’s threats that the U.S. will become Stalinesque if right wingers aren’t elected.
Fred Koch Sr. learned a lot about manipulation while in Russia.
Pertinent discussion! American democracy’s resilience continues to stay relevant, despite these types of thoughtless political actions.
If you’ve listened to Sarah Kendizor and Andrea Chalupa’s podcast Gaslit Nation (which you must!) you’ll recognize the story of the Ukraine famine at least in passing. Chalupa is the author of the screenplay for Mr. Jones, a film directed by Agnieszka Holland. Authoritarianism is a topic with which both Chalupa and Kendzior have a more than passing familiarity.
Robert Conquest wrote the history of the Ukrainian famine, “The Harvest of Sorrow.” Ukraine was considered the breadbasket of Europe until Stalin decided to collectivize the farms, kill the kulaks, and punish Ukraine by seizing its grain. The deaths of millions of Ukrainians resulted from Stalin’s actions. He was remorseless.
Thank you for telling me about “Mr. Jones.” I’m eager to see it. I was aware of Walter Durant, chief correspondent for the New York Times in Moscow, who was an apologist for Stalin.
I hope your recovery is going smoothly, Diane.
Christine,
I walk one to two miles every day, and that’s my therapy. The doctors told me it would take six months to recover, and I wanted to prove them wrong. I’m not 100% but I am feeling better every day!
At your suggestion, I rented “Mr. Jones” tonight. It’s a powerful movie. And an important one.
By the way, the great economist of education, Helen Ladd, will speak at Wellesley College on December in the lecture I support. She is one of the few economists who has steadfastly warned about the dangers of school choice. Save the date!
I’m delighted to know you’re going to show your doctors they’ve underestimated you. They do so at their peril! Glad you enjoyed Mr. Jones. Looking forward to seeing you in Philly in October and at Wellesley in December.
Great news on walking here: