As Trump rewrites even America’s history, institutions have two choices – submit or find ways to resist | Charlotte Higgins
IT has reached this: We are now in the Ministry of Truth. In Washington, DC, the Smithsonian Foundation became the United States Band, which includes 21 large national museum Donald Trump. “Distorted novels” should be removed. There will be no more “erosion ideology” that has strengthened “the feeling of national shame”. The Foundation reads the matter, “Be under the influence of an exciting ideology that focuses on sweat” depicting “American and Western values as harmful and repressive.” Vice President, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum board. Trump was accused by “banning spending” on programs that “divide the Americans on the basis of race.” It is to remove an “inappropriate ideology”. The regime is entitled “Restore truth and reason to American history.” George Orwell lived very early.
This step is very shocking, but it can be predicted. After Trump was introduced to himself as head of the John F. Kennedy and Derbasier Center against the supposed mix in the place of national performance arts, it was imperative that Smithsonian, funded by the federal government in the queue. Those who imagined that the Kennedy Center was once, and attracted the president’s anger for personal reasons, deceiving themselves from Trump’s ideological ambition. He was chosen to celebrate the celebration of celebrating the celebration of celebrating the celebration of celebrating the celebration of celebrating the celebration of celebrating the celebration Sexual women (The museum, to be referred to, has not yet been built); The National Museum of American African History and Culture; And an exhibition entitled “The Figure of Power”: American race and sculpture stories at the American Art Museum.
I visited the American -African History Museum for the first time two weeks ago. It is a wide book of a museum, heavy with a text. It was full, when I visited, of mostly black families looking for a meeting with a long -time account that was a footnote or completely erased the main national story. You can spend days absorbing the stories of the museum, starting from the lower floors with a via Atlantic slave trade, as it was one of the most expected and deep stirring things, a piece of iron bracelet between Africa and Europe has been distorted. The wonderful balance is drawn between an indelible view of persecution systems, the feeling of black achievement and the cultural wealth he was exposed to.
Loony Banch, a newly director of the Museum Foundation at the House of Lords in 2011 around the institution, which was still in planning, and will open after five years. I can still remember how much he moves to hear the difficulties of making a museum – a place where the story is listed through things – from the traditionally poor societies in material things. The Foundation has made an invitation to loans and donations. Precious objects, carefully proud – the embroidered hood by someone who worshiped, for example – was reaching the new group.
Quickly forward to the present time, Bunch is responsible for the entire Smithsonian Foundation. This is a man who believes, as it is Queens Belfast University was told Last year, this date can be used “to understand the tensions that divided us. And those tensions are in fact where the learning is where the growth is, where there are chances of transformation.” This emotional vision of the past, as a means for citizens at the present time to better understand each other, completely oppose the homogeneous victorious spirit of the Trump executive system, where history is reduced to “the heritage of our nation that is unparalleled in the progress of freedom, individual rights, and human happiness.” How easily, to drown in this pillow, the comfortable idea of progressing, instead of wrestling with a kind of complex, often disturbs it and facing the history offered by the American -African History Museum to its visitors. But it makes me wonder: Can the museum survive from this government?
I have also visited the American Art Museum, which targets the form of strength in the executive order as a symbol of Smithsonian’s decline to “an exciting ideology that focuses on sweat.” The exhibition that was Years in flour makeIt indicates what is certainly clear, as soon as it is thinking about a moment: that this race is not an inherent and political predecessor, but rather a group of ideologies that serve (and still serve) a set of economic and political interests. (One of the ways to know that sweat is a social-based category, in fact, to look at the Greeks and the Romans- the people who established, in the minds of many on the right of the United States, “Western civilization”. They were on foreigners, and they were for them, not. “
The catalog quotes Tony Morrison, who once wrote that “I want to draw a map, if it is permissible to speak, about decisive geography and the use of this map to open a large space for discovery, intellectual adventure and careful exploration as did the original plan for the new world.” Such an intellectual adventure is not what is required by the White House now. Trump’s world is like Victor Urban, under which his government The school history curriculum has been rewritten To glorify Hungary, or throw Türkiye Tayyip, Erdogan, where you remember the novelist Alif Shafak, as you remember in a Direct guardian The event last week, was tried on charges of “insulting the Turkish”, and its lawyer obliged to defend the opinions of its fictional personalities in the court. Smithsonian and all those who work there are an unenviable option, which was already placed in front of great or wonderful institutions such as Columbia University: to comply with Trump’s dark demands; Or to find ways to challenge them.
