In the first paragraph Project 2025The operating guide for the Heritage Foundation for the second Trump Administration, the battle lines are drawn on history: “America is now divided between two opposition powers: they wake up revolutionaries and those who believe in the same American revolution.” Three weeks later Donald TrumpElections, Mike Gonzales, a shareholder in the 2025 project, and Armin tools, former chief of staff in the right activist Christopher RovoIt was placed on the combat maneuvers of the new administration, and writing in Wall Street Journal That in order to “put a height in the heart of waking up”, the White House was obligated to “restore control of museums, starting with Smithsonian institution.”
During the campaign, Trump announced the ignorance of the project 2025. “I have never read it, and I will never do so.” This was difficult to analyze. Although it was really difficult to imagine Trump on his office, which leads to emphasizing clips on pages that exceed nine hundred of the report, he had what was known in Washington as “awareness of the circumstance” of his medical prescriptions to increase the executive force to the maximum, Reducing government agenciesThe enemies punish the perceptions, the intimidation of the dissidents, and the rule as a democracy. Trump enters the project approximately 2025 to the message, and it is published Executive ordersThe lawsuits and the rhetorical bomb in an attempt to force the judges, Lawyer companiesCultural institutions, University presidentsAnd Press barons In severe obedience situations. It even took time to come to the heel of the Brechti Cultural Rebellion Center, John Kennedy Center for Dramatic Arts.
As in tyranny everywhere, this administration requires a mystical vision of an imagined past. In late March, Trump issued an executive entitled “Restore truth and rationality of American history.” Her diagnosis was that there was a long time between professors and curators “a wide -ranging effort to rewrite our nation’s history, to replace objective facts with a distorted novel driven by ideology rather than the truth.” Continues:
The Smithsonian, the vast complex of museums visited by millions of Americans every year to see LincolnSupreme hat, Saint Louis Spirit, Harriet TobmanShal, a moon Rock, and Doroth’s Ruby Slippers, is located in the Opening Order Center. This takes a special problem with the sculpture exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Arts entitled “The Figure of Power”, saying that it pays “the opinion that race is not a biological but social structure.”
It may be rude or “review” to question an executive order, but the two values have obtained it properly. As the text of the wall in the exhibition indicates, humans are “99.9 percent from the genetic point of view”. The opposition opinion, racist fundamentalism, barely benign. It is the foundations of evil intolerance, who described the Jews as Firmin in Deir Stormer To assurances in white national clips that blacks cursed them with less intelligence
the National Museum of American -African History and Culture– Who was running until recently New Yorker Hair editor, Kevin Young– In the event of a particularly denouncing the spleen. In his first term, Trump expressed admiration during his visit to the so -called Black Smithsonian. It is an amazing museum, richly represents the story of American struggle, suffering and achievement. One day, adults and teachers in exhibitions about slavery take Shatil and Jim Crowe,Reconstruction and Civil Rights MovementAnd I leave with a deeper understanding of American history with all darkness and promise. But in a cultural war that requires the description of political opponents collectively, as “wake up revolutionaries”, there can be no complexity. This job will be, according to the executive order, for the vice president JD VanceWho sits in the Smithsonian Council, to make things simple. Vans charged with the effort to remove the museum from the so -called museum, in the wonderful Orwellis, “improper ideology”.
This police desire in the past is hardly unique to the Trump administration. This is the reflexive mania of Autocrats everywhere. History museums, which were once interrogated many Soviet cities, did not interrogate Lenin’s life. They were places of Orthodox worship. Its types and sacred tea are, such as the turno shroud. More importantly, its ideological principles have not left open for discussion. For decades, he was the second most important person in the Communist Party, after the Secretary -General, to say that the chief ideological age, who had the last word about what could be said about history.
when Mikhail Gorbachev Forty years ago to give a democratic character to the Soviet Union, one of his most daring moves was to encourage the argument – or, the best, a free heterogeneous argument. This has led to the publication of countless writers who are under control before, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who described in the “Gollage Archipelago” how Lenin began the system of work camps from Moscow to Majadan. Such historical discovers, which were published and discussed, were necessary, but incalculable painful. Among the most heading of the party, this new liberalism-which it wakes up in the late Soviets-was unbearable. At that time, one of Gorbachev’s competitors in the party, Yegor Ligachev, He complained to me (In the tones that the project expected 2025) that when history was removed from the party’s hands, an “dark” atmosphere was created in society. “People are eager for a positive thing, a bright thing,” he said. “However, our cultural characters have published more lies and things hostile to Soviets more than our Western enemies at all.”
Ligachev, who died in 2021, lived to see the last embers of the Russian liberalism. Vladimir Putin It lacks the basis of heritage, but he did so. In 2013, he complained that the period of historical pluralism in Russia led to the fact that textbooks are full of “internal contradictions and mysterious interpretations.” He took his commissioner in the cultural war of the braid, and agreed to a textbook full of indisputable assertions of official history: “Russia is the country of heroes”. And “Ukraine is a new Nazi country.” In the same spirit Foreign policyChinese leader Xi Jinping supervised the institution a few years before the “historical nihilistic” hotline so that citizens can get rid of anyone who participates “ideas and wrong views.”
Trump’s CEO about history does not specifically repeat Putin’s tactics or eleventh. But they are rhymes. ♦
