ERASING HISTORY: My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline
In my Saturday Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, I turn to philosopher Jason Stanley for clues on how to disrupt Trump’s attempts to control the future by rewriting the past
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I try to get through every book on my nightstand. This week, I dedicated time to Jason Stanley’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future in order to clarify that erasing history of nations is a first-phase tool in colonial invasions:
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Below is an excerpt:
Hot Type: How to Stop Trump From Erasing History
Heidi Siegmund Cuda on the fight to disrupt the US President's attempts to control the future by rewriting the past
In the before times, I was listening to Timothy Snyder’s The Making of Modern Ukrainepodcast series when I was jolted by the phrase ‘The Executed Renaissance.’ I didn’t know that Joseph Stalin had ordered the mass murder of the Ukrainian intelligentsia that had flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.
An entire generation of Ukrainian language poets, writers, and artists, who lived in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic were persecuted, denied work, imprisoned, and murdered. Poets, writers, dramaturgists who wrote in the Ukrainian language were denied their voice in history.
According to historian Orest Subtelny, the collapse of the Russian Empire and the subsequent “cultural leniency of the Soviet regime in the 1920s led to an astonishing literary and cultural renaissance” in Ukraine, which was part of a movement to stamp out illiteracy.
The new generation of writers, who used their words to rise up beyond their social circumstances, celebrated independent thought and a rebellious spirit.
This brief period of literary freedom — also referred to as the Red Renaissance — was exterminated under Stalinist rule, with repression, show trials, forced suicides, concentration camps, and executions to silence independent expression.
In a period known as the Great Terror of 1937 - 1938, 223 writers were arrested, and about 300 representatives of the Ukrainian Renaissance were murdered in October and November 1938, and were buried in a mass killing field.
These words from a defiant Ukrainian poet sentenced to execution by firing squad echo in eternity thanks to a saved scrap of paper:
‘I am writing to you as the sun is shining outside my window – and, oh goodness, how difficult I find it to restrain myself so as not to scream – about how good life is, about how wonderful the future of a person, who owns the right to that future, is. I’m sending you a kiss, my dear, and ask that you remember the date of this letter as a date of one of my best days.’—Ievhen Pluzhnyk, a poet who died in a Solovki concentration camp
Rewriting the Past to Control the Future
In revisiting philosopher Jason Stanley’s latest book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future I can see a clear line as to why history is being erased in the US and replaced with a white supremacist narrative. I can see why the Trump regime is erasing the history of neighboring countries — that’s a primary tool of fascism that precedes colonial invasions.
I appreciate how Stanley — the author of How Fascism Works — uses the word fascism unapologetically. I have often believed we’ll still be debating the word when we’re being marched off into the gulags.
As Stanley writes: “I find the label apt, and will continue to use it in these pages when referring to those who engage in clearly fascist politics, with the aim of attacking democracy.”
As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told her Substack audience this week, the speed with which the Trump regime is destroying democratic institutions is unprecedented in her studies of strongmen. Usually, there’s an initial fig leaf of law and order and scientific reverence, but not so in the US.
As I have written many times in the past, Trump fails at reality. Where he excels is in propaganda and the creation of unreality — a lies-based order.
As American historian Nancy MacLean wrote in her review of Stanley’s book: “Authoritarians hate honest history.”
The thesis to Stanley’s Erasing History can be summed up by the first lines of his preface: “Authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. At every opportunity, these regimes find ways of erasing history in order to consolidate their power… Authoritarianism’s great rival, democracy, requires the recognition of a shared reality that consists of multiple perspectives.”
If more members of the media had recognized Trump’s reality wrecking ball in 2016 for what it was, and is – a way to groom the population for authoritarian capture – they might have spent less time treating the tens of thousands of lies as some bizarre anomaly and more effort warning Americans about the evil aims of those lies…
Stanley’s book explains how erasing history inside a country paves the way for consolidation of power, but also how erasing the history of other countries is a first-phase tool of planned invasions.
We can see how this was accomplished in Putin’s Russia. Russian state TV propagandists consistently use genocidal language when referring to Ukraine, working off of scripts to deny Ukrainian agency, creating ‘history’ books that mass delete reality.
Education, history, language, culture, expertise, all stand in the way of fascist goals, explains Stanley…
Educational Authoritarianism
Stanley explains a phenomenon he calls “educational authoritarianism” — where members of academia are frightened into restricting their true knowledge, and instead, forced into spreading anti-democratic ideology…
Seizing control of education is how political cultures are changed longterm, says Stanley. He uses the word “scholasticide” as part of a conduit to erasing a culture’s history, which is then replaced by colonial words like “lazy, savage, corrupt,” or in the case of Russia’s barrage of lies about Ukrainians, they use terms like “Nazis” or simply say that Ukrainians are really Russian.
Part of how dominion over other cultures and countries is justified is what Stanley calls “supremacist nationalism”.
“In the United States’ earliest days, a brutal form of supremacist nationalism arose as a way of justifying some of the country’s deepest sins, including chattel slavery and indigenous dispossession. It has survived in part through accounts of the country’s history that glorify the deeds of white Europeans while erasing the contributions of Black and indigenous Americans.
“The long shadow of historical disinformation stretches over decades, and the myths of the past weigh heavily on the present.”
Colonizing the Mind
It’s important to understand that when Trump refers to Canada as the 51st state, Canadians take it very seriously.
As Stanley writes: “When one group erases the history of another, the latter becomes significantly more vulnerable to domination and conquest. It is much easier for a colonial power to justify taking land when that land can be represented as lacking a history.”
Not only must all people rebuke the genocidal language of history erasure, but the countries being targeted must get out in front of the narrative, as the Ukrainians do, and demand the world see them and respect their extancy, the fact that their history predates Moscow…
Bones of Generations
In the flurry of cruelty spewed daily by the Trump regime, all Americans must find their sea legs to begin the journey back to empathy. I liked the America that was reconciling the sins of its past. Bring that America back.
Other countries are doing it. Multiple nations directly voted against the cruelty of Trump, as we witnessed in election outcomes in Canada and Australia, where the pro-democracy candidates were down by double digits in the polls, only for the anti-Trump Effect to boost them across the victory line.
We also have a new American-born Pope, who has gone on the record to defend immigrant and human rights and may act as a direct counterweight to the brutality and anti-science quackery of the US regime.
As Stanley reflects on the work of family members, who survived both the Nazi and Stalin regimes, he reminds us that ‘treating others with dignity and respect should be a baseline for all human interaction’.
America may have lost its way, but it does not have to be malignant.
“Authoritarians cannot erase people’s lived experiences, and their legacies written into the bones of generations,” Stanley writes. “In this simple fact lies always the possibility of reclaiming lost perspectives.”
“How wonderful the future of a person, who owns the right to that future.”
Ievhen Pluzhnyk, Ukrainian poet
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The above report is an excerpt of my Hot Type column originally published Friday in Byline Supplement, May 9, 2025.
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Thank you for suggesting Jason Stanley's book, "Erasing History," I hope more people read and understand this is what is happening today all across this country! And even some, such as Mr. Stanley, are leaving this country for fear of being silenced in one way, or another. This must be stopped!