Today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day*, offers a powerful time to remember: Last week’s dismantling of the President’s House slavery exhibit by the Trump Administration takes a page from the Nazis’ book of tactics to rewrite history and suppress the truth.
The site where George Washington illegally held nine people in bondage, located just across the green where the Weitzman National Museum of Jewish History houses Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport proclaiming that this new nation would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” hauntingly demonstrates the complexity of our first president and the injustice of any telling of history that erases the truths of slavery. Burying complicated and problematic truths is not a new strategy of authoritarianism.
In the pursuit of dehumanization of Jews as well as other persecuted groups, Nazi master of propaganda Joseph Goebbels sought to shape attitudes by replacing historical evidence with a false narrative.
Having born witness to Nazi propaganda, political thinker Hannah Arendt wrote: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics).
To destroy the category of truth versus falsehood, this Administration’s National Park Service is not the first to fabricate history with the use of memorials. The Nazis too distorted history by tearing down or disappearing historical monuments that complicated their image with uncomfortable truths.
With this strategy, public space and architecture became a tool for recasting figures of the past.
SUNY Buffalo professor of architecture Despina Stratigakos explores how power and ideology function in architecture in her research of memorials desecrated by the Nazis. On August 12, 1940, Nazi Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel ordered Germany’s Army High Command in occupied Belgium and France to destroy World War I memorials that honored civilians massacred by the Germans, because Hitler believed those memorials defamed Germany with blame. Army units in other occupied districts were ordered to survey their areas to eliminate monuments and dismantle their inscription panels. In 1940, the Nazis removed the 1924 Monument to the Heroes of the Black Army in Reims, France that had been dedicated to the West African colonial troops who defended the city against a German attack in 1918. (https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/culture/the-invasion-of-memory-hitlers-attempt-to-rewrite-the-history-of-world-war-i_o)
The leaders in the current Administration are not Nazis and there is no fair comparison to Hitler. And when strategies of tyranny shared by fascists in other eras are mirrored in our own time, we cannot avert our eyes; we need to recognize and be able to say we have seen this before.
Hitler did not like the way WWI history made him feel, the responsibility it implied, or the reputation it projected to the world, so he sought to fabricate history and distort memory. The Administration does not like the way our nation’s history of slavery makes them feel, the responsibility to African Americans it implies, or the reputation it projects to the world, so it seeks to fabricate history and distort memory.
Tyrants rely on lies, fear, and dehumanization to coerce society to comply. Our Jewish community across the world is now reading from the Torah our People’s story of resistance and moral courage. In the Exodus story, the midwives Shifrah and Puah, who birth Moses, defy Pharaoh’s decree to kill all of the Israelite baby boys. Torah teaches us their courage is rooted in their fear of God. Indeed, they refuse to serve Pharaoh; they fear God and only God. Without the tool of fear, Pharaoh has little power over them.
Lies, fear, and dehumanization are the authoritarians’ sharpest weapons of tyranny. May truth, courage and humanization be our citizens’ sharpest tools for resistance. And as we remember the horrors of the Holocaust, let us remember its lessons for our own Nation as well.
*The date of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the UN, was selected to mark the liberation of Auschwitz. The date of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day on the Jewish calendar of sacred days, was selected to mark the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
