Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future
From the bestselling author of How Fascism Works, a global call to action that tells us “why the past is a frontline in the struggle for a future free of fascism” (Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author) as it reveals the far right’s efforts to rewrite history and undo a century of progress on race, gender, sexuality, and class.
In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people around the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.
In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.
In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And with his “urgent, piercing, and altogether brilliant” (Johnathan M. Metzl, author of What We’ve Become) insight, he illustrates that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.
In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people around the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.
In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.
In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And with his “urgent, piercing, and altogether brilliant” (Johnathan M. Metzl, author of What We’ve Become) insight, he illustrates that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.
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Community Reviews
“Erasing history helps authoritarians because doing so allows them to misrepresent it as a single story, a single perspective.” (p. xii)
“Fascist education works by strategically erasing accounts of history and current events that include a diversity of perspectives, narrowing the scope of what can be taught until students are presented with a single viewpoint, which is formulated specifically to justify and perpetuate a hierarchy of value between groups. This narrowing is inconsistent with multi-racial democracy, antithetical to egalitarianism and carries the possibility of conjuring mass violence.” (p. 111)
What’s more, “Fascism survives off myths that create an outgroup, who are relegated to second-class citizenship, at best. Schools and universities allow for critical inquiry into these myths, and so attacks on them are always the canaries in the coal mine of authoritarianism.” (p. 186)
“When fascists adopt classical education, then, they rely on the flattened, instrumentalized version of it, which does nothing to challenge the practice of viewing people solely in terms of their productive capacity–in the case of women, the capacity to produce children, and in the case of men, the capacity for labor.” - p. 141
“Eliminating knowledge and critical inquiry restricts our range of actions.” (p. 187) If we don’t see or understand the issues at play, we can’t take action to reverse them.
“What is needed to stave off the impending collapse of the information space required for a democracy are honest and fearless teachers and investigative journalists. That’s why authoritarians target both” (p. 187). They are painfully aware of how “virtually every advancement that society has made toward greater equality began with educators.” (p. 23)
“Democracy requires the recognition of a shared reality that consists of multiple perspectives.” (p. Xi). “To resist the slide into cruelty is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people.” (p. 176)
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