1/10. Tyrants monopolize innocence for themselves and their supporters. But history challenges stories that equate power with virtue. So tyrants refer to history as "revisionist."
2/10. By "revisionism," tyrants mean what actually happened at critical moments in the past. In Russia, for example, the Soviet alliance with Hitler to invade Poland in 1939 is sensitive.
3/10. Tyrants today oppose history by enforcing an official myth in law. Memory laws were originally meant to protect facts about minorities. Increasingly, however, they flatter the emotions of majorities.
4/10. In the United States, the sensitive issue is race. Some American politicians call the history of African Americans "revisionism." They propose memory laws to protect people from feeling shame about shameful topics.
5/10. Memory laws are now an American reality. Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas have mandated guilt-free history in the classroom. Florida requires teachers to say that racism is a personal prejudice unrelated to society or law.
6/10. Memory laws censor speech. State governments are telling teachers what they can say in the classroom. Because the laws protect emotions, teachers self-censor.
7/10. Memory laws undermine democracy. They divide citizens into those who accept the official version and those who contest it, those who can be allowed to participate in politics and those who cannot.
8/10. Voter suppression is on the rise, and history helps us to see it for what it is. More than a century of American experience teaches that "fraud" is the cover story for laws meant to stop black people from voting.
9/10. Falsifying the past legitimates oppression in the present.
10/10. Censoring the past to deny that racism is systemic makes it more so. snyder.substack.com/p/juneteenth-c…
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