Yale historian Timothy Snyder sees a lot of similarities between the discussion of race happening right now in American schools and the 20th-century European totalitarianism regimes thought about the past. Here is a taste of his piece The New York Times:
These Russian policies belong to a growing international body of what are called “memory laws”: government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past. Such measures work by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship. Early memory laws were generally designed to protect the truth about victim groups. The most important example, passed in West Germany in 1985, criminalized Holocaust denial. Perhaps unsurprisingly, other countries followed that precedent, and banned the denial of other historical atrocities. The West German law was controversial to some advocates of freedom of speech; succeeding measures were disputed on the grounds that the Holocaust was in a special category. Yet these early laws could be defended as attempts to protect the weaker against the stronger, and an endangered history against propaganda.
Russia has turned the original logic of memory laws upside down. It is not the facts about the vulnerable but the feelings of the powerful that are to be protected. The language used to attain this goal is very carefully chosen. During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin signed into law the misleadingly named “Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism.” Its premise was that the tribunals at Nuremberg, where some Nazis were tried, had passed exhaustive judgment on the atrocities of the 1930s and ’40s. The law specifically banned, with criminal penalties, “false information on the activities of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” In other words, any mention of crimes not judged at Nuremberg could be equated to a denial of Nazi atrocities. No Soviet actions were judged there, of course, because the Soviets were among the victors and the judges.
Snyder concludes:
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws’ portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
Read the entire piece here.
