Rebecca Gordon ended her article by quoting Augustine: "...it is on
the basis of memory, he added, that "I reason about future
actions and events and hopes, and again think of all these things in the
present. 'I shall do this and that,' I say to myself within that vast recess
of my mind which is full of many rich images, and this act or that follows."
Rebecca Gordon comments: "If Augustine was right and memory gives us
our selves, allowing us to
"reason about future actions and events and hopes," then a political regime
that seeks to destroy its people's memory is an existential threat."
But what if the People have been fed false memories from the very
beginning? What course of action can we set, if our entire Self is
built upon lies?
When I was a boy, I asked my dad if it were true that George
Washington cut down the Cherry Tree and when his father asked him if
he did it, George Washington said, "I cannot tell a lie. I cut down
the Cherry Tree."
Dad told me, "History is written by the victors." The victorious
Colonists wrote their constitution and their Bill of Rights. And they
wrote their History. It was not a history of the American People, it
was a history of the American Oligarchy, designed to display the
perfect Land of a Kindly, Peace Loving, democratic, Christian People.
It reflected America the Beautiful, Land of the Free and the Brave.
Certainly we were forced to defend our Promised Land from the Red
Savages. Naturally we sent our young men forth to claim those far
distant shores of the mighty Pacific Ocean, and bring civilization to
the Mexicans living on our new land. And my school lessons taught me
that we Americans were fighting for Freedom during WW II, and we never
killed anyone needlessly. We treated our prisoners of War with
kindness, even though they tortured our soldiers. I read that every
young boy could grow up to become President of the United
States...with no mention that this road was closed to Black youth, and
Mexican, and Asian, and Atheists and Jews, and anyone else who was not
Christian. And of course we learned that women could not be
president, either. They were far too emotional to lead our nation
with a clear head. We learned nothing about disabled people, and no
one ever mentioned Gays...although we seemed to instinctively hate
them. For many years we Americans lived in a bubble, kept safe from
the rest of the world by two huge oceans.
And now we have put in office a man who is going to bring back this
Greatness...even though it never really existed.
Well, at least a few historians have written a more honest history.
To date, my favorite history book is the work of Howard Zinn, A
People's History Of the United States. If you haven't read it, I urge
you to do so. Then think about where you and your people fit into
this more real history.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/26/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
Down the Memory Hole: Living in Trump's United States of Amnesia
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/down_the_memory_hole_living_in_trumps_un
ited_states_of_amnesia_20170525/
Posted on May 25, 2017
By Rebecca Gordon / TomDispatch (http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176287/)
President Trump and members of the press aboard Air Force One in January.
(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead / Wikimedia Commons
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Trump%27s_First_100_Days-
_7_(34383318535).jpg) )
The Trump administration seems intent on tossing recent history down the
memory hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole) . Admittedly,
Americans have never been known for their strong grasp of facts about their
past. Still, as we struggle to keep up with the constantly shifting
explanations and pronouncements of the new administration, it becomes ever
harder to remember the events of yesterday, let alone last week, or last
month.
The Credibility Swamp
Trump and his spokespeople routinely substitute "alternative facts" for
what
a friend of mine calls consensus reality, the world that most of us
recognize. Whose inaugural crowd was bigger
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/03/06/here-are-the-ph
otos-that-show-obamas-inauguration-crowd-was-bigger-than-trumps/?utm_term=.8
86522f38d6d) , Barack Obama's or Donald Trump's? It doesn't matter what you
remember, or even what's in the written accounts or photographic record.
What matters is what the administration now says happened then. In other
words, for Trump and his people, history in any normal sense simply doesn't
exist, and that's a danger for the rest of us. Think of the Trumpian past
as
a website that can be constantly updated to fit the needs of the present.
You may believe you still remember something that used to be there, but
it's
not there now. As it becomes increasingly harder to find, can you really
trust your own memory?
In recent months, revisions of that past have sometimes come so blindingly
fast that the present has simply been overrun, as was true with the firing
of FBI Director James Comey. First, the president ordered up
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comey-misstated-key-
clinton-email-evidence-at-hearing-say-people-close-to-investigation/2017/05/
09/074c1c7e-34bd-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html?utm_term=.92e8ebbd59ed)
some brand new supporting documents
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/09/us/politics/document-White-H
ouse-Fires-James-Comey.html) from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his
deputy, Rod Rosenstein. These were designed to underpin his line that Comey
was fired on their recommendation-for being "unfair" to Hillary Clinton.
Then, even as his surrogates were out peddling that very story, Trump told
(https://www.vox.com/2017/5/11/15628276/trump-comey-fired-russia) NBC's
Lester Holt that, "regardless of [Sessions' and Rosenstein's]
recommendation, I was going to fire Comey." And he explained why:
And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, 'You
know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an
excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've
won.'
Which rationale for Comey's departure is true? Both? Neither? What is
"truth" after all?
When the need to ask such questions occurs once in a while, it's anomalous
enough that we notice. We have time to remark that someone or various
people
in this story-Sessions, Rosenstein, the surrogates, Trump himself-are
mistaken or even lying. Fortunately, in the case of Comey's firing,
journalists are still reporting the lies, but what happens if the rewrites
of our recent history begin to come so fast that we stop keeping up?
During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson was famously said to have
a
"credibility gap." People, including journalists, had stopped believing
everything his administration said about one very important topic: the war.
Trump doesn't have a credibility gap; he's tossed us into a credibility
swamp. We're all there together swimming in a mire of truth and lies, with
the occasional firecracker
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highl
y-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/
15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_tr
umpintel-0504pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f5c52fa9ca3e) thrown in just
to see if we're still paying attention.
If the age of Trump doesn't end relatively soon, the daily effort to sort
out what happened from what didn't may eventually become too much for many
of us. Memory fatigue may set in, and the whole project of keeping the past
in focus shelved. In that case, we might very well start to give up the
concept of citizenship altogether and decide instead to just get on with
our
own private uninsured
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/politics/health-care-bill-vote.html)
, underpaid (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-idUSKBN15I0I1) ,
and overworked
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/17/job-juggle-real-many-americ
ans-balancing-two-even-three-gigs/92072068/) lives.
Sometimes it's easier to simply adjust to an ever-changing official version
of reality than to keep up a constant, unrewarding struggle to remember.
This was the phenomenon George Orwell described so unforgettably in his
dystopian novel 1984
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061767646/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) . His
hero, Winston Smith, becomes aware that the sole party that runs his
country
incessantly rewrites the past to its own liking and advantage. In fact, he
realizes that "the past not only changed, but changed continuously."
Like most inhabitants of the mega-state of Oceania, it wasn't that Smith
couldn't accept such a reality. He could. What he couldn't shake was a
nightmarish sense "that he had never clearly understood why" the Party
needed to do it. "The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were
obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious" to him. That "ultimate
motive," he eventually realizes, is to so destroy people's hold on memory
that they come to believe that truth genuinely is whatever the Party says
it
is.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you
would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that
claim
sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the
validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was
tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common
sense.
And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking
otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know
that
two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past
is unchangeable?
Does President Trump know what he's doing? Does he know that, in a more
chaotic fashion than Orwell's "Big Brother," he's grinding away at American
memories, threatening to turn them into so much rubble? It's hard to say;
he
appears to be incapable of either self-reflection or planning, indeed of
acting in any way except on impulse. He does, however, seem to know in an
intuitive way what works for him, what gets him things he wants, as he has
his whole professional life. He's called
(https://www.fastcompany.com/3068552/i-call-it-truthful-hyperbole-the-most-p
opular-quotes-from-trumps-the-art-of-the-deal) his method "truthful
hyperbole." And regardless of what he himself understands, there are
certainly people around him who do grasp all too well the usefulness of
that
"ultimate motive," of convincing the public that facts are not all that
stubborn (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/18/facts-stubborn/) after
all.
The Memory Hole
Supplying alternative facts is one way of destroying memory. Erasing real
facts is another.
In Orwell's 1984, there was a slot in the wall at the Ministry of Truth
where Winston Smith worked, a memory hole, into which inconvenient
documents
could be fed to be consumed forever by a huge basement furnace. There are,
it seems, plenty of memory holes in Washington these days.
Since January, the Trump administration has been systematically removing
from federal websites inconvenient information on subjects as diverse as
climate change and occupational health and safety, and replacing it with
anodyne messages. Take, for instance, this one
(https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/signpost/cc.html) , which you
get when you search the Environmental Protection Agency's website for the
term "climate change" and click on links that search turns up:
This page is being updated.
Thank you for your interest in this topic. We are currently updating our
website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump
and Administrator [Scott] Pruitt. If you're looking for an archived version
of this page, you can find it on the January 19 snapshot.
If you do click on the link
(https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climatechange_.html) for that
January 19, 2017, "snapshot," you can still (for now) see what the old
climate change portal of the Obama era looked like. At the top of the
"snapshot," however, is a bright red notice announcing:
This is not the current EPA website. To navigate to the current EPA
website,
please go to www.epa.gov. This website is historical material reflecting
the
EPA website as it existed on January 19, 2017. This website is no longer
updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not
work.
The government has now entered full-scale climate change denial mode.
Information of just about any sort on global warming has been or is being
memory-holed in a wholesale fashion at other agency websites as well. The
Guardian, for instance, reports
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/14/donald-trump-climate-change
-mentions-government-websites) that, in the part of the Department of
Energy's site addressed to children, "sentences that point out the harmful
health consequences of burning coal and other impacts of fossil fuels have
gone." At the State Department, references to President Obama's Climate
Action Plan
(https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/image/president27s
climateactionplan.pdf) and a recent U.N. meeting on climate change have
similarly been expunged.
However, it's not just government pronouncements on issues like climate
change that are being sanitized. Actual data is disappearing from
government
websites. The federal government collects vast amounts of data, much of it
the results of studies it has funded. Some agencies, like the Environmental
Protection Agency, are required by law to retain data they collect, but
they
are not required to post it. This means basic information and the results
of
scientific research, once available online, are now only available through
a
Freedom of Information Act request. Of course, you have to know that the
information exists in the first place in order to request it.
One result of hiding such data is that scientists citing U.S. government
webpages as sources in their own work are now finding that the references
they've pointed to have disappeared. Arctic researcher Victoria Herrmann
describes
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/28/arctic-researcher-don
ald-trump-deleting-my-citations) watching her citations dissolve into thin
air:
At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links
on 21 January. The U.S. National Strategy for the Arctic, the
Implementation
Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a
matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I
frantically combed the Internet for archived versions of our country's most
important polar policies.
Herrmann was able to find some of her missing articles using the Wayback
Machine (https://archive.org/web/) , an internet archiving project. But as
Herrmann points out, "Each defunct page is an effort by the Trump
administration to deliberately undermine our ability to make good policy
decisions by limiting access to scientific evidence."
It's not just environmental information that's been tossed down the memory
hole. Concerned about the health and safety of workers or animals? The
Washington Post reports
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/under-trump-inconvenient-data-is-be
ing-sidelined/2017/05/14/3ae22c28-3106-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.html?tid
=hybrid_content_1_na&utm_term=.d85203a2ced7) some things you won't find
anymore on federal sites:
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for instance, has
dramatically scaled back on publicizing its fines against firms. And the
Agriculture Department has taken offline animal-welfare enforcement
records,
including abuses in dog breeding operations and horse farms that alter the
gait of horses through the controversial practice of 'soring' the animals'
legs.
Sometimes information only hangs around for a brief moment, before sliding
down the memory hole. That's what happened to an advertisement
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/24/us-embassy-site-outrage-mar
-a-lago-winter-white-house) for Trump's Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, which
was masquerading as an entry on Share America, which the State Department
calls its "platform for sharing compelling stories and images that spark
discussion and debate on important topics like democracy, freedom of
expression, innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and the role of civil
society." The page appeared on the website of the U.S. embassy in London.
Someone must have realized that using the State Department to advertise the
President's private club was not a great idea. Conflict of interest? No
problem. It's down the memory hole.
Nor is it just government websites that are being reworked in a distinctly
Orwellian fashion. Recently, the Trump 2020 reelection campaign
(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-kicks-off-his-20
20-reelection-campaign-on-saturday/516909/) (yes, it already exists)
quietly removed many 2016 campaign documents from its website. The
Washington Post's Avi Selk describes
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/09/all-of-trumps-cam
paign-statements-just-vanished-from-his-website-so-lets-remember-them/?utm_t
erm=.609ec4aea9b6) some of the missing press releases, among them the one
that reproduced Trump's full interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos
in which he so infamously insulted Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who
spoke out against him at the Democratic Party convention, and his wife,
Ghazala.
Similarly, links to Trump's "New Deal for Black America," released a week
before the 2016 election, now bring up a dreaded "404 - Page not found"
message on the Trump-Pence website. Whatever that "deal" was, it's
evidently
no longer on offer, nor is it even to remain in the historical record.
The same memory hole has also evidently devoured a December 2015 press
release announcing that "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and
complete
shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's
representatives can figure out what is going on." Fortunately, versions of
that particular statement were repeated often enough in enough places that
lawyers have been able to continue to use it
(http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/9th-circuit-travel-ban-hearing-round
-two/) to argue against the president's executive orders
(https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/06/executive-order-prot
ecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states) banning the entry of
people from seven (now six) majority-Muslim countries.
The Trump administration's memory holes have swallowed up more than
documents and data. People have also disappeared-if not from the world, at
least from their government positions. We still remember former National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former FBI Director James Comey, but who
remembers Ponisseril Somasundaran or Courtney Flint? They are among the
scientists recently dismissed from the Environmental Protection Agency's
Board of Scientific Counselors. Among their duties was to give advice on
environmental regulation. They are to be replaced, according to agency
spokesperson J.P. Freire, by people "who understand the impact of
regulations on the regulated community"-that is, representatives of
polluting industries.
The United States of Amnesia
Gore Vidal coined the expression "the United States of Amnesia" in a 2004
book (https://www.amazon.com/dp/156025744X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20)
about George W. Bush's America. The particular instance of amnesia Vidal
highlighted with that phrase was the failure of those then waging the "war
on drugs" to remember the disasters of the prohibition of alcohol sales in
the 1930s, and the ensuing corruption, gangsters, and smuggling rings that
came with it.
His larger point, however, was that, in general, American historical memory
is short. Thirteen years after Vidal's book appeared, and with a new
Republican administration ascendant, it seems that this country is in
danger
of sinking ever deeper into a state of amnesia. And can there be any
question that, in a distinctly Orwellian fashion, the new administration is
doing everything in its power to hasten that process? As the Trump
administration prepares
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/politics/donald-trump-afghanistan-tro
ops-taliban-stalemate.html) for a new "surge" on the perpetual battlefield
that is Afghanistan, we've conveniently forgotten how little
(http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/25/the-afghan-surge-is-over/) the last
one achieved. We've forgotten how deregulation
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/business/economy/26inquiry.html) led to
the Great Recession, as the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
concluded in 2011. "The greatest tragedy," that panel wrote
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/business/economy/26inquiry.html) ,
"would
be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus
nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen
again." Yet the Republicans in Congress can't wait
(http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/05/04/dodd-frank-repeal-bill-advanc
es-in-house.html) to repeal Dodd-Frank, the law that restored a semblance
of regulation to the world of commercial banking.
The fifth-century African bishop St. Augustine was probably the first
western thinker to pay attention to human memory. In his Confessions
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199537828/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) ,
Augustine observes that it is memory-the ability to bring into present
awareness past experiences and the ability to recognize the difference
between past, present, and future-that makes us self-aware beings. He
described the "vast hall of my memory," where "I meet myself and recall
what
I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I
did
it." It is on the basis of memory, he added, that "I reason about future
actions and events and hopes, and again think of all these things in the
present. 'I shall do this and that,' I say to myself within that vast
recess
of my mind which is full of many rich images, and this act or that
follows."
If Augustine was right and memory gives us our selves, allowing us to
"reason about future actions and events and hopes," then a political regime
that seeks to destroy its people's memory is an existential threat.
In that case, the first act of resistance is to remember who we are.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176263/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_believe
_the_autocrat/) , teaches in the philosophy department at the University of
San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials
Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1510703330/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) . Her
previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TomDispatch) and join
us
on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch) . Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror
Since World War II
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) , as
well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) , Nick
Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) , and
Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global
Security State in a Single-Superpower World
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) .
Copyright 2017 Rebecca Gordon
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