Yves here. Trump\u2019s minions are in the process of re-writing, or perhaps more accurately, re-imaging US history so as to downplay and even eliminate the contributions made by members of out groups. It seems as if Team Trump thinks that DEI was so hugely successful that the American public needs to be deprogrammed\u2026as if achievements by what were formerly called minorities were fabrications.<\/p>\n
Oh, and yes, Stalin is the process of being rehabilitated in Russia. But that does not invalidate the criticism of his airbrushing of history.<\/p>\n
By Arnold Isaacs.<\/a> Originally published at TomDispatch<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n In early June, the Washington Post<\/em> published a follow-up<\/a> to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of \u201cDEI-related content.\u201d Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post<\/em>\u2018s reporters were able to find reproduced on non-government websites), the Post<\/em>\u2018s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues \u2014 overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as \u201cgay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.\u201d<\/p>\n The headline over the story didn\u2019t mince words: \u201cHere are the people Trump doesn\u2019t want to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n Identified from a database obtained by the Associated Press<\/a>, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation\u2019s first Black military pilots<\/a> during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army\u2019s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force\u2019s first female fighter pilot.<\/p>\n Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot\u2019s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted \u201cDEI\u201d into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, \u201cgay\u201d was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised. Some of those photos were fairly quickly reposted, along with other images whose removal had drawn criticism \u2014 photographs of the Code Talkers, for example. But thousands of photos were kept offline, making it clear that the basic goal of that purge, the intent to revise history and erase truths and realities that the Trumpists believe challenge their ideology, remains unchanged.<\/p>\n Reading the Post<\/em> roundup and other articles on the subject reminded me of an event that, while not identical, was similar in meaningful ways to the Trump team\u2019s chainsaw assault on the Pentagon photo archives. It, however, took place in a very different time and setting \u2014 nearly 49 years ago, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was then a journalist in Hong Kong, covering stories in China and elsewhere in Asia. Several years into that assignment, in September 1976, China\u2019s longtime Communist ruler, Mao Zedong, died in Beijing. Less than a month later, in early October, his successors arrested his widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates<\/a>, now condemned as counterrevolutionary criminals for their leading roles in Mao\u2019s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n Only weeks earlier, hundreds of millions of Chinese and other readers around the world had seen photographs in the Chinese communist newspaper, the People\u2019s Daily<\/em>, and other official media showing all four sitting in the front row of mourners at Mao\u2019s funeral. After they were arrested, Chinese publications continued to carry those photos \u2014 but with Jiang and her three allies, now labeled the \u201cGang of Four,\u201d airbrushed out. The editing was anything but subtle: blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been in the originals, while their names in the captions were blotted out by vertical rows of X\u2019s.<\/p>\n Though I haven\u2019t found copies of those memorable images, an online search turned up a different set of<\/a> before-and-after shots without\u00a0the smudges and blotted-out captions I remember\u00a0but with equally\u00a0obvious gaps where\u00a0each of the four\u00a0had been standing\u00a0when the photo was taken.<\/p>\n I have no way of knowing what, if anything, President Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or their censors might know about that earlier example \u2014 or anything else about Mao, for that matter, or if any of them have ever even heard of Jiang Qing or the Gang of Four. It\u2019s likely that, like most Americans, they know little or nothing about that now-distant Chinese past. It\u2019s more than likely that they\u2019ve never even heard the name Jiang Qing or the label Gang of Four. Still, the parallels are a chilling reminder that, in democracies as well as in Communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.<\/p>\n Another Alarming Precedent<\/strong><\/p>\n I had another first-hand encounter with airbrushed history some years later on a short visit to the other twentieth-century Communist superpower. That glimpse came during a university-sponsored study tour to the Russian Far East in the summer of 1990, just a year and a half before the final breakup of the Soviet Union. In the decades preceding our trip, the Soviet authorities had preserved the communist structures of government, while continuing to proclaim Marxist-Leninist ideology. They had, however, repudiated the brutal legacy of Joseph Stalin\u2019s rule, which ended with his death in 1953. Consistent with that shift in official thinking was an exhibit at the Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok (named for an explorer and naturalist who had been a pioneer in that once remote region), which I visited twice while there. The exhibit, which had been installed just a year before our trip, offered a remarkable display of artworks and relics that recalled the terror of the Stalin era.<\/p>\n On my first visit to the museum, accompanied by two students from the local university hosting our tour, I walked through the Stalin exhibit with Irina Yatskova, a brisk, forthright woman who was the chief of the museum\u2019s Soviet history department. Irina was also co-chair of the provincial branch of the Memorial Committee, a nationwide organization seeking redress for victims of the terror campaigns of the Stalin era. Over the doorway where we entered the gallery, strands of barbed wire hung between bare boards. They were meant to represent the gates outside the entrance to one of the concentration camps of that era. Inside, one wall was covered with photos from the Stalin years, images of smiling workers or grateful peasants thanking the Soviet ruler for their supposedly happy lives. In front of that display stood a huge blown-up photo of Stalin himself, circled by a ring of inscriptions reproducing the worshipful titles he was customarily accorded during his years in power \u2014 \u201ccreator of happiness and friendship,\u201d \u201cleader and teacher of the Communist party,\u201d and dozens more in the same vein.<\/p>\n On another wall, a stylized map showed the route by which prisoners were transported to concentration camps scattered across the Soviet Arctic \u2014 a journey that began on the Trans-Siberian railroad from the Russian heartland to Vladivostok and then by ship for another 1,400 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, the gateway to Russia\u2019s vast frozen northern region. A row of display cases in front of the map contained bits of memorabilia: prisoners\u2019 ID cards, photographs, a few letters, and two shriveled roses tied with a red ribbon \u2014 brought there by a former prisoner\u2019s daughter, Irina told me. There was also a panel listing the names of prominent victims of Stalin\u2019s terror, including many of the top leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who were later exiled, imprisoned, or executed as Stalin eliminated possible rivals for power.<\/p>\n There was, however, a glaring omission from that list. The name of Leon Trotsky, by far the most prominent of the old Bolsheviks who had fallen out of favor under Stalin\u2019s rule, wasn\u2019t on that panel. And Trotsky was similarly missing from a display in a different exhibit, dating from a previous era and reflecting an earlier version of ideological orthodoxy. Focused on the original Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, portrayed in the heroic style traditional in past official propaganda, the exhibit included many photos from 1917 and the following years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. None of them, however, showed Trotsky, even though he was at the time a highly visible revolutionary leader, second only to Lenin himself. When I mentioned that to Svetlana Soboleva, one of the teachers hosting our group who accompanied me on a second visit to the museum a few days later, she replied with a question of her own: How did I know Trotsky wasn\u2019t in the photos, since the captions were in Cyrillic script, which at the time I couldn\u2019t read? I knew because I would recognize Trotsky if I saw him, I replied, and I hadn\u2019t seen him in any of the pictures.<\/p>\n Svetlana looked at me in surprise. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a photograph of Trotsky!\u201d she said. I was startled \u2014 and puzzled. If Stalin\u2019s other high-ranking victims had indeed been officially rehabilitated and their images restored to public view, why, I wondered, was Trotsky still a non-person?<\/p>\n I must have asked that question at the time, but I don\u2019t remember how I framed it, or how she answered. Now, relevant details are easy to find on the Internet \u2014 for instance, on a page at the Rare Historical Photos site<\/a>, which notes that, after sending Trotsky into exile, Stalin ordered him \u201celiminated from all photos.\u201d His censors also erased other rivals or potential rivals, as strikingly shown in a spread of four successive copies of the same Stalin photo.\u00a0The original print, from 1926, has him standing with three contemporaries; in three subsequent versions each of them would be deleted, one at a time.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/00-photos.jpeg\")
The technology in that now-distant era was different, but the Communist party officials who doctored those photographs were acting in the same way and for the same reasons that motivated Trump\u2019s minions nearly a half-century later, when they eliminated those supposedly DEI-related images and descriptions from the Pentagon archives. Both intended to wipe out any evidence that conflicted with the preferred (and often wildly false) historical narratives propagated by their rulers. Both sought to obliterate visual records that might have raised uncomfortable questions about the political messaging of their leaders and the policies and underlying values they reflected. Both were entirely ready and willing to disregard truth and deny reality in order to protect falsehoods their bosses wanted people to believe.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tomdispatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Screenshot-2024-03-27-at-9.45.32\u202fAM.png\")
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