Signs have gone up at U.S. national parks telling visitors to report 'negative' information about America.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
We are living through history. Right now, this week. We are being dragged, kicking and screaming, through it. They will study this period one day: Iran, Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia. Donald Trump.
Fortunately, there is a wealth of documentation about these matters, delivered daily (even if some accounts are more credible than others). But what happens when a country deliberately sets out to erase its history? The unpleasant bits, in particular. We saw this in 20th-century totalitarian regimes. And we are seeing it right now in the U.S. – another illustration of this weird and ugly chapter in American history.
Signs have gone up at U.S. national parks urging visitors to report plaques, brochures or other information (perhaps your park ranger’s historical tour) “that are negative about either past or living Americans.” A QR code is supplied for your tattletaling convenience.
This follows a government directive to the National Park Service (NPS) to remove or cover “all inappropriate content” that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times),” according to the New York Times, which reports that the NPS must do so by a Sept. 17 deadline.
We’re not just talking about hiking trails and sandy beaches. The NPS also encompasses monuments and historic sites, including the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington; the Stonewall monument in New York; the incarceration sites at Minidoka in Idaho and Manzanar in California, commemorating the forcible confinement of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War; and the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Colorado, the site of a 19th-century American slaughter of about 750 Indigenous people.
These sites (and many others) are being instructed to fudge the history, tone it down, literally whitewash it.
“How do you talk about Martin Luther King without talking about racism?” asks Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonpartisan advocacy group for the parks. Yes, but also, how do you talk about the United States, period, without talking about racism? Slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter – the government can’t just erase these historical pillars, or fiddle dee dee them away. You can’t shove the facts of history aside, to be gone with the wind produced by the huffing and puffing of a tyrant.
The placement of these Orwellian signs follows Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” part of the President’s crusade against wokeness. The new signs also encourage visitors to report any information that fails to “emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” Be complimentary, or else.
Rather than rat out tour guides or wall plaques, visitors are being urged by the NPCA to use their voices to tell the government to stop meddling. And good news: The publication Government Executive reports that almost all of the nearly 200 submissions received in the first few days urged the government not to censor history.
In Canada, we are learning the value of telling history accurately, in particular the history of Indigenous people. The Truth and Reconciliation process has been bumpy at times, sure, but it has exposed this country’s real history to many Canadians (not just students) who simply didn’t know about the harms of colonialism, including residential schools.
We are seeing this reflected in school curricula, at museums, on the calendar (we mark National Indigenous Peoples Day on Saturday) and, consequently, in the zeitgeist. That’s how it works.
“If our country erases the darker chapters of our history, we will never learn from our mistakes,” said Ms. Pierno in a news release. Exactly.
What if they did this in, say, Germany – where monuments and museums tell the country’s chilling Nazi history, along with tens of thousands of Stolpersteins (literally “stumbling stones”), small brass plates marking places from which people were deported? (Memorials that speak to the despicable actions of past governments of that period are also prominent in Hungary, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and France.)
Imagine if, in an effort by a hypothetical German government to avoid casting shade upon its history, those sites were watered down. What if Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was renamed to play down the murder part? Any thinking person would be outraged – even much of the MAGA set, too.
Picture Minidoka, currently billed as “An American Concentration Camp,” instead being described as “a unique visiting experience in the scenic Gem State, along the refreshing waters of Clover Creek with its fine fishing?” What an insult to the memory of all who suffered there. What a disservice to any visitor.
This move to sanitize historic sites is a testament to the idiocy of this U.S. administration – as history, one hopes, will show.