You Can't Learn from History If You Cover It Up

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jim-hightower/115242/you-can-t-learn-from-history-if-you-cover-it-up

You Can’t Learn from History If You Cover It Up
by Jim Hightower | October 24, 2025 - 4:39am

— from OtherWords


Our country’s magnificent National Park System has been called “America’s greatest idea.”

These 433 treasures — along with our rich diversity of national museums and historical sites — each have their own stories to tell. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, for together they express America’s egalitarian spirit and “little-d” democratic possibilities, urging us to keep pushing for economic fairness and social justice for all.

And that’s exactly why Trump and his cabal of moneyed elites and right-wing extremists are out to purge, erase, and officially censor the parks’ historical presentations. After all, it’s hard to impose plutocratic autocracy if such tangible examples of historic truth and democratic rebellion are openly displayed!

Thus, as dictated by the GOP’s secretive anti-democracy clique, Project 2025, Trump’s ideological Thought Police have set themselves up as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to sanitize and Disney-fy the telling of our people’s real history.

For example, Trump complains that parks and museums hurt America’s self-image by telling “how bad slavery was.”

Donald, that’s not an image — its reality. It’s as central to our national character as our historic commitment to equality. And the explosive conflict between ugly repression and flowering egalitarianism is ever present today.

Consider the push by Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and others in the GOP’s Christian Nationalist movement to deny the unifying principle that “all men are created equal.”

There’s not enough whitewash in the world to cover up the deep ugliness of slavery, and it’s self-destructive for the government to try. The fundamental purpose of recording our shared history is to learn from it.

[usonian]

1. Why AI is needed to speed up translation of OLDSPEAK into NEWSPEAK (1984-style)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220731559

From Emmanuel Goldstein's work:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oligarchical_Collectivism

PDF download:
https://archive.org/download/the-theory-and-practice-of-oligarchical-collectivism_202408/THE%20THEORY%20AND%20PRACTICE%20OF%20OLIGARCHICAL%20COLLECTIVISM.pdf

Back in Orwell's time, he couldn't imagine instant "translation" of the body of western literature into right wing SSB (my term for self-serving bullshit) rewriting history, STARTING WITH THE CONSTITUTION.

Just like they did to the Bible. Turned it into a weapon of hate.

Put an anchor chain on both the RW revisionism and AI in the service of fiends.

Begin
It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation—that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW GOVERNMENT...

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government. A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way.

Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.

These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature—indispensable technical manuals, and the like—that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.
End

absolute government?
plenary authority ?
Asking for a fiend.