Russia, Nazi Germany, MAGA: The Dangers of Weaponizing History and Education

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, as democracy is threatened around the world, our next guest warns that danger lies closer to home, at school. In his latest book, American philosopher Jason Stanley argues that attacks on education empower authoritarian regimes by reshaping our understanding of the past. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Jason Stanley, thanks so much for joining us again. Your recent book, “Erasing History,” starts with a quote from Vladimir Putin, that wars are won by teachers. Explain why this quote, what does he mean, and why is it so significant?

JASON STANLEY, AUTHOR, “ERASING HISTORY”: So, what our schools do and our textbooks do is they give us a vision of history that allows us to make judgments about policy. In the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the textbooks that Russians are brought up on do not represent Ukraine as having an independent history. They do not represent the Ukrainian language as genuinely separate language, and they erase the history of genocide that Russia directed against Ukraine in the 1930s, Holodomor. And so, Russians are brought up thinking that it’s just not true that Ukraine is an independent country. And they’re brought up thinking that it’s offensive to Russia that Ukrainians claim they are an independent country. And so, that for them justifies the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Also, the Russian textbooks represent Russian incursions, invasions, really, into neighboring countries like Georgia and Ukraine as justified by a supporting in pro Russian independence movements. So, all of that justifies the ideology of the full-scale invasion.

SREENIVASAN: How does that translate beyond Russia to other countries and then will get to the U.S.?

STANLEY: Well, in the case of, for example, Nazi Germany, it happened very rapidly to the Weimar Republic was not flooded with anti-Semitism. But the Nazi textbooks emphasized the so-called stab in the back myth that Jews somehow betrayed Germany in World War I. And so, it wasn’t a military loss. It was a betrayal. And so, by the time the late ’30s came around, Germany was the most anti- Semitic country in Europe. So, we think — we see this actually — this process happening actually relatively rapidly. And one might wonder whether the youth support for MAGA republicanism comes from the already changed curricula in southern states, for instance, we’re seeing more youth support for Donald Trump. It may be, this is just a speculation, that we’re already seeing the effects of the attack on education in many states.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit more about that. Expand on this attack on education. How — I mean, look, you are an expert on fascism. You are an expert on how cultures and societies, you know, slowly drift from one ideology to another. What troubles you about what you see in American education today?

STANLEY: So, in a democratic society, you want an education that gives citizens agency. It represents social movements that realize the two great democratic values of equality and freedom. When you erase the history of social movements. For example, as they did with Jim Crow, when they erased the agency of black Americans from the Civil War — from before the Civil War, like slave rebellions, through to the Civil War and beyond, then you’re representing black Americans as lacking the agency to fight for their own freedom and equality. When you erase the history of social movements, you’re representing hierarchy as permanent and unchallengeable. And that’s what we’re seeing in U.S. education. Instead of democratic education, we have patriotic education. We have the glorification of great men. And that idea is that it’s not social movements rising as it were from below that make democracy more perfect, but — that realize democracy, but instead the, great deeds of individual men. And then, you’re removing the agency from people that’s required for democracy. So, that’s the first element that worries me. You’re representing history as the deeds of great men. And so, why would people join social movements? Secondly, you’re erasing the history of the dominant groups’ oppression of non-dominant groups. So, you’re — in order to realize the democratic ideals of freedom and equality, we need to know who has been denied equality and why. When you erase that history and instead promulgate a myth of national innocence and national greatness, well, then you can’t repair the inequalities of the past.

SREENIVASAN: I mean, the former president was recently at an event for Moms for Liberty where he was implying that kids just went to school, and several days later came back with gender surgeries. I mean, well, you know, that’s in a hyper political and a campaign environment, but what are these things — how do they inform your thinking about how this sort of creep happens?

STANLEY: Toni Morrison made the point that liberty too often in America means liberty for essentially white Christian men or whites. Moms for Liberty fights to eliminate black history because they don’t want their children to feel guilty about the past. But whose children are made to feel not guilty here? Whose children are, as it were, rescued from — by this confrontation from history? Well, it’s not black children, because black children, by not knowing the history — black history, by not knowing — by not being exposed to the consequences of Jim Crow, the consequences of redlining in the mortgage industry, for example, which is why many black Americans didn’t inherit houses, cheap source of wealth of white Americans, by not learning that history, they will feel badly about their family. They will think that their ancestors were somehow lazy for not for not accruing wealth. So, this is — so, it’s what’s meant here by liberty, what’s meant here by not making children feel the weight of the past is white children. What’s meant is boys, because they’re not learning what’s meant is heterosexuals, because they’re not learning the history of LGBT, how LGBT was suppressed. Now, two things about the focus on trans children. First of all, there’s a tiny minority of America who are trans. So, it’s the perfect scapegoat. It’s the perfect scapegoat because it’s not a real voting population. So, you want a scapegoat that doesn’t affect a significant voting population. And trans Americans fit that. Secondly, fascism, fascist ideology, which is what we’re seeing, is based around natalism. It’s based around rigid gender roles. The idea that women should bear a lot of children, and men should father those children. Trans identity violates rigid gender roles. And this goes back in history to the original fascist movements. The National Socialists targeted Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay a gay German Jew, who is the director of the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft that had the largest photographic evidence of gender variability, as well as 20,000 volumes of LGBT literature, literature representing LGBT perspectives. And this whole collection was burned in the first in the first Nazi book burning in 1933. This is highly reminiscent of what we’re seeing now when we see any evidence of gender variability removed from libraries and schools, when we see LGBT perspectives removed from libraries as there were libraries and schools. And I ask again, Moms for Liberty wants to eliminate any representation of LGBT perspectives from schools. Think about how this makes LGBT children feel, or children of same sex parents. This makes them feel terrible, weird, freakish. Moms for Liberty is all about not making our children feel badly. Well, what does our children mean here? The Toni Morrison point is that liberty and Moms for Liberty just means heterosexual white people.

SREENIVASAN: How does this escalate up? Right now, we’ve also had, you know, politicization of the protests that are happening on campuses while simultaneously there is also an attack on the types of material that is allowed to be taught on college campuses. We see, you know, maybe it’s economic reasons, maybe it is cultural reasons. There might be a lot of factors. But we also see kind of an attack on just the idea of the humanities or liberal education.

STANLEY: So, let’s begin with the attack on universities. That is the canary in the coal mine of fascism. Central European University was ejected from the country of Hungary by Victor Orban for teaching gender ideology. We’re seeing this imitated point by point by American autocrats like Ron DeSantis. So, autocrats know that dissent and critique comes from universities. They know that student movements are often central parts of social movements for democratic change. Look at Bangladesh, what just happened in Bangladesh. Student protesters overthrew the autocratic leader of Bangladesh. That’s the kind of thing that that autocrats, authoritarians, those who want to build a one-party state are afraid of. They’re afraid of student movements. What we’ve seen is we’ve seen nonviolent student protests protesting American funding of a genocide in Gaza, protesting Israel’s aggression in Gaza. These are antiwar protests. So — just like the Vietnam antiwar protests. And then, we have moderate liberals joining the right-wing authoritarian forces in cheering on police, militarized police going on campus and confronting anti-war protesters. And this concerns me greatly because when the left and the center left, the liberals, are separated and at each other’s throats, then the autocrats and authoritarians when history tells us this. So, what we have here is an attack on universities egged on by moderate liberals, egged on by newspapers like The New York Times. And that is exactly what authoritarians want. If you look at India, for example. In 2019, there were large scale student protests for Muslim equality against the Citizenship Amendment Act. These were nonviolent protests supporting Muslim equality. They were represented as anti-Indian, and there was a harsh militarized reprisal to these protests. So, this idea that universities — critique that universities make of patriotism and nationalism and student movements for equality are somehow anti-national is very familiar from authoritarian movements, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing a wind up to what if Trump wins the use of militarized force in against protest. We’re also seeing a very developed attack on the greatest university system in the world. The United States has the greatest university system in the world, and the Republican right is dismantling it with the help of what Martin Luther King called the moderate liberal. Florida has essentially dismantled tenure. Ohio and Indiana are essentially dismantling tenure with politicized tenure review. The AAUP, the American Association for University Professor Report on Florida is terrifying. And let me conclude by pointing out a fundamental element of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is all about creating a culture of fear. And that’s what these attacks on schools and universities are doing. They’re creating a culture of fear and intimidation for anyone who criticizes the nationalist ideology that the far-right is promulgating.

SREENIVASAN: How does Project 2025, which Former President Trump has tried to disassociate himself from, how does it tackle the idea of educational institutions in the United States if President Trump is re-elected?

STANLEY: So, we’ve got an attack on federal funding for universities. And we have the elimination of the Department of Education. Now, that’s a long-standing goal of the conservative movement. So, to eliminate the Department of Education and deal with its civil rights, it’s jurisdiction over civil rights equality. So, once you eliminate the Department of Education, you don’t really have monitoring of what’s going on in states. You don’t really have moderate — have monitoring that there’s not discrimination against minority groups. That’s a longstanding goal of the Republican Party.

SREENIVASAN: You write that history in a democracy is not static, not mythic, but dynamic and critical. Explain that.

STANLEY: A democracy requires a constant critical engagement with the past and the present. Because the democratic ideals of freedom and equality are never perfectly realized, but a democracy is a dynamic culture that tries to realize them more and more, tries to broaden the scope of freedom and broaden the scope of equality. Equality in a democracy means political equality, and that means all of us play a role in the formation of the laws that govern us. If we don’t play a role in the formation of the laws that govern us, then we’re not a democracy. But you can’t play that role if you don’t know history. You can’t play that role if you don’t understand how history impacts the present. You can’t play the role of changing laws to make up for the tendrils of history that suppress certain groups in the present.

SREENIVASAN: You know, right now, in Germany, in the eastern part of the country, a far-right group for the first time since, really, Nazi Germany has come back into power. And I wonder if that is an anomaly, if that is part of a trend. What do you see?

STANLEY: Well, it is sort of an imitation of what’s happening in the United States, right? I’m not saying it’s an explicit imitation, but it’s a — it mirrors what’s happening in the United States. Alternative fur Deutschland wishes to change the education system and change the monuments and sculptures. They want Germans to be proud of their history. They want to reduce the stigma of the Third Reich and National Socialism. Well, this is exactly what’s happening in the United States. People are saying, well, we don’t want students to feel to feel ashamed of U.S. history. We don’t want black children to learn, black and white children to learn that our founders were enslavers. We just want them to learn the positive aspects of our history.

SREENIVASAN: The new book is called “Erasing History.” Professor Jason Stanley, thanks so much for joining us again.

STANLEY: Thank you, Hari.