{"id":34675,"date":"2023-07-28T01:07:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-28T01:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=34675"},"modified":"2023-07-30T23:42:58","modified_gmt":"2023-07-30T23:42:58","slug":"desantis-war-on-woke-looks-a-lot-like-attempts-by-other-countries-to-deny-and-rewrite-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/desantis-war-on-woke-looks-a-lot-like-attempts-by-other-countries-to-deny-and-rewrite-history\/","title":{"rendered":"DeSantis\u2019 \u2018war on woke\u2019 looks a lot like attempts by other countries to deny and rewrite\u00a0history"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rochelle Anne Davis<\/a>, Georgetown University<\/a><\/em> and Eileen Kane<\/a>, Connecticut College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Florida law<\/a> that took effect on July 1, 2023, restricts how educators in the state\u2019s public colleges and universities can teach about the racial oppression that African Americans have faced in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, SB 266<\/a> forbids professors to teach that systemic racism is \u201cinherent in the institutions of the United States.\u201d Similarly, they cannot teach that it was designed \u201cto maintain social, political and economic inequities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are professors who teach the modern history of the Middle East<\/a> and Eastern Europe<\/a>, and we know that even democratically elected governments suppress histories of their own nations that don\u2019t fit their ideology. The goal is often to smother a shameful past by casting those who speak of it as unpatriotic. Another goal is to stoke so much fear and anger that citizens welcome state censorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see this playing out in Florida, with SB 266 being the most extreme example in a series of recent U.S. state bills<\/a> that critics call \u201ceducational gag orders<\/a>.\u201d The tactics that Gov. Ron DeSantis is using to censor the teaching of American history in Florida look a lot like those seen in the illiberal democracies of Israel, Turkey, Russia and Poland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are four ways SB 266 relates to attempts used by modern governments to censor history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Invent a threat<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One strategy that DeSantis shares with other world leaders is to invent a threat that taps into anxieties and then declare war against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has been waging a brutal war against Ukraine in the name of \u201cdenazifying\u201d the country<\/a>. This claim that Ukraine is a Nazi bastion is a fabrication<\/a>. Nevertheless, it stokes real fear and hatred of Nazis<\/a>, whose 1941 invasion of the USSR led to 27 million Soviet deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan labels critics of state violence \u201cterrorists<\/a>.\u201d More than 146 Turkish academics who signed a 2016 peace petition condemning Turkey\u2019s violence against its Kurdish citizens faced trials for \u201cspreading terrorist propaganda<\/a>.\u201d Ten were convicted and served jail terms before Turkey\u2019s Constitutional Court, in a 9-8 decision in 2019, overturned their convictions<\/a> because of the violation of their freedom of expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Florida, the phantom threat is \u201cwokeness<\/a>,\u201d a reference to a term that the Black Lives Matter movement made mainstream<\/a>. To \u201cstay woke\u201d means to be self-aware and committed to racial justice. Republicans have co-opted the term and use it sarcastically to denigrate progressive ideas and drown out discussions about the reasons for America\u2019s stark racial inequities<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Criminalize historical discussions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once a fake threat has been ginned up, world leaders can use it to create new laws to criminalize speech and critical discussions of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Russia, Putin uses so-called \u201cmemory laws<\/a>\u201d to, among other things, prevent knowledge about the scale of crimes<\/a> committed by former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin against the Soviet people from the 1930s to the 1950s. And in 2018, Poland\u2019s right-wing leadership added an amendment to one of its own memory laws to defend the \u201cgood name<\/a>\u201d of Poland and the Polish people against accusations of complicity in the Holocaust. Historians who defy this gag order have faced harassment<\/a> and death threats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, the Turkish government has a law against \u201cdenigrating the Turkish nation\u201d that makes it a crime<\/a> to acknowledge the early-20th-century Armenian genocide<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turkey\u2019s purge of its intellectuals<\/a> resulted in the firing of more than 6,000 university instructors in an effort to silence critical teaching about the nation\u2019s past and present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SB 266<\/a>, meanwhile, requires general education courses to \u201cprovide instruction on the historical background and philosophical foundation of Western civilization and this nation\u2019s historical documents.\u201d It also prohibits general education core courses from \u201cteaching certain topics or presenting information in specified ways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vagueness is deliberate. Teaching virtually anything related to America\u2019s history of racism<\/a>, particularly as it relates to racial inequalities in the present, could be seen as violating SB 266. Florida professors may refrain, for example, from teaching that Jim Crow laws<\/a> were designed to deny African Americans equal rights. These are the same laws that Hitler used as a model<\/a> for the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jewish citizens of Germany of civil rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Demonstrators<\/a>
Demonstrators protest Gov. Ron DeSantis\u2019 plan to eliminate AP courses on African American studies in Florida high schools. Joshua Lott\/The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

3. Punish transgressors<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

With laws in place that criminalize dissenting interpretations of history, governments can then punish those who violate them. Punishment can involve threatening arrest and imprisoning individuals, and stripping funding from institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, in 2011 Israel enacted the Nakba Law<\/a>, which authorizes the minister of finance to cut funding to institutions that commemorate or acknowledge what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba \u2013 or \u201ccatastrophe\u201d in Arabic. The Nakba<\/a> is the displacement of more than half of the Indigenous Palestinian population and destruction of their communities that resulted from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, SB 266<\/a> defunds diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in public colleges and universities and empowers school administrators and boards to take action against those who defy the rules. It comes in the wake of Florida\u2019s 2022 \u201cStop WOKE\u201d law<\/a> \u2013 which restricted discussions about race in K-12 schools and led teachers to purge their classrooms<\/a> of books they worried could get them a five-year jail sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Write new history<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

With actual historical events denied or suppressed, governments can then rewrite history to further monopolize truth and impose ideology. Russia offers the most egregious example of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2021, Putin published a 20-page article, \u201cOn the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians<\/a>,\u201d in which he argued that the Ukrainian and Russian people are one and the same. Alarmed critics<\/a> rightly saw this as a preemptive justification for escalating his war against Ukraine, which he did with a full-scale invasion of the country<\/a> in February 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like right-wing ideologues in other parts of the world<\/a>, DeSantis claims to be defending U.S. history from falsehoods pushed by ideologues<\/a>. In his attempts to rewrite history, calls for a reckoning with America\u2019s history of anti-Blackness are ridiculed as indoctrination<\/a>, and bigotry gets repackaged as patriotism<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the way governments are rewriting history in other parts of the world is a guide, DeSantis\u2019 and other states\u2019 legislation could be the prelude to an even greater assault on accurate history and freedom of thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rochelle Anne Davis<\/a>, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Georgetown University<\/a><\/em> and Eileen Kane<\/a>, Professor of History, Connecticut College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rochelle Anne Davis, Georgetown University and Eileen Kane, Connecticut College A Florida law that took effect on July 1, 2023, restricts how educators in the state\u2019s public colleges and universities can teach about the racial oppression that African Americans have faced in the United States. Specifically, SB 266 forbids professors to teach that systemic racism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":34676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[292],"tags":[13354,3762,11215,1996,3181,3666,6662,1737,1553,14446,1850,13,1538,1852,13987,234,3297,973,12657,104,9481,1212],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34675"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34688,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34675\/revisions\/34688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}