He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell, 1984

Erasing History takes its place among an extensive list of works — both classic and more recent — dealing with how fascists go about their business. While some might say that the topic has been thoroughly studied if not exhausted, the unfortunate reality is that fascism takes on many guises as it rears its head at different times and under different circumstances. This requires constant attention and re-attention on the part of scholars. Erasing History provides the reader with an important look at how fascists are going about their work in the U.S. today.

Stanley has contributed a clear, easily accessible account of a key factor that is foundational to how fascists achieve their political, social and cultural ends: “erasing” and rewriting history. Rewriting and re-interpreting history is essential to the fascist project and an important element in how fascists “consolidate their power.” As Stanley discusses, history is presented or, rather, “re-presented” in order to create a “mythic past” “foster anti-intellectualism,” “justify hierarchies of race or religion,” “foster and exploit feelings of resentment and victimhood,” “prioritize law and order over freedom,” and foster “sexual anxiety,” among other goals. In Stanley’s analysis, each of these focal points are key to how fascists legitimate their agenda in the minds of those they seek to dominate.

MAGA’s attack on education: A broader context

The book attributes responsibility for the current incarnation of fascism in the U.S. (largely, though not exclusively) to the Republican party, Donald Trump, Christian Nationalists, and their fellow travelers on the far right. Throughout the work, Stanley contextualizes what is currently happening in the U.S. by showing how fascists follow a tried and true playbook used not only by earlier U.S. fascists but also by fascist movements in Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, The British colonial domination of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary and other contemporary manifestations.

Stanley does a good job showing how U.S. fascists are trying to rewrite history while pointing out how other fascist movements have worked in similar fashion. Current right-wing efforts to remove ideology from education are painted as an effort to make education “fair” or “value neutral” but these efforts are just a ruse designed to eliminate the kinds of thought that conservatives don’t like while furthering their own narrow ideological perspective.

The fascist agenda rests on convincing Americans that they are only returning the country to its true values, requiring a rewriting of the historical narrative.

Trump and his right-wing enablers assert that the educational system has been hijacked by left-wing intellectuals. And it’s not just educational institutions. According to Russel Vought, the self-styled Christian nationalist: “Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement — a new regime if you will — that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” As Stanley demonstrates, this agenda rests on Vought and his ilk convincing Americans that they are only returning America to its true purpose, its true values. This can’t be done unless one is able to rewrite the historical narrative in a way that supports that assertion.

In the chapter called “Colonizing the Mind” we get an instructive and relevant in depth look at how the British went about their work in subduing the Kikuyu. Stanley details how the British not only dismantled Kikuyu governing structures but created a forced system of education whose curriculum eliminated any reference to Kikuyu history and culture. As Stanley puts it:

The education that African students received in the British colonial education system was a British education in every way. Of all the subjects they covered, the schools devoted the greatest amount of time and attention to the Christian Bible. Students studied the history of European monarchies, learned the names of Britain’s kings and queens and read the classics of British literature. They learned nothing of their own history or religious practices. 

In “From Supremacism to Fascism” we get a description of how fascists make use of the educational system, newspapers, and the media to legitimate the supremacy of one racial, ethnic or religious group over another. History is represented as a conflict between races, ethnic groups or geographic regions that legitimate current actions against groups listed as the “enemy.”

As Stanley further notes, those who can’t be bamboozled or misled or are too knowledgeable about the historical record to believe the new narrative have to be either intimidated into silence or forcefully marginalized. All these efforts are accompanied by the physical intimidation of their opponents, the cooptation of the legal system, the use of lawsuits and other threats to intimidate or bankrupt opponents and by firing or jailing those who dare to oppose their agenda. All of these are elements of the current Trump administration.

The relevance of Stanley’s analysis to the current crisis of fascism in the U.S. is clear and his ability to place what is happening within a broader context of how fascists — both past and current — rewrite history to further their ends is must-reading for anyone interested in the subject.

A “lay” introduction

Stanley clearly writes for a “lay” audience that might not be familiar with the intricacies of the subject matter or that might not be conversant with how fascists have gone about their business of rewriting history. However, those with a broader or more in-depth study of the history of fascism, as well as those who for one reason or another are familiar with the ins and outs of historiography, will find little that is “new” here.

Hannah Arendt provides us with a more analytical and detailed examination of these themes in the Origins of Totalitarianism and other works. Adorno’s The Culture Industry and Lukacs’ Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat also come to mind as classic works relevant to this subject that go into much more detail. Among more recent analyses Bryant Welch’s State of Confusion, Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, Walter’s How Civil Wars Start and Corey Robin’s Fear: the History of a Concept are all prior additions to this genre and would be logical next steps for the reader whose appetite has been whetted by Stanley’s analysis.

Not quite Marxist

Although Stanley alludes to the issue, the economic basis of what is discussed in Erasing History is given short shrift. Political, cultural, and other forms of dominance have an economic motivation. Ultimately, the goal is to secure wealth and the levers of political power that wealth allows one to access. The brazen and open way that Elon Musk and his oligarch friends are enhancing their wealth and turning it into political power that is unmatched since the gilded age is ample testament to this fact. Stanley does at times refer to this aspect when he recognizes that labor is “exploited” and when he notes W.E.B. Dubois’ exploration of the way in which white politicians and wealthy elites in the U.S. South:

“…exploited (racial) emotions to prevent the emergence of the labor movement based upon the clearly aligned interests of poor white people and poor Black people in the south. Crucial to this weapon against a cross-racial mass labor movement are practices and structures that kept Black citizens subordinated even to poor white citizens. Demagogues, with the support of wealthy backers could foment panic by dangling the prospect that poor white citizens might lose even these small advantages.

Dubois, both as a Harvard-trained social scientist and as a socialist, never let the economic basis of racism go unexamined. I could not help but feel that this work would have benefitted by touching on this subject more directly.

Stanley does not adequately address the fact that the Democratic Party buys into many of the same historical fallacies and inaccuracies that fascists seek to promulgate.

Stanley does not, to this reader’s mind, give adequate attention to the fact that the “liberal” and “democratic” opponent to fascism — namely the Democratic party — is itself a bourgeois organization largely serving the interests of the ruling class and is itself guilty of the same attempts to rewrite U.S. history that they are quick to lay at the feet of their political opponents. The Democratic Party buys into many of the same historical fallacies and inaccuracies that fascists seek to promulgate. That they are not quite as explicit in their efforts is cold comfort to the groups that have been historically marginalized in this country.

Western thought analyzed

A key chapter in the book entitled “Classical Education” explores how fascists make use of the Western cannon of thought to promote a virulent nationalism designed to create support for aggression toward either “internal” enemy groups or nation states that pose a challenge to their international hegemony. Stanley rightly points out the misogyny, racism, cultural bigotry, and myopia that many classical and enlightenment thinkers in the western cannon demonstrated in their thinking. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Rousseau — among others — are all called to task. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others could be added to the list. These elements in the thought of some of the most noted minds in this philosophic tradition opens the door for fascists to use the tradition to legitimate their own racism, bigotry, and misogyny.

Stanley devotes some time to a critical analysis of the western tradition of thought, arguing that the enlightenment’s emphasis on empiricism, objectivity, and the sanctity of personhood can be misused to support systems of hierarchy and oppression. He argues, correctly, that a truly “value neutral” objectivity, a “view from nowhere” as he puts it, is a perspective that is “both false and the basis for cynical attacks on education”:

All education presupposes values, even substantive moral and political ones. The idea that it should not presuppose perspectives, even value laden ones, involves a false conception of objectivity, and a tendentious and in fact ultimately incoherent distinction between facts and values. All inquiry must make presuppositions, and these presuppositions form an intertangled web of facts and values. The demand for neutral inquiry is philosophically incoherent. No wonder such demands invariably, and hypocritically, mask political agendas.

Stanley says he endorses “some version of the liberal tradition and hence some version of enlightenment ideals such as objectivity, reason, equality, and freedom” but that the criticisms of these enlightenment principles cannot be dismissed “out of hand.” In this, I suspect that Stanley gives away more than he intends.

The individualism underlying Western thought and the whole modern project has facilitated an explosion of “magical” thinking.

This country is under the sway of radical forms of individualism and relativism. It has been a long time coming and its foundations can be found both in philosophical errors in the thinking of the founders as well as aspects of the tradition of Western thought that underlies the whole modern project. Politically, this relativism is epitomized by the consistent undermining of scientific data and empirically verifiable evidence, by the attack on professionalism of all kinds, and by an explosion of “magical” forms of thinking and belief that are not limited to traditional religious observance. Nietzsche’s point that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” which was intended as an attack on positivism, has become the mantra of our times.

Relativism’s trap

But the fact that classical and enlightenment thinking can be used to the advantage of the fascist agenda is no reason to abandon them. We must not throw out the baby with the bath water. The Enlightenment’s focus on empiricism and objective factual evidence is our main defense against relativism and the attacks on professionalism and science that the fascist political agenda relies upon. As such, it is an essential weapon in the fight against fascist attempts to rewrite history.

Factual evidence is how one rescues history from those — fascist or otherwise — who would erase the historical record and rewrite it in their image. E.H. Carr pointed out in The Historian and His Facts that:

The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. My first answer therefore to the question, What is history?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and present.

Carr makes clear that history is a continual dialogue not just between a historian and her facts, but with other historians as well. This is precisely the kind of historiography that those who would erase history are first to reject.

Marx’s analysis of the ills of capitalism and his own historiography is, if nothing else, an attempt to pierce capitalism’s veil of mystification and ideology by means of empirical, objectively verifiable evidence. It is unfortunate that many contemporary devotees of his thought have come under the spell of cultural relativism and the methodology of deconstructionism and end up rejecting the very enlightenment principles and methods that are their best line of defense against the fascist historical project.

An impetus for further study

These observations notwithstanding, Stanley has done us all a great service in highlighting the key role that “erasing” and “rewriting the past” plays in how fascists legitimate their nefarious agenda. My comments here form not so much a criticism of the work as a running commentary on how those who read Erasing History might consider the case Stanley makes in a broader context and point his readers to further study of the subject.

Stanley concludes by noting that the challenge is that of: “Bringing people to the point of understanding the objective historical and existing conditions of groups with whom they have had no personal life experience.” And that it is up to us to “define a different version of America, one that is conducive to democracy and human flourishing and that justifies a role in the world as an example, not a warning.”

We best hope that such methods still have the potential to rescue our troubled nation. The alternative, as history tells us, will involve a far more violent response to rescuing the present — and hence the past and future from the fascist grip.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Images: Fred Barr / CPUSA; Book banning protest by John Ramspott (CC BY 2.0); Elon Musk at the 2025 CPAC Conference by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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