During the Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered his officers and acolytes to destroy artworks, monuments, images, and texts that were considered politically unacceptable. In the full fever of its fervor to erase alternative worldviews, the Red Guard burned the landscape paintings of Fu Baoshi and the novels of Lao She; references to political opponents and even former followers who had strayed from the party line were scrubbed from libraries and history books.
Once upon a time in America, such spasms of censorship — such tantrums of irrational will to erase any trace of history or culture that didn’t align with the prevailing political orthodoxy — were almost impossible to conceive of, so foreign were they to our way of life. But here we are. The American culture wars have become our own cultural revolution, censorship with a whimper, not a bang.
Last week, according to The Associated Press, the Trump administration directed the Pentagon to remove 26,000 images from all platforms in a sweeping effort of erasure and rewriting of history — deleting from the collective memory anything that might remotely carry even a faint whiff of association with Obama and Biden-era policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Six photographs of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, were, for example, cleansed from Department of Defense media platforms, according to The A.P. Why the Enola Gay, you ask? Because the file name for these images included the word “gay,” and the D.O.D. had ordered the purging of any materials that could be construed as L.G.B.T.Q.-positive. That ludicrous mistake was reversed when officials realized what they’d done — but the attempts at whitewashing didn’t stop there. Hardly.
The items burned in the digital dust heap were, in the majority, images of and texts about people of color and women. To give another example, even more outrageous, the Pentagon had to dip back into the digital code after a minor public outcry to restore a webpage it had removed honoring Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers. And who was Major General Rogers? A soldier decorated with a Medal of Honor by President Richard Nixon for defending a U.S. base while thrice wounded in Vietnam. He was Black. The URL of the D.O.D. webpage, while the page was down, was “altered to add the letters D.E.I.,” according to NPR; anyone who clicked on it was redirected to a page with a “D.E.I.” error message. That’s right: The assumption of the Trump administration’s censors was that this hero, this highly decorated general, was simply another so-called “D.E.I. hire.” To call this a disgrace is a gross understatement.
History demonstrates very colorfully how extremist authoritarian behavior tends to tip over into the realm of the clownish and absurd. Indeed, clownishness is a symptom of authoritarianism. (Recall Kim Jong-il claiming he invented the hamburger. Recall the romance novels written by Saddam Hussein. Recall Putin riding bare-chested on horseback.) This month’s information purges under the direction of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth certainly qualify as both absurd and clownish, but all this really isn’t funny. The ineptitude of the censors may be laughable, but censors usually are inept. The disrespect shown to veterans such as Major General Rogers should be a national scandal — and a government that attempts to erase history is dangerous indeed.