Fighting field of history policy – Uncle Donald’s fairy tale hour

While we are preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the establishment of our nation, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect unity, progress and constant values ​​that make up American history. «With these words dripping in front of Pathos, an open letter from the White House to the head of the Smithsonian Museums in the USA, Lonnie G. Bunch III, 2025, from August 12th, from 12.

The state-owned Smithsonian Museum complex is the largest in the world and deals with the natural and socio-cultural history of the territory, on which the United States today are located. They are the relevant location of the state-official museum historiography-and thus consequently in the sights of the current US government with their project of white-Christian, capitalist protection of rule. Personally commissioned to clean up the Smithsonian Museums, the US Vice President JD Vance, a member of the “Smithsonian Board of Regents”, flanked by the arch-conservative senior judge of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, who is conveniently also CEO of Smithsonian.

Explicitly asked to remove historical facts such as slavery and colonialism or evolution theory – from all exhibitions and programs within 75 days, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of Natural History. But the American Women’s History Museum, which is still being planned, is already on the line of fire – for the time being with the hostile justification that “male athletes are celebrated”.

Other examples of disruptive factors in the image of “American Exceptionalism”, on which Trump and others want to commit the Smithsonian Museums: the mention of the fact that the US “founding father” Benjamin Franklin was owned by enslaved people, the presentation of a film about the police order of George Floyd in May 2020 as well as a document from the exhibition »¡Presente! Latino History «in the National Museum of American History, which represents the warlike appropriation of Mexican territory (today parts of the US states of California, Arizona and Texas) in 1848.

History policy rollback

As hair-raising history revisionist, this agenda of the Trump administration is so little original. It simply cleans up with all those historical modernizations that have always been fought in the Republican party by US conservative, organized for decades-but a struggle that was at least partially lost in the course of “68” and its (movement) political follow-up projects. The general thrust of the trumpist history policy should therefore be well received by the right. But the completely unbridled manner with which the fascist leadership of the Republicans today now brings the story about the nation back to the course of the white rulers is like a conservative fever dream.

Incidentally, the US President had already issued the legal basis for his cleansing efforts in March 2025: a decree “to restore truth and intellectual health in American historiography”. If you don’t know it any better, the title could only appear laughable. But “the production, hypostasis and circulation of these powerful, contentless, large -scale signifiers,” as fascism researcher Alberto Toscano is fascist cultural production in his current book »late fascism. Racism, capitalism and authoritarian crisis policy «is in the service of a deadly, already advanced project project, which even seems to have his zenith in front of it.

The Trumpists are increasingly driving around in a ethnic world of imagination.

The Trumpists are increasingly driving around in a ethnic imagination, which also defines the ideology of “degenerate art” in National Socialism: critical – i.e. realistic – representations of social conditions are not only described as wrongly or artistically devalued, but are characterized as pathological, yes “hostile to people”. Just like the Germans in 1937 in the Nazi exhibition-albeit from a different motivation-US citizens are currently flocking to the museums to see certain exhibitions before they are broken down “(” Cronkite News “). Some visitors express their outrage over the planned changes to the press, but overall fatalism seems to predominate. And also from the Smithsonian itself-as can currently be observed in other democratic US institutions-there is no real resistance. Instead of attacking Trump’s statements as the demagogical concepts of concepts they are, the head of Smithsonian is fully involved in an internal message to the workforce: “We continuously check our content to ensure that our programs are impartial and factual.”

In the case of the Smithsonian, it is about museums that deal less with visual arts than with historical topics. Nevertheless, something can be learned here about fascist aesthetics. As Walter Benjamin stated in “The artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility”, one of the essential characteristics of fascism is a strong tendency towards aesthetizing the political: affective emotions take the place of rational penetration; A matter-of-fact-scientific content is captured purely emotionally. Reason and affect are not dialectically conveyed how a work of art would do, but represent and reception are club -like to kitsch and ornament. The contradictory illustration of the “size of the nation” as an imperative for museum examination of history is an example of this.

This aesthetization of the political but also in the propaganda is clearly evident, which the Trump government uses in its redesign of other state institutions. Two examples have gone through the media in the past few weeks: First, a recruitment call for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – »No Age Limit! Join Ice Now! «-, which shows a blond, Aryan-looking father-son couple with rifles in front of an American flag; Second, the suspension of a gigantic Trump counterfeis on the building of the US Ministry of Labor, including the slogan “American Workers First”. (On the fascist character of the use of pseudo-class-fighting vocabulary with simultaneous frontal attack on unions, labor law and the welfare state, which the Trump administration currently leads, can only be pointed out at this point.)

Control over culture

The great attention that the Trump administrator grants the areas of culture, art and national historiography shares with the National Socialist rulers-and actually without wanting to carry out equation here with the historical socialist states. The anything goes The pluralistic democracy, in which the market exercises the censor function and which draws its strength from it to allow various expressions of opinion as possible, is suspicious of every authoritarian state – also because it is actually more precarious than democracy in its rule based on open violence.

In order to destroy the illusion, fascism and democracy, incompatible opposites were, finally Toscano was cited again: »As the writings of imprisoned black revolutionary from the United States show to us, political orders that continue to be considered liberal and democratic can accommodate institutions that, in a kind of racist duplication of the state, for further parts of their population and a power and power and Terror regime. «What we are currently observing in the United States is more the expansion of this regime to ever larger parts of the population than a complete break with the status quo. It is to be hoped that this concern will no longer split, but creates solidarity.