History By Dummies, or, Why Labor History Matters
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them ? -Bertolt Brecht
If it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny. If it wasn’t so scary, it would be hilarious. Star Billionaire Elon Musk and his sponsor, Donald J. Trump and their minions, in a determined effort to whitewash American history, have piled up some impressive faux pas in a very short time. First, they bungled the Paul Tibbetts Thing: Tibbetts, a combat pilot in World War II, piloted the plane that dropped the first atom bomb (“Little Boy”) on Hiroshima, killing around 100,000 people in a matter of seconds and wounding tens of thousands of others. For some reason, Tibbetts dedicated the action to his mother, a woman named Enola Gay Tibbetts, by naming his bomber after her.
(This, in itself, raises serious and ugly questions right off the bat. Name an atomic bomber that killed defenseless old men, women and children by the tens of thousands after your mother?)
But this is not my point.
Skip forward to now. Musk and Trump loosed their Lysol crews—both human and AI— on the archives of the Department of Defense. Their task? To find and erase text and/or photos that promote “Diversity, Equity, or Inclusion”—that is, erase from history groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability.
The limpiadores got hot on the trail. One of the first things they discovered was the word GAY and they immediately expunged it. They found others, too. Hey, look! a black soldier who protested discrimination in the Army! Erase! WWII Navajo Code talkers, who spoke to one another in a language no one else could understand! Can’t have that! Erase!
The uproar, thank God, was swift. Someone realized that the “GAY” was only Mama Tibbetts’ middle name! Oh God! The black soldier in question was none other than Jackie Robinson! The Code Talkers were decorated for their part in defeating the Japanese! AI can’t tell the difference, and it seems like some of the humans in the room couldn’t either: You can picture them asking one another surreptitiously, “Who the hell WAS Jackie Robinson, anyway?”
(To be fair, I should add that the DOGE people corrected their errors before they went on to make more.)
If it wasn’t so scary, it would be funny…after all, this is the stuff we used to read about in 1984, right? A government that wants to create history in its own image by erasing all other versions. What a concept! Never really happened, of course…So this is scary as hell, because they really mean to DO it. And when you do such surgery on the past, you strangle the future. It was Malcolm X who said if all you ever heard about your people was that they picked cotton, that’s all you’d ever think you could do. History, to quote Marge Piercy, either leads to us or contains us.
And yes, this is why history is so crucial, so important. Labor History, for example, which includes everybody, is routinely written out of most history taught in schools for the very reason that it is a threat to the rulers’ version. It challenges the power of the Trumps and the Musks and those who want to write working people out and focus on the kings, the generals, the Great Men, the capitalists, et cetera.
We are supposed to forget, or erase, the people who did the work. If they are Black or Brown or women, just erase ’em, and the history of their movements, past and present.
Stay tuned for more and worse and fatal faux pas from this Musk/MAGA crew. They are just getting started. But then so are we.
Bill Morgan is a unionist, retired teacher, author, and DJ of Labor and Love on Mutiny Radio. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.