Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

The human race finds itself again under threat of a rising global fascist movement. In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people all across the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.

Democracy requires a common understanding of reality, a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution.

In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right’s tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.

In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities — places, he explains, that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway. [Adapted from publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781668056912 | Atria/One Signal Publishers

Endorsements

I’ve never read a book that is as timely, urgent and essential as this one. Erasing History is, at this moment, the only source of knowledge I know of that is a sort of battle plan for keeping this nation from falling into fascism. You must read this book. — Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Jason Stanley’s engaging work has taught people in the 21st century the anatomy of fascism as a political system. In Erasing History, Stanley dissects the ideological components of the fascist assault on historical teaching, memory, and analysis. He shows how everything from the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory to the vilification of gay people and feminists to the promotion of myths of national purity and historical innocence all work to demolish democratic agency and freedom. But he leaves us with the sense that those who fight for the past can save the future. — Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

Jason Stanley is the essential voice for anyone seeking an unflinching account of the fascist dimensions of the current moment. Erasing History delivers a vital decoding of the wide-ranging effort of a small but well-organized and well-resourced faction seeking to consolidate power by censoring knowledge and rewriting the past. — Kimberlé Crenshaw

Erasing History is both sequel and prequel to Jason Stanley’s invaluable How Fascism Works, a sweeping survey of this global fascist moment’s anti-education tide. From India to Turkey, from Russia to Florida — and maybe soon in a classroom near you — gross declarations of supremacist nationalism are becoming awful substitutes for historical inquiry. Erasing History, fast-paced and up-to-the-minute, tells us how it’s happening and why the past is a frontline in the struggle for a future free of fascism. — Jeff Sharlet

Simply put, Stanley has laid out the blueprint for the worldwide fascist attack on history. A must-read to fight authoritarianism and disinformation. — Anthea Butler

Why are so many actors on the radical right laying siege to our schools? Hint: it’s far more serious than current reporting conveys. In this powerful book, Jason Stanley deftly interweaves his family’s experience under Nazi rule with a far-reaching, lucid explanation of why authoritarians hate honest history. A must read to understand how much truth telling matters for multiracial democracy to withstand the siege. — Nancy MacLean

Jason Stanley has done it again. This urgent, piercing, and altogether brilliant book exposes how the fight to learn from our past is ultimately a fight about the promise of our future. Erasing History unpacks the imperative story of our time: how authoritarianism aims to collapse history into a single, drab, monololithic narrative. And how the fight for freedom is one that requires us to disrupt that telling through continued, collective reflection and re-imagination. — Jonathan M. Metzl