Opinion
We wrote a news piece this week about the White House demanding the Smithsonian’s internal records and threatening its funding until the Institution agrees to tell American history “in a positive light.” Read that sentence again. It is not a request for accuracy. It is a demand for a mood.
This is not new, and it is not really about eight museums. Every ruling class that has ever held power has understood something the rest of us are taught to forget: whoever controls the account of the past controls what the present is allowed to imagine as possible. A labor movement that doesn’t know it won the eight-hour day through strikes, not statutes, will ask for less than it’s owed. A country that doesn’t know its museums have always been a battleground will hand that battleground over without a fight.
So we’ll say the obvious part plainly, since institutions built to be diplomatic won’t: a museum that can be starved into agreement was never independent, and a public that wants an honest account of its own past has to fund one itself, defend it in public, and refuse to accept “positive” as a synonym for “true.” That is the job. Nobody else is going to do it for us.
This is an editorial. It argues a position and reflects the view of The Communard, not a neutral news report.