# Erasing History [[Jason Stanley]]'s account of why authoritarian movements always attack education and historical memory first. Book bans, curriculum-gag laws, the campaigns against "critical race theory" and "divisive concepts," the defunding and capture of universities — Stanley frames these not as culture-war noise but as **core fascist technique**: whoever controls the narrative of the past controls the boundaries of legitimate politics in the future. ## The Argument Fascist politics requires a mythic past — innocent, glorious, hierarchical — and that myth cannot survive honest history. So the movement must erase: colonial violence, slavery's centrality, labor history, the achievements of multiracial democracy. Stanley maps the contemporary American erasure machine (model legislation, donor networks, astroturfed parents' groups) onto international precedents from Russia's memory laws to India's textbook revisions, and identifies the funders and intellectual architects behind the U.S. campaigns. Erasing history is preparation: a population that cannot remember alternatives cannot organize resistance. ## RWKB Relevance Bridges the [[Propaganda]] cluster and the education-war material; sister text to [[Ministry of Truth]] (Benen on the GOP's revision of the *recent* past) — Stanley supplies the theoretical frame, Benen the running case file.