The Right-Wing’s Dirty War Against History and Education: Beyond the Politics of Disappearance

The past haunts the present moment because it increasingly offers terrifying narratives and images of what Walter Benjamin once called “a catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin.”1 The catastrophe to which Benjamin refers is the ghost of fascism and its irrepressible ability to reappear in different forms at certain moments in history. At the present time, memory and catastrophe have merged as past images that flash before us, signaling danger and suggesting that the current era is a “state of emergency” that is no longer “the exception but the rule.”2