(Source: I am a professional/academic historian with several advanced degrees in history. I have read many history books and even written a few history books myself. I have taught about history books. I spend a lot of time thinking about history books. It’s at least fair to say that I know a bit about history books.)
Speaking of said history books, last night I finished Anne Applebaum’s excellent Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, which describes in detail how Soviet-style totalitarianism was imposed on Eastern Europe (her focus is East Germany, Poland, and Hungary, but it is applicable to all of them) in the chaos and destruction after the end of WWII. It is an eerie and timely look at how an unstable and war-racked society can sink into the grip of absolute dictatorship on every level – and also why those absolute dictatorships do not work. The era of extreme Stalinism was resisted even while it was taking place and after his death in 1953, the regimes were forced to adopt a more status-quo system that nonetheless never, not once, succeeded in brainwashing every single citizen, forcing public legitimacy of their rule, or destroying history books, alternate narratives, outside sources of information, awareness of reality, and everything else that eventually led to the fall of the totalitarian state and the rebuilding of society along freer and more open lines. There is a reason that the authorities desperately suggested “more ideological education!” (i.e. brainwashing) as the response to every mild act of defiance, of which there were many. No matter how massively overwhelming the propaganda was in every area of life, after a certain and limited point, it simply did not work.
America in 2025 is also not exactly comparable to Eastern Europe in 1945 for many reasons. For one thing, despite its struggles and political backsliding, it has (as I have said before) a 250-year history of participative governance and constitutional democracy that is innately and unconsciously familiar to every citizen. The Eastern European countries – emerging from nineteenth-century repressive empires, short-lived People’s Revolutions, and the comprehensive destruction of World War II – did not have that. In some sense, they were a far easier target to become a fully brainwashed and docilely obedient totalitarian population, but it didn’t work even on them, and this book is able to describe in detail what happened, drawing on sources and people who lived in that time and remembered it firsthand. The fact that I was reading a history book about it kind of proves my claim that indeed, there were history books about it. And there will be history books about this.
Donald Dumbass Trump and his evil-but-not-evil-genius Project 2025 myrmidons are not capable, in any way whatsoever, of destroying either history or books about it. In the 90s, we also had an upswing of “the end of history!” claims, this time in a positive sense, where people really thought for some reason that the end of the Cold War meant all geopolitical crises were over and everyone would only have to worry about how to increase peace and freedom for all time. That sounds risibly naive to us now, and obviously it was: history was never going to just end for the better. It’s just as naive to think that history will also be forced to end for the worse. The world continued, for both good and bad. There were books about it. There will be books about this. Make sure you’re around to read them.
amhrancas 