Letter: ‘Correcting’ history is part of a dictator’s plan
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Editor,
People who can’t see us with an authoritarian government need to remember what happened in another country. There was only one political party whose leader demanded loyalty — but not to the Constitution. He put soldiers on the streets and used them against his own people. Society’s problems were blamed on vulnerable minorities who were demonized, rounded up and disappeared.
His party promoted “Positive Christianity,” seeing themselves as chosen people with the moral authority to start wars and steal land. Schools taught a politically corrected history. Unacceptable books were burned — then people were burned.
This was the Nazi Party my father, the son of immigrants, fought in World War II. He would no doubt recognize Hitler’s playbook being followed today.
The Nazis lost the war, but their white nationalist beliefs live on, and though rarely admitted, are held by many today. Achieving their preferred society requires the rest of us to abandon our democratic principles.
I’m a senior southerner that’s witnessed change — but nothing like today’s flipping of right and wrong. Compassion and empathy are seen as weaknesses — threatening and bullying as strengths. Humility has been replaced with vanity, self-aggrandizement and in-your-face display of wealth.
The White House, once called the “People’s House,” is fitted with the gold trimmings of an oligarch’s mansion. It sits within walking distance of where the homeless were driven from their cardboard pallets and makeshift tents.
Our “history police” oppose remembrances of slavery yet insist on displaying the statutes of slavery’s Confederate defenders. The civil rights movement is on their anti-wokeism chopping block, as will be social justice movements that ended child labor, sexual discrimination and the genocide of Native Peoples. This whitewashing of history, by design, keeps the victims of prejudice and greed from knowing how they might overcome what they face.
Reducing civil liberties, separation of powers and the rule of law is what want-to-be dictators do. They also to turn tragic domestic events into self-serving propaganda.
Both our parties have funded and supported violence abroad — like the on-going killing and starvation of people in Gaza. The violence we legitimize in our foreign policies normalizes the political violence we increasingly practice against each other.
It’s concerning, but not surprising that the influencers of one political party are inciting violence against another they clearly want eliminated. It’s what the Nazis and similar governments did before misleading their blinded and like-minded followers over a cliff.
Rick Abraham
Greenbank
