Stalin paved the way - rewriting history by suppressing it and doctoring it.

The on-going effort by so many on the left and therefore in mainstream media and social media platforms to remove or rewrite history is an evil to be repudiated. Nominally they are attempting to suppress past accounts because it offends sensibilities. Remove statues. Put topics off limits so they cannot be discussed. Pack up classic art and put it in the basement. There is always room for good faith accommodation of shifting sensibilities but that is not what is happening here. This is primitive totalitarianism and a blatant exercise in trying to control free citizens.

It goes against all our natural inclinations to free speech and the respect that that requires for others. I see this morning that YouTube, in their pursuit of moral posturing with the Mandarin Class, have begun removing classic movies documenting historical events, some disturbing and some evil but all of them necessary to understand why things happened the way they did.

Having lived in Europe in the sixties and seventies, this sort of speech repression and inclination to rewrite history always takes my mind to the Soviet Union and Stalin, an early and enthusiastic practitioner in the modern era of rewriting history.

The classic example is illustrated by this infamous pair of pictures.

Click to enlarge.

In the first picture, Stalin stands with his henchmen including to his left (i.e. on the right of the picture), Nikolai Yezhov, his head of secret police. Yezhov was an evil man as well, having implemented Stalin's Great Purge, resulting in the deaths by execution and starvation of close to a million often innocent individuals.

Having served his purpose well but also having seen too much and now too familiar with power, Stalin had Yezhov executed. His position in Soviet history was expunged both in the records and in pictures. As seen, or rather unseen, in the second photo.

From the linked article above.

Stalin used a large group of photo retouchers to cut his enemies out of supposedly documentary photographs. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin’s purges. For a while Yezhov worked at Stalin’s right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party officials. But in 1939, Yezhov fell from Stalin’s favor after being usurped by one of his own deputies. He was denounced, secretly arrested, tried in a secret court, and executed.

Stalin’s censors then removed Yezhov from the photographic record, including cutting him from a photograph in which he smiled next to his former boss, Stalin, next to a waterway. The photo retouchers removed Yezhov from the photo and inserted new water to cover up the space where Yezhov would have been.

Stalin did the same with scores of party officials who had been photographed next to him at various events. Sometimes, official censors had to retouch photos over and over again as the list of political enemies grew longer. In one photograph, Stalin is shown with a group of three of his deputies. As each deputy fell out his favor, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained.

So when YouTube, Facebook, Google, activists try to suppress free speech and try and rewrite history by destroying records, removing statues, getting rid of art, etc. it is almost impossible for me to see beyond their appearance as little Stalins.