Trump, such a busy boy. Working since January on his Orwellian erasure of women from the public record.
- NASA was ordered to remove mentions of “anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc)” from its website.
- The Pentagon has deleted online many mentions of female military members who made history.
- The Arlington Cemetery website has erased pages on female veterans.
Writer Anna Funder for Time Magazine asks, “why is it so important in our culture to disappear women from the story? Turns out, it’s how patriarchy creates itself. Erasing women makes men into the main characters in life and in history, and women into supporting cast, or caste. “
The White House January Executive Order reads in part:
“This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept. Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of consciencebyusing clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.
Per Time: This feels Orwellian, because it reminds us of Orwell’s novel 1984, in which Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to send unwanted truths down the “memory hole” to be obliterated. Winston lives in a surveillance tyranny which falsifies history, including by erasing the names of people who have been “vaporized , and were therefore considered never to have existed.”
Removing women from public recognition as astronauts, patriots, or anything else, is a step towards pretending their achievements never happened. Orwell put it best, in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” A MAGA-revised history would read that women have always been kept at home, it is their “natural” place to work unpaid—and at unrecorded cost to them—in the interests of men and families. And then, having erased women from the public sphere, MAGA men could to take the impunity of untrammelled power they feel in the private sphere and spread it everywhere, to move fast and take/break things. (Time)
It’s the memory that has you. No memory, no you…..