Upon his soldiers discovering the first Nazi concentration camps in western Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower personally toured the sites of the Final Solution. Writing in his memoirs after the war, Eisenhower said he “visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’” He would also ask members of the press and Congress to walk the grounds and see what he and his men had seen, so they could show it to the public “in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”
As many journalists and observers will write about, today marks four years since the assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election – or die trying. And while Eisenhower insisted the camps be documented so that nobody could deny their existence with any credibility, cynical doubt and propaganda are now the currency of the west.
With a few exceptions, Holocaust denial never flourished beyond the fringes of neo-Nazi dead-enders and Hitler worshippers selling pamphlets to each other. But January 6th denial and the rewriting of current events, has shown enormous staying power and mainstream appeal, to the point of being one of the biggest factor’s in Donald Trump’s improbably comeback. The thing that looked to have doomed his political career is now its engine.
The rewriting of history around January 6th has become an industry that denial of the camps could never have become. If you deny that millions of Jews and other “undesirables” were murdered by a methodical Nazi machine, you’re probably not going far in mainstream public life. But if you deny that January 6th was an organized attempt to violently seize total power and nullify an election, you’re probably going to be a superstar in the GOP. You might even get your own podcast.
The American press covered January 6th, its planning, its minute-by-minute execution, and its prolonged aftermath with as much vigor and enthusiasm as maybe any subject since 9/11. But for a certain segment of the population, all of it was a lie. To Trump, his inner circle of acolytes, and his vast (and growing) base, January 6th wasn’t an insurrection, it was a “day of love” meant to show support for the rightful winner of the election. The angry, violent, armed, unhinged mob that breached the Capitol was actually a “sightseeing tour.” The instigators of the insurrection weren’t a loose alliance of racists and anti-government extremists, but actually federal agents directing these peaceful tourists who were just there to express legitimate political differences and their sincere belief that the 2020 election was stolen.
On and on the false history goes, rewritten on the fly by cynical grifters and political hacks. The Capitol Police were the unhinged ones who viciously attacked the meek and humble Trump supporters, while the peaceful patriots caught up in the dragnet are hostages and political prisoners. Nobody was there to hurt anyone except the fed plants and undercover antifa soldiers who turned the day dark. There were no Republican criminals that day, the real criminals are the Soros-funded Trump-hating members of Congress investigating the “attack” to influence the 2024 election. Democrats in Congress weren’t under siege that day, they planned the attack or, at the very least, allowed it to happen. And Donald Trump never told anyone to do anything wrong, and did nothing wrong himself. He even told the “mob” to go home peacefully and that he loved them. Because it was a day of love.
Falsifying history gets easier as events recede and witnesses die off. But falsifying current events takes willpower, commitment, and a vast and relentless drive to tell yourself that the things you saw happen didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean you’re being lied to, like a conspiracy theory requires. It means you’re lying to yourself. Over and over and over. And if we know one thing about devotion to Donald Trump, it’s that self-delusion is a requirement.
Reeling from his loss and his party turning against him in the days after January 6th, Donald Trump decided that the only way to recover from the event was to created an alternative history of it and act as if it were the real one. At first, he was in exile, rambling to a seemingly shrinking audience that he’d won the election, that January 6th was a setup, and that the people who rioted and killed for him were heroes.
The falsified history was that not only did Trump do nothing wrong, but nobody did anything wrong except the Democrats and law enforcement. And he just kept at it, relentlessly, and with no oxygen given to any other narrative.
Of course, it worked. It started working on the same day as the attack, with hundreds of thousands of tweets immediately calling the riot fake, a false flag, and a fed hit job – all based on Trump’s own casting of blame elsewhere. In the months after the insurrection, when ardent Trump acolytes in Congress began shifting blame to mythical FBI plants and antifa infiltrators, it was in full swing.
The Republican history of January 6th, the one clung to by the party that will soon control every branch of the federal government, is that it was a peaceful protest ruined by federal jackboots and outside agitators. And it’s a protest that the American people, much more concerned about the price of eggs and the possibility of being raped by Haitian migrants, don’t care about anymore. Soon it will be swept out of the history books entirely, with Trump pardoning all the “hostages” and going after the investigators who tried to hold him to account
It never happened.
Except, of course, it did happen.
Relatively few people saw the immediate aftermath of the Nazi camps, and virtually none are still with us. Most of us only know of the Nazi horror through the footage taken in the aftermath, the testimony of those who survived, and the blubbering fake repentance of those who did the deeds. But millions of Americans were watching the news and seeing in real time how the American electoral system teetered on the edge.
We all saw it together. Our hearts raced and our jaws dropped and we all asked ourselves and each other “can this really be happening?” Because it was happening. We heard the screams of the Capitol Police officers being torn apart. We saw the blood on the floors and the shit on the office walls. We know it wasn’t a peaceful love fest, but a sacking that would make a Visigoth proud. We know what January 6th was – not a “day of love”, but an organized and well-planned attempt to prevent a presidential election loser from transferring power to a presidential election winner. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters knew what it was. Until they decided otherwise and began lying to themselves.
The more an event is documented, the more effort needs to be put into making us question our memories of the event. And that’s ultimately what J6 denial is about – not even so much rewriting history, but rewriting our memories. Trying to convince us that what we saw wasn’t what we saw, what we experienced wasn’t what we experienced, and our feelings – our horror – weren’t real.
Don’t let Trump and his acolytes rewrite your memories of that awful day. Take them with you, speak of them often, tell those too young or disengaged to have been watching what you saw. Don’t allow them to cynically deny what they did, and never question the depravity and deeply unpatriotic derangement of those who did it.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will pardon those responsible for January 6th. But no matter what their legal outcomes are, we can hold them to account with our memories and witnessing. We must all be the documentarians of the horror of January 6th, and we can never allow ourselves to be convinced that it was anything else than what we saw.
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Mike Rothschild 