The rise of the populist right – Part 2. Turn right on Revisionism Street

Ashraf Engineer

January 11, 2025

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to Episode 2 of this All Indians Matter special. I am Ashraf Engineer.

In Episode 1, we discussed how the rise of the populist right wing had much to do with issues of economy, identity and cultural differences. In the second episode, let’s look at how history has become a battleground and is being used by the right to polarise people.

But first, some perspective. While interconnected economies, and the free movement of capital and people, meant millions escaped poverty, there was also great resistance to globalisation. This was because rapid technological change made older skills redundant and manufacturing moved to regions that were more cost-effective. The result was unemployment and discontent in many parts of the West that did not adapt or raise their skill sets. Much has been said about the ‘rust belts’ of US and Europe, which turned to the political right and its mantra of production in their own countries. Bubbling alongside in this cauldron were resentments over culture, identity and immigration.

Many of those historically on top of the socioeconomic order now feel disempowered and are chafing at the bit. There is an overpowering desire to go back in time to when they were more powerful, more rich, more dominant over others and more in control. The right has tapped into this desire through grandstanding on cultural preservation and righting so-called historical wrongs. Often, this means rewriting history and demonising groups as those holding back a majority that has been too accommodating.

Weeks before losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump launched the 1776 Commission to promote so-called patriotic education, posing as the defender of “centuries of tradition”. He claimed that US Constitution was “the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilisation” and that this civilisational tradition was under assault by centrists and the left.

This didn’t lead to his win but it did help Republican victories in the mid-terms. Republicans then promised to rid schools of so-called divisive attempts to examine racial injustice and white supremacy. In other words, rewrite textbooks and in turn history.

Sure enough, now that Trump has won the 2024 election, he is harping again on reshaping education to weed out so-called unwanted lessons and thoughts.

This is being mirrored in India, where textbooks are being rewritten to leave out historic phases, such as Mughal rule, and critical democratic philosophy such as the Preamble to the Constitution. Attempts are being made to portray people like Vinayak Savarkar, who wrote several apologies to the British after he was jailed, as heroes.

History, then, is being weaponised with many populist right-wing parties and leaders painting themselves as defenders of a glorious past under attack from enemies within. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the hands of the right.

SIGNATURE TUNE

In 2014, Narendra Modi and the BJP first ascended to power. Before that, the US had denied him a visa because of his support for or inaction against Hindu extremist mobs massacring Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 when he was chief minister. He may paint himself as accommodating of all cultures now, but he has led the idea of India as a Hindu country – never mind its great diversity. He and his Bharatiya Janata Party push a narrative of Hindus being victims of Muslim conquerors through history to justify measures like the Citizenship Amendment Bill and National Registry of Citizens. Together, the laws conspire to strip Muslims of their citizenship.

Caste, meanwhile, is sought to be justified as a means of maintaining social order. Caste atrocities are sought to be papered over as exceptions rather than the rule they actually are.

Among their other pet projects is blaming Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and other past Congress prime ministers on all that ails India today – from the lack of jobs to Chinese aggression on our borders to the slowing economy and even our inability to get a respectable number of Olympic medals.

In the US, Republicans have been slamming critical race theory and passing state laws that restrict how teachers can discuss questions of historical interpretation, race and identity. In Texas, a law was proposed to suppress discussion of slavery in school history curricula with regards to the state’s battle for independence from Mexico.

Critical race theory is a set of ideas holding that racial bias is inherent in parts of western society, especially in its legal and social institutions, because they were primarily designed for and implemented by white people.

Whether it’s the US or India, discussing shameful historic acts is being projected as an imbalance, as lecturing by centrists and the left that damages national pride and confidence. It is a great stage to cultivate the politics of grievance.

In September 2021, Pope Francis wrote to Mexican bishops on the 200th anniversary of the country’s struggle for independence from Spain. He asked them to recognise the “painful errors” committed by the Catholic Church during the Spanish conquest. In Spain, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, then a rising political star from Madrid, reacted angrily, saying the Spanish conquistadors had brought only “civilisation and freedom” to Mexico. With this, she tapped into a resurgent nationalism. The Spanish government also rejected calls from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to apologise for atrocities committed by the conquistadors.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin shut down Memorial, a human rights group that had built a database of what life was like in the hellish gulag prisons of the Soviet Union. Again, an attempt to erase shameful history because it hurt national pride. A state prosecutor was brazen enough to ask why, “instead of taking pride for our country, victorious in [World War 2] and which liberated the whole world,” does Memorial “suggest that we repent for our… pitch-dark past?”

In Germany, the anti-immigrant, ultranationalist Alternative for Germany party made a mark due to the growing resentment over the leadership’s unwillingness to forget the Holocaust. In fact, in 2017, party co-founder Alexander Gauland said Germans should be proud of soldiers who fought in World War 2 and a party member termed Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame”.

In Poland, it is now a crime to link the country to Nazi atrocities committed on its soil.

In Hungary, long-ruling Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has revamped school curricula to promote pride and patriotism, editing out historical defeats and rehabilitating Nazi-era fascist collaborators.

In France, far-right politician Éric Zemmour rose on the wings of a narrative that cast native-born whites as endangered in their own nation. He is openly hostile to Islam and immigration, and believes deeply in historical revisionism. He has Algerian Jewish roots himself but is an apologist of the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. He also rejects the suggestion that France must atone for its colonial sins in countries like Algeria. He doesn’t think that racial inequities should be dealt with either.

Zemmour has gone so far as to accuse President Emmanuel Macron of “rewriting the history of France, always to its detriment”. This is in response to Macron starting a public conversation about France’s war against Algerian revolutionaries in the 1950s and 1960s. Macron even laid a wreath near the site of a massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961and has described parts of French colonialism as a “crime against humanity”. He also established a commission that acknowledged French atrocities.

But such has been the pressure from the far-right that Macron provoked a diplomatic incident with Algeria after suggesting that the country existed only thanks to French colonial rule. Later, he spoke of the suffering of the colonists who fled to France after Algerian independence. Today, many of their descendants vote for right-wing candidates.

At election time, Zemmour sought to don the mantle of Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. He even named his party Reconquête, or Reconquest, to conjure visions of a bloody and grand history, to remind people of French battles against the Moors and Spain’s victory over Iberian Muslim kingdoms, and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims that followed.

Such actions are common among right-wing nationalists. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has always embraced his nation’s Ottoman imperial past. Harking back to a fallen caliphate is a covert assault on the secularism that defined modern Turkey for decades.

In China, President Xi Jinping’s tough-guy rule is accompanied by great historical revisionism too. He has officially limited discussions of Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Instead, Xi stands for a muscular nationalism. So, officials target those engaging in acts of “historical nihilism” that are “distorting the history of the party”. Beijing has also deleted millions of social media posts that push this so-called nihilism. This is accompanied by suppression of political freedoms in Hong Kong and repression of ethnic minorities on China’s western border.

So, why does the past weigh so heavily on the present? After all, a globalising liberalism was supposed to have marched on, taking everybody along and spreading prosperity along the way. The reality turned out to be very different amid disastrous wars and financial meltdowns. Globalisation brought with it gaping inequities, emboldening autocracies that held back winds of change.

In western democracies, there was rising disenchantment and political fragmentation. The bland centrism lacked the energy of the snarling, loud right. Its fixation with the past offered a fantasy of the future, a world in which the country would be great again. For that, it would have to dip into its shining past, recreate it in the modern context. And, as I said earlier, there are enemies within that must be brought to heel.

This is a tricky time. Not only is the future at stake, but also the past. For in the correct and holistic reading of history lies an understanding of our present and the idea of where we want to go. Without that, we will always be susceptible to ideas like revisionism and the quest to recreate a glory that never was.

Thank you all for listening. Please visit allindiansmatter.in for more columns and audio podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at @AshrafEngineer and @AllIndiansCount. Search for the All Indians Matter page on Facebook. On Instagram, the handle is @AllIndiansMatter. Email me at editor@allindiansmatter.in. Catch you again soon.