When the USSR was still up and kicking, teachers were required to edit history books. They'd cut out or paste over pages, replacing them with content sent them by the Communist Party. Figures who had fallen out of favor with the party were airbrushed out of photos and any mention of them was pasted over with a new history -- as far as anyone was concerned, those people never existed. As a result, Soviet students grew up in a world without any real past or, at least, a past nearly as unknowable as the future. If Comrade X was a big figure in Soviet history one year, the next he might no longer exist.The reason for this was what the right would call "politically correctness" run amuck. The party's ideology dictated that the party was flawless. Removing people from history wasn't seen as an act of censorship, but as retroactively correcting mistakes. By revising history, the party believed they were able to control it. And the populace became used to ever-changing truths and, for the most part, accepted the party's shifting versions of reality.
This Soviet style airbrushing of history is happening now in the US. Specifically, Texas. And the first figure to fall out of favor with the party and be airbrushed out of history is one of the founding fathers. Liveblogging a Texas Board of Education meeting the Texas Freedom Network reported that Thomas Jefferson has become the Texas version of Leon Trotsky... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
