The denial of history ...

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The 1st Amendment has costs. Whether it be letting neo Nazies march in Skokie, Ill or describing the ascent of Hitler in Germany, the inherent costs of allowing free speech can be summed up by the famous Salman Rushdie quote ... “Nobody has the right to not be offended." With this in mind, the censoring of data, such as Hitler's rise to power, is being increasingly controlled by algorithms and entities like Facebook and governments all over the world as speaking unpleasant truths is deemed no longer acceptable as seen by the US taking down confederate statures instead of posting on said statues why they were put up in the first place. To deny history evokes 1984 ... "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

100 years ago yesterday — on July 29, 1921 — Adolph Hitler was elected leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, later known as the Nazi Party. The combustible Army corporal succeeded the party’s original leader, Anton Drexler, whom Hitler originally been sent to spy on, but whose ideas he came to admire (he may even have shaved his mustache to emulate his predecessor). The 533-1 delegate vote set in motion a series of events that would dominate the next two and a half decades of world history.

 

This is fact and ...

Marotta’s accounts remind us that the past was once news, that stories we now remember as ossified, fixed narratives captured in black and white were once fresh, suspenseful events, that filled contemporaries with excitement, and uncertainty.

Whether it’s a snapshot of a socialist congress in Lille, France that at the time might have seemed the beginning of a global Western revolution, or a cartoon showing both sides of the prohibition debate that showed how extremes of opinion dominated discourse even back then, Marotta has a nice touch for putting readers in the mood of the era, while keeping our thoughts in the present. He is very much the opposite of a Nazi or a fascist, and posts about history in the hope that people will learn from it. “I have a step-grandmother who’s a Holocaust survivor,” he says. “That’s part of the reason I started the account.”

 After the war, disillusioned and bankrupt, the odd little Corporal worked as an intelligence agent for the government. While gathering information on the new German Workers’ Party, he grew fond of it and joined it. Today, he’s become its leader.
 

The denial of history ...

There is no politicking or advocacy observable here, not as standalone posts and still less in the context of hundreds of other entries about other scenes as disparate as Thomas Edison taking a nap under a tree, a woman on Tremont Street in Boston turning heads by wearing pants, or a Soviet ship shelled in the Russian Civil War.

Nonetheless, Instagram pulled Marotta’s post on Hitler’s election, saying it violated “community guidelines.” When he appealed the decision, the rejected him again, saying his content went against their guidelines on “violence or dangerous organizations”:

The denial of history indeed.