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Friday, 11 July 2025

The casual elimination or sanitization of history—whether personal, cultural, or structural—plays a foundational role in enabling and sustaining systems of oppression and eliminativist eugenics. It serves both as a precondition and as a tool for dehumanization and social erasure. Here's how this unfolds on several levels:

1. Erasure as Ontological Violence

The removal of history is not just an epistemic loss—it is an ontological act. To erase someone’s history (personal trauma, cultural lineage, structural memory) is to participate in their non-being. This aligns closely with eliminativist eugenics, where the aim is not just to remove the physically or mentally "unfit," but to render them as if they never were—or never truly belonged to the human community.

2. Historical Sanitization Enables Recurrence

When the "cons" are airbrushed from history in favour of "pros" or in favour of "neutrality"—atrocities, experiments, failures, resistance—power systems retain plausible deniability. Sanitized narratives allow oppressive ideologies to reinvent themselves as progress.

Nazi eugenics were built on earlier American eugenic programs; the U.S. history of forced sterilizations and racial pseudo-science was quietly suppressed rather than reckoned with.
Aktion T4, the Nazi program targeting the disabled and mentally ill, is rarely centered in Holocaust education, and yet it prefigured the broader death machinery.

The removal of this lineage allows present-day policies to quietly inherit eliminativist logic while posing as humane or efficient.

3. Personal Historical Erasure as Compliance Training

On the individual level, being encouraged—or coerced—to forget or reframe one's past (e.g., trauma, marginalization, resistance) is a way of disembedding people from their narrative agency. When people cannot claim or even remember their suffering, it becomes easier to assimilate them into systems that harm them.

In trauma therapy, there is a risk that healing becomes synonymous with forgetting or re-narrating suffering in a way that supports normative productivity.
In neoliberal mental health discourse, being “functional” is often preferred to being historically or politically conscious.

4. Airbrushing as Ethical Short-Circuit

When the moral complexity or horror of past events is removed, the ethical "thickness" of history collapses. Sanitized stories allow dominant groups to appear righteous while avoiding responsibility.

Reparations become unnecessary when past harms are reframed as isolated accidents or “products of their time.”
Resistance movements are domesticated and commodified when their revolutionary content is erased (e.g., MLK as peace-loving patriot, not systemic critic).

This makes it easier to eliminate or sideline those who continue to bring up the unresolved.

5. Techno-scientific Justification Without History

By ignoring the historical misuse of science, these programs avoid ethical drag—and repeat the logic of “curing” or removing what doesn’t fit.
Contemporary eliminativism often casually deletes the "low-performing"—not through malice, but through assumed irrelevance.

6. Airbrushing Produces the "Unstoried" Mass

Without historical roots, individuals become what Hannah Arendt called mass men—isolated, replaceable, depoliticized. This facilitates authoritarianism, because it removes the narratives through which people would otherwise resist.

Oppression needs forgetfulness: both the victims' and the perpetrators'. If people knew where they stood in historical trajectories of harm and resistance, they might act differently.

In Summary:

The casual elimination of history is not a passive forgetting, but an active strategy of control. It strips people and groups of context, dissolves responsibility, and paves the way for sanitized, technological, or "humane" forms of elimination. Whether in eugenics, mental heal, education, politics, poverty industries, or AI ethics, historical erasure is a precondition for violence without friction.