The Uses of History and the Anti-Trump Protests

22 01 2017

Yesterday, there were protests around the world against the new US President. (As a non-American, I’ve leave aside the issue of whether it is tactically wise to protest a president before he has implemented any policies, an issue that has been debated by Trump’s opponents). What’s interesting to me is the ways in which the past is being used to mobilize supporters and and create historical narratives that link Trump to both the opponents of votes for women and the anti-Semitic America First movement of the early 1940s. For instance, some of Trump’s enemies have been circulating a 1941 Dr Seuss cartoon about America First, while others have been dressing as 1910s suffragettes.  (Luckily Trump doesn’t own any racehorses).

xq-ekwtajqw-uwg_ivn04mcorznin7eefci8r4yhwre

 

women-protest


Actions

Information

One response

30 01 2017
The Use and Abuse of History: Why the 1940s Remain the Go-To Decade of Choice for Western Political Actors | The Past Speaks

[…] Churchill supported British membership in a United States of Europe was conveniently ignored). As I showed a few days ago, there were many historical references in the first wave of anti-Trump marches, which were led by […]

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s




%d bloggers like this: