Witness history being made now because we know what oppressors will attempt later.
Most of us learned incorrect and incomplete history in our textbooks. The ones that are supposed to teach you intentionally. But what’s different now most people KNOW that we haven’t been taught the truth.
First oppressors will try to edit history.
They will embellish it with “workers” instead of enslaved people, with exchange of “gifts” instead of theft of land, with “deliverance” instead of erasure.
They will hide behind the idea of “diversity” and the melting pot, which in reality espouses assimilation as the goal. No, the Empire doesn’t want our differences and variation, it wants us to conform.
Then they will try to deny it.
There will be those who will say it never happened. They will say it never happened THAT way while banning and burning books.
Then they will outright lie about their role and change it. They will claim they were defending the people, that there was no genocide, that the enslaved were there voluntarily to learn, that the land was always theirs.
We will have those who deceitfully change their stance. Changing your mind because you learn is not the same as changing your story and lying about the past. They will get louder and say they always supported Palestine.
We know this because it has already happened. We know there are white people who, after the fact, switched their stories about marching in the civil rights movement.
And of course history will be erased, rewritten, and adopted in the voice of the oppressor. They will co-opt the messages and struggles of the oppressed by saying they were there during the marches, that they were always on the side of freedom, that they were fighting for peace and equality.
But we always recognize this co-optation because you cannot mimic liberation.
Edit, deny, lie, change their stories, and co-opt ours. This is the cycle.
But we can stop it. We each have our voices. We each have tools like social media, boycotts, protests, and organizing. We can each document, we can share, we can seek out news and truth ourselves. We can witness history ourselves. We are witnessing it happening now. We are in it. We are history. We are revolution.
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