On The Deployment of Facts
Monica Black, writing for The Sewanee Review:
But the reality is that sometimes what matters—and what really moves the wheels of history, as Mussolini might have put it—is what you can make out of the facts. Sometimes myths are much more compelling than humble, modest truths. In that sense, it did not matter much whether the Reichstag fire was set by a young communist who opposed the Nazis, or if that’s merely what they said happened. What mattered was the chain of events that flowed from the fire, and what the Nazis made of those events. What mattered was how the facts were interpreted and put to work.
By the way, just yesterday, one of our illustrious Tennessee state senators, Frank Niceley—who in 2013 addressed the Southern National Congress, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says is an offshoot of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South—posted this question to Twitter: “isn’t it a #Fact that #COVID-19 originated in #China?”
Dr. Black is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Tennessee, and she also happened to be my thesis advisor. Additionally, I had the pleasure of taking her course “Medicine in The Third Reich”, during which I was consistently delighted by her thought provoking lectures which always provided a historical lens useful to interpret the present, and were somehow always intriguingly relevant to current events while following an established syllabus.
Her remarks here are also very thought provoking, and we would do well to heed the warning: in times of uncertainty and crisis, we need to be questioning the “facts”, but we also need to be paying attention to how certain facts may be deployed to bolster agendas.
Sure, the coronavirus started in China. That is a fact. But does this fact help us slow its spread, stabilize the economy, or help the sick recover? No. Is it consistent with Donald Trump’s (and his pals’) nationalistic tendency to deflect blame for the United States’s shortcomings by painting them as foreign threats? Certainly. If you’d like an example, look no farther than the wall Trump promised (and failed) to build as a silver bullet measure to solve our broken immigration system and bring back “stolen” jobs.