by Debby Pattiz

The upcoming Supreme Court challenges to Florida and Texas laws regulating online speech moderation by social media platforms have me thinking back to the first time I considered the role of government in influencing concepts I’d previously considered absolutes: fact, history, truth.

It was a snowy day in February 1988. I was twenty years old and abroad for a strange semester behind the Berlin Wall. On a field trip with the future history teachers of East Germany, I found myself marching into a tranquil forest. Silhouettes of slender beech trees punctuated patches of sunshine and shadow. Then it hit me. The trail didn’t lead through “a” beech forest; it led through THE beech forest. This was Buchenwald (literally, “beech forest”).

Inside the concentration camp memorial, an exhibit about the murder of German communists at the hands of the Nazis caught my eye; that was new to my twenty-year-old self. It made sense . . . but why had I never learned about Nazi persecution of communists? How could “history” here diverge from what I’d been taught back home?

Pondering that question, I began searching, for the word “Jude” (Jew). It might’ve been there, but I didn’t find it. Though established as a concentration camp for political prisoners, tens of thousands of Jews were also murdered at Buchenwald. In Nazi Germany’s socialist successor state, communists were memorialized; Jews were erased. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“Buchenwald revealed the extent to which thought and history can be controlled. The exhibit portrayed the struggle and suffering of communists during Nazism, and celebrated the glorious Red Army’s singlehanded ‘liberation of the German folk from Fascism.’ The word ‘Allies’ appeared as an afterthought, and ‘Jude’ was absent.”

Confronting this twist on truth taught me how omission of inconvenient facts, undesirable interpretations, or a comprehensive context when reporting news—and history—is a tactic at the heart of effective disinformation and propaganda campaigns anywhere: What role SHOULD government play in determining fact, writing history, telling the truth?