President Donald Trump’s administration is pushing a “deliberate destruction of education, science, and history,” wrote Adam Serwer in a scathing analysis for The Atlantic published on Tuesday — and it recalls the “Dark Ages” that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
“Every week brings fresh examples,” wrote Serwer. For instance, Trump “is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression.”
One of the most prominent of these attacks is on Harvard University, which the administration today announced will have all its remaining grants canceled, he said. That matter is currently the focus of legal action as Harvard fights back, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This purge is already snuffing out free thought across the country, wrote Serwer: “Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.”
The result of all this will be to “undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us,” he warned. “Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.”
And the harm done to America’s ability to conduct basic research to improve our lives and advance technology is hard for lay people to comprehend, he continued.
While private companies do a lot of innovation themselves, he continued, “the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble — for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot.” For instance, “commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines — the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless.” And even when private companies do their own research, it takes a back seat to profit — after all, “Exxon Mobil knew climate change was real decades ago, and nevertheless used its influence to raise doubt about findings it knew were accurate.”
As the Trump administration burns down America’s capabilities in the pursuit of destroying “forbidden ideas,” Serwer concluded, history could be on track for a grim repeat: it “will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.” 1.7K Comments / 1K
and it recalls the “Dark Ages” that followed the fall of the Roman Empire
This is unfair to the Romans. They struggled through multiple economic and migratory/military crises to keep their state alive and saved it from destruction several times before entropy finally took its course. Even after Rome “fell”, people maintained the appearance of continuity. What they did not do at any time is deliberately take a hammer to everything. Trump is much more like Pol Pot than Odoacer.
Holy shit you’re right. He is like Pol Pot.
Please keep in mind that America backed Pol Pot as the head of state through that 1975 to 1979 genocide and for over a decade after.
Yeah but they caused their economic collapse themselves. Their monetary policy was awful (spoiler : it’s the same americans currently have)
while it is important to stress how terrible trump is making these times, and how much a fascist he is, please know that the “dark ages” were not in fact “dark” at all. there was a whole swath of Asian, African, and Islamic technology, art, and culture that was blooming.
You know …as we enter into the “dark ages” I am fascinated by what the outcome is for the rest of the countries within the progression and advancement of technology. I am curious to see the infrastructure, education, AI, ecosystem, biology under the medical aspect. I am sure all of the countries would bypass us with years in advancement regarding society. Because America is now entering a 4th world country dragged back into 1800 century fighting its way to the light through the dark ages. We would be too poor to even steal or try to infiltrate, (example Gaza, Palestine, Afghanistan, and several countries) that we have literally destroyed and put them back into 3rd world impoverished countries. So I am very curious to see how other countries progress when we have destroyed ourselves from within, like a cancer eating parasites that this country is. Just look at China, look at Japan, Saudi Arabia, SK, Asian countries, Africa, and several countries that has just sped through years in advancements of infrastructure, technology, cars, roads, education, Medicare/healthcare and practically everything.
I am well aware that countries has it’s faults as well, every country does…but if we compare countries to US…I think the writing on the wall is there, we are headed for some real bad times, and I am not the least bit surprised. We are spiraling into a 4th world country that is so impoverished, destitute, and appalling. Remember those commercials that used to show up of African babies, “You can save this child by donating so so a month to feed and clothe.” That’s gonna be us very soon with other countries advertisement on their tv, showing us Americans starving to death on the dilapidated roads and buildings looking like we just got out of World War One. But hey….that’s just my theory and speculations…take it with a grain of salt. We truly never know what the future holds…but I mean…I don’t know…it looks like we are though.
They were dark for Europe though, that is undeniable.
not really - a whole ton of german, austrian, “barbarian” art and science was, in fact, explored and created.
it was a period of growth. growth hurts but it was still there.
Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 87, 183
[T]he post-Roman centuries saw a dramatic decline in economic sophistication and prosperity, with an impact on the whole of society, from agricultural production to high culture, and from peasants to kings. It is very likely that the population fell dramatically, and certain that the widespread diffusion of well-made goods ceased. Sophisticated cultural tools, like the use of writing, disappeared altogether in some regions, and became very restricted in all others.
…
It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries…[which] was no mere transformation, [but] a decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’.
…
[T]here is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and all decline [like this]. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times.
In other words, denying the Dark Ages is denying historical evidence, most of the times with a political or religious revisionist agenda behind.
again - considering other facets of humanity existing outside of rome and europe is important.
I’m talking about Europe though, again, re-read my comment.
Germany had tons of dark ages art and progress, no?
The only surprising thing is that the headline isn’t an actual Trump quote.
I thought the same thing initially, but then I considered how accurate the statement was.
Misleading titles all around and we wonder why media literacy is through the fucking ground.
Pretty sure reading that title and thinking it’s implying something that it doesn’t is the actual failure of media literacy.
What sort of world is this where the leader of a country can get up and more or less say “I’m going to ruin everything and send citizens to a foreign prison without trial” and they’re allowed to carry on
This one, quite literally. This is not new for humanity even in the slightest.
I wish soldiers fighting for our freedoms would take on a different connotation. I wish it meant something.
Spoilers: The soldiers were never “fighting for our freedoms”. They were fighting to pay off their personal debts and - particularly in the special forces - go on drug-fueled murder sprees in between binging and fucking prostitutes all over the world. If they served long enough without suffering a debilitating injury, they could make the jump to the private sector where the pay was way better and the jobs were much easier.
In the end, the US military is just a jobs training program for mercenary fuck bois. It is not some kind of Knights of the Round Table for liberal democracy.
So this “article” (that I couldn’t read on my own without downloading their app) is just explaining a better article from The Atlantic? Why even post this trash, why not post the actual article from The Atlantic?
And why are all the comments discussing this like it’s not trash with a bullshit, clickbait headline? Is Lemmy all bots now, too?
why not post the
actuallink to the archive.is unpaywalled version of the article from The Atlantic?Much better idea!
I totally agree. If anyone has a way of filtering this stuff out, please share.
It’s what fascism looks like. The arts and sciences are among the first things to go.
What happened to traitors back in the Dark Ages? Asking for 8 billion friends…
Can we Order 65 this traitor before he Order 66 us?
He just wants everyone to see the world the same way he does.
As a giant piggy bank?
He wants everyone as stupid as he is.
How much has this to do with Michelle and Barak Obama studying at Harvard? Why is no other university involved?
He seriously thinks US and the Roman empire are comparable?
Trump was needed. It is time USA influence to be reduced to acceptable level. Most likely USA will be devided to 2-3 parts and that is the best scanario for the world.
I wonder if Romans were as arrogant as Americans before their fall
The French aristocracy certainly were.
I think the guy you replied to is anti-american
They must have been. The problem is that after the fall of great empire, there is a “dark age” untill things settle down. The question is how long after the fall of USA world will be in “transition”.
I don’t think that will be the case. China has been filling the gaps pretty well in the absence of the US.
Instead of military imperialism, China’s just going to conquer the world with its wallet.
