That night at Mar-a-Lago, when Belgium invaded Germany

“When [Mark] Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.”¹

Donald Trump is weeks away from power and the alarm bells are sounding each day. It’s not only his disturbing list of cabinet picks but the repeated threats against Trump critics and opponents. Jack Smith, Liz Cheney and the January 6 committee, judges, pollsters, journalists, and broadcasters have all been threatened with abuse, investigations, and costly legal battles.

Yet more worryingly, there are some early capitulations to these threats or what Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, has termed “obeying in advance.” To take two of the most recent examples, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times suppressed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and has instructed editors to “take a break” from writing about Trump, while ABC News (owned by Disney) settled a clearly winnable defamation case brought by Trump. The settlement brought $15 million and a public apology that would likely have proved unwarranted.²

Yet it is a third example of “obeying in advance” that I find most disturbing, perhaps because it is a potent image, an orchestrated piece of political theatre, and an omen of enforced revisionist meanings and obedience to come. Mark Zuckerberg stands, hand on heart, for the national anthem during his visit to Mar-a-Lago. Does he know the recording is of a choir made up of Trump’s January 6 mob? We cannot say. But my strong sense is that in the highly-charged setting of Mar-a-Lago, under pressure to make corporate peace with the coming Trump regime, Zuckerberg would have stood obediently whether he knew the choir’s identity or not.

To be clear, my disturbance has little to do with the anthem itself. I have never been much of a flag-waver or singer of patriotic songs. And The Star-Spangled Banner, we know, has a controversial history and set of meanings that are complex and regularly contested.³ No, my disturbance has to do with the role played by such symbolic moments in the destabilization of historical representation, in this case the historical facts and meanings attributed to the events of January 6, 2021.

Historical representation is nearly always a perilous search for the truth of a past moment or set of events. As such, truth - right down to the basic facts uncovered and informing it - has always been contested by winners, losers, and historians themselves. All this is part of our changing relation to the past, our practice of the profession, and the workings of power. But it is precisely these factors that make our search for truth and the defense of truth especially urgent when democracy itself is under threat.

Readers will know that I have visited these questions before, and as ever, I turn to Hannah Arendt:

“During the 1920s, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”

Arendt recounts this story in her 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics” an examination of the relations between truth, lies, fact, opinion, and power, one that has gained new relevance in the era some now describe as ‘post-truth’. And although she does not contend that historians or archivists alone have the power to alter received truths about the past, she does imagine the possibility of such alteration occurring:

“It is true, considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters.”

Hannah Arendt, 1944

These days, we haven’t far to look. There are numerous examples of the strained relations between facts, fictions, and power. Historians, I contend, are relatively well-equipped for this, even as it worries us as much as anyone else. This is partly because we bear regular witness to the vagaries and unreliability of evidence; we have also documented and analyzed the capacity of historical actors to lie to themselves and others. We struggle with our own ‘truths’. Then, it is partly because knowledge of the past tends to make the present less shocking. But finally, it is because we cannot study history and remain unaware of the workings of power.

So, in truth, the precarity of truth has always been worrying. If Derrida’s theory of the archive privileged a psychoanalytical reading, it also attended to matters of political power by reminding us of the Greek origins of the term. As the residence of the archon (magistrate), the archeion was where all official documents were filed. In the beginning, therefore, the archive was located at the seat of the law, at the legal source and legitimation of power:

“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory.” (Derrida, Archive Fever)

Our mal d’archive, then, is not only a feverish search for origins, but it is implicated in the legitimation and maintenance, or contestation, of power. Only the most naïve of historians, even before the postmodern turn, would have staked her reputation on the absolute truth or finality of archives and the written histories derived from them. Indeed, Carolyn Steedman has rightly pointed out that historians – fully aware that the past is gone and the archive, however helpful, is always troubled - were far better prepared for deconstruction and postmodernism than we’re given credit for:

“So there is a double nothingness in the writing of history and in the analysis of it: it is about something that never did happen in the way it comes to be represented (the happening exists in the telling or the text)…We should be entirely unsurprised that deconstruction made no difference to this kind of writing. The search for the historians’ nostalgia for origins and original referents cannot be performed, because there is actually nothing there: she is not looking for anything but silence, the space shaped by what once was; and now is no more.”⁴

Yet we keep going. All of us. Each person seeks something of her history, her ancestral past, her place in time and space. And each historian seeks essentially the same thing together with the conscientious practices of her trade: research, findings, and analysis, as truthful a representation of the past as possible. We are all out there trying to forge something honest from little to (in Steedman’s account) nothing. Because the past is, by definition, past. Gone.

If we borrow from Hayden White, it is, therefore, the historian’s moral obligation to put away old notions that historians are only allowed to speak about the past - that our only domain is the past. To the contrary, in White’s vision, “the task of the historian was less to remind men of their obligation to the past than to force upon them an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future.” (Hayden White, (with reference to Hegel, Balzac, and Tocqueville in The Burden of History)

For White, history is above all, ‘human-made.’ It is how people (individually/privately and collectively/politically) choose, create, and relate to our past. It concerns the present, the questions we are asking about the world in which we find ourselves, and the world we hope to bring about in our lifetimes and beyond.

So, for all we know that truth is a troubled and vulnerable thing, we seek it and defend it. Arendt’s old First World War story is a stark reminder that historical memory will always be politically urgent and precarious. What we can say in one time/place, we cannot assume will remain ‘sayable’ in another. Perhaps few working historians saw this more clearly than Foucault who theorized the archive as a discursive practice, as the “law of what can be said” in a given time, place, context:

“[By archive] I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation… The archive is the law of what can be said.”⁵

Arendt’s essay on truth and politics can now be read as an anticipation of how these questions would be taken up by historians in the postmodern era. And they are good questions. But make no mistake, Arendt adhered to the critical importance of truth, to what she called the ‘fate’ of truth. And so should we.

And this, finally, is what makes the image of Zuckerberg’s compliance so disturbing. It is as though he cares no longer about the fate of truth. Belgium really did invade Germany.

1. See Lora Kelley, “Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago” in The Atlantic, December 16, 2024.

2. See Ja’han Jones, “After ABC settlement, emboldened Trump goes after Iowa pollster Ann Selzer” at MSNBC, December 17, 2024.

3. See, for example, Mark Clague, O Say Can You Hear: A Cultural Biography of the Star-spangled Banner, W.W.Norton: 1922.

4. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, Rutgers University Press: 2002.

5. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Knopf Doubleday: 1982 (first published, 1969).