Last week, a controversy erupted over textbooks approved by Florida Governor Ron DeFascist’s Board of Education. These books emphasized how the skills learned by slaves enabled them to supposedly prosper later. In other words, according to these fascists, “slavery had benefits.”

When you take the time to study and examine with clear eyes what actually happened during the 250 years of North American slavery, the truly disgusting and distorting character of this falsehood stands out. People were violently ripped away from their homelands in Africa—from family and friends and communities. They were held in prisons and then loaded on slave ships in hell-like conditions where often one-third of the people died. Brought to American shores, they were forced to labor generation after generation to enrich the slave owners. They were beaten and whipped to increase production, they were raped, they were tortured and often murdered if they resisted or tried to escape, and they were forced to endure the horror of seeing their children sold away from them. ¹

These generations of enslaved human beings produced a large part of the initial stake—or what Marx called the “primitive accumulation”—of capitalism. This is the real history—and this is what DeFascist and the others in the fascist-run states like Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and so on are aiming to suppress.

And what was Auschwitz?  During World War 2, the Nazi regime in Germany shipped the Jews of Europe to death camps.  They ripped them from their homes, took their property, shot many of them on the spot, and put the rest in cattle cars where many died. Then they arrived at the camps. The most infamous of those camps was Auschwitz, where over 1 million Jews were killed in gas chambers in the space of a few short years.² When the Jews came into the camps, they were stripped naked and had a number tattooed on them. The tattooing was a “job” reserved for some of the prisoners. So, by the logic of Ron DeFascist, the “chance” to be a tattooist should be seen as an actual “benefit” of the concentration camps—instead of what it was, which was yet more horrific degradation.

The Nazi holocaust of the Jews in World War 2 was one of the towering crimes of imperialism—in this case, German imperialism. But as Bob Avakian recently pointed out, the Nazis themselves actually learned from slavery in the U.S. and then Jim Crow.  And what was done to Black people in this country, including in the years after slavery—continuing to today—is a crime of the same magnitude. De Santis’ attempts to erase historical memory of this must not be allowed.