Reagan Warned about Airbrushing Our History Away
This Fourth of July we will celebrate our independence and freedoms. But are we now more politically correct than free?
Last week, Apple Computer removed several Civil War games that uses Confederate flag imagery from its app store. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Twitter that he wished to honor the Charleston shooting victims “by eradicating racism & removing the symbols & words that feed it.” Recall that Soviet leaders hoped they could drop executed party members down an Orwellian memory hole by airbrushing them out of photographs.
Apple relented a few days later and agreed to reinstate some games if they merely, for example, displayed little troops carrying the infamous Rebel banner. But the partial retreat came only after the Game Labs Team, which develops computer simulations, blasted Apple:
Spielberg’s Schindler’s List did not try to amend his movie to look more comfortable. The historical Gettysburg movie (1993) is still on iTunes. We believe that all historical art forms: books, movies, or games such as ours, help to learn and understand history, depicting events as they were. True stories are more important to us than money. . . . We can’t change history, but we can change the future.