Information about Whitewash (censorship)

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This article is for the meaning of censorship. For other uses, see Whitewash (disambiguation)

Whitewash is a form of censorship via omission in which errors or misdemeanors are deliberately concealed or downplayed. In politics, whitewash is sometimes used to describe a cover-up or a deliberate downplaying of a problem.

Etymology

Its first reference dates back to 1762 in a Boston Evening Post article. In 1800, the word was first used in a political context, when a Philadelphia Aurora editorial said that "if you do not whitewash President Adams speedily, the Democrats, like swarms of flies, will bespatter him all over, and make you both as speckled as a dirty wall, and as black as the devil."

Modern usage

Many dictatorships and authoritarian states, as well as democratic countries, have used the method of whitewash in order to glorify the results.

During the Soviet-era, Stalin adjusted photographs of himself with Lenin, in order to position himself closer as to give an impression of the close relationship between the two.

North Korean radio broadcasts claim to have an abundance in food supplies, yet the government receives food aid from foreign states.^[1]

Japan is accused of whitewashing its history of warfare and imperialism by omitting or minimizing subjects such as the Nanking Massacre in textbooks.^[2]

Fictional usage

Novels by George Orwell have dealt with the subject of whitewash as well. In Animal Farm, the pig Napoleon tries to whitewash history by deleting a few characters from the minds of the other animals. This was perceived as a direct reference to the USSR under Stalin.

Whitewash is also the name of a 2004 novel by Chuck Cosson, published under the pseudonym "Erik Blair", which is an altered spelling of Orwell's birth name. It involves a politically inconvenient truth: the President's running mate in a re-election campaign, a popular African-American TV talk show hostess, has kept secret her real identity (as a foreign national and former CIA asset). When this is discovered by the Attorney General, he must then wrestle with the tension between honesty and loyalty, while the campaign tries to whitewash over the importance of his investigation.

References

External links

• The Commissar Vanishes - site explaining the whitewashes by Stalin.