Maga and Israeli rhetoric thrive on distorting the past with selective tradition and nostalgia, whether it is the myth of a “Great America”, that never existed for many, or the claim to land by Israel, without acknowledging the historical complexity of the colonial history in Palestine. (File image)
Why are so many people in 2025 still vulnerable to the simplistic, misleading propaganda from Make America Great Again (Maga) in the US to the Israeli state’s narratives? This vulnerability stems from a reliance on distorted forms of social memory and uncritical consumption of podcasts, TikTok clips and opinion pieces, rather than sustained engagement with historical inquiry and primary sources.
Propaganda succeeds because people rely on nostalgia, tradition and uncritical memory instead of what British historian and professor emeritus of history at Roehampton University John Tosh calls “historical awareness” and source criticism. These are the tools historians use to resist the distortion of the past. The past has become easily bent to serve and fuel nationalist political ideas globally.
Maga and Israeli rhetoric thrive on distorting the past with selective tradition and nostalgia, whether it is the myth of a “Great America”, that never existed for many, or the claim to land by Israel, without acknowledging the historical complexity of the colonial history in Palestine, and the process that has sought to remove Palestinians from their land and history, distorting the narrative of their resistance.
How does the world ignore seeds that the British planted, promising Arabs independence, on the one hand, and a Jewish homeland to balance their imperial ambitions in the Middle East, on the other?
The propaganda that has come out of America and Israel has been used to justify crimes against humanity in the US and Palestine, and unlike professional historians, most people rely on unexamined social memory, podcasts and viral clips that present simplified “truths” without context.
This propaganda succeeds because it feeds on the weaknesses of memory, tradition and uncritical media consumption, while history, as a discipline, offers the very tools needed to resist it. History as a university subject is often dismissed as not useful. I have even been asked, “Why history, of all subjects?” As if history is valueless. What people fail to realise is that, without history, we would not have the background of our religions, institutions and established practices; our traditions and behaviours, and the social norms that shape our communities.
History has long been called the “queen” or “mother” of social sciences, for good reason. It is the foundation upon which courses in the humanities and social sciences rest. Without history, we would struggle to make sense of subjects like philosophy, psychology, sociology, theology, economics, art and so on. History allows us to look at continuity and change in our societies and this is done by uncovering evidence, interrogating sources and using it to explain why the world is the way it is today.
How historians approach the past is what sets them apart from other readers or researchers. Tosh introduces us to what he calls “historical awareness” and contrasts it with social/collective memory. History as a discipline is not the same as memory, memory can be collective, emotional and often selective. Communities hold onto memory because it feeds their sense of identity and belonging but memory is not always perfect and it can come with some biases. It can be romanticised, exaggerated and even erased.
This distinction is important for understanding why people have become so easily susceptible to propaganda, even academics. Movements like Maga and the Israeli state’s narrative of national legitimacy thrive on social memory rather than historical awareness..Maga appeals to an imagined memory of America in a time before women’s liberation and the civil rights movement “ruined” it. We have heard this echoed by men like Charlie Kirk, who said, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,”calling it a “colossal error”. How can demanding the integration of public facilities, fair hiring practices, fighting to stop the bombing of black homes and churches by the Ku Klux Klan be a colossal error?
Similarly, Jewish memory can lean only on Jewish suffering, particularly the Holocaust, while downplaying and erasing the historical context of Palestinian displacement and occupation. The roots of Israel’s propaganda can be traced back to Britain’s colonial double-dealing during World War I.
At the same time that Britain promised the Arabs independence if they supported the war against the Ottomans, it also issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, pledging to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This was not a neutral statement: Britain was handing over the rights of an Arab-majority land to a small Jewish minority, without consulting the indigenous population. That contradiction planted the seeds of the present conflict.
Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire in the 1900s — Muslims, Christians and Jews had been living alongside each other. When the Ottoman empire collapsed, Palestine was subjected to British rule and it was under this rule that Britain announced its support of the Jewish state in the Balfour Declaration.
The declaration gave national rights to the Jews who were a minority and denied rights to the majority, who were the Palestinian people. Britain played a significant and crucial role in supporting Zionist immigration and land acquisition in Palestine. When the Palestinians revolted in 1936 to claim the independence they had been promised, the British Empire responded with brutal force, sending over 100 000 troops to crush the uprising and killing, wounding, imprisoning and deporting Palestinians.
In 1947, the UN partition plan, orchestrated by the US and Soviet Union, handed over the majority of the land in Palestine to the Jewish minority. When Israel declared independence in 1948, the Zionists expelled over 750 000 Palestinians in an event known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”. Palestinian villages were demolished, their homes seized and they were never permitted to return. Today, Israeli narratives often obscure this colonial history, portraying their actions as self-defence, while the true origins of the conflict lie in the dispossession and intentional erasure of Palestinian nationhood. It is with British, French and American arms that Israel fought its past and present wars with Palestinians and solidified its colonial rule in Palestine.
Historians approach the past differently from the general public and propagandists. They seek to liberate the past from modern-day biases and they respect its autonomy. Historians aim to understand each age on its own terms rather than through the lens of today’s fears and desires. For example, Maga rhetoric uses political desires, fears and anxieties, and projects backwards, portraying the mid-20th century as a “golden age” before the civil rights movements and feminism “ruined” America. Israel projects and justifies occupation using a biblical past. This creates an illusion of eternal rights for them, justifying genocide.
In South Africa, there have been white communities who have similarly used nostalgia to idealise apartheid as a time of order and prosperity, erasing the violence, corruption, forced removals, executions that upheld the system. This selective memory paints a picture of a “better time”, mirroring Maga propaganda in its manipulation of the past.
These examples show how the three core principles of social memory — nostalgia, tradition and progress — are often misused to re-write history.
Tradition is often invented or manipulated to legitimise power and identity. Maga glorifies myths of the Founding Fathers pioneering liberty, while Israel appeals to constructed biblical traditions, claiming ancestral rights to Palestinian land. Nostalgia creates a dreamlike vision of the past, when “things were better”, feeding Maga slogans about pre-civil rights America and Israeli rhetoric about the “return” to historical or divine lands.
Progress, the mirror image, justifies present-day violence or coercion as necessary for modernisation or security, presenting occupation or repression as inevitable or beneficial. John Tosh notes that these elements prioritise belief over inquiry, making them tools of social memory, rather than historical awareness.
Responsible historians are always challenging these historical distortions. We do not accept events and statements at face value. We critically interrogate sources, looking at who created them, when, where were they made and for what audience. We examine the reasons behind the creation of a source and what might be missing, a process known as source criticism. This method enables historians to identify biases, omissions and forgeries in historical documents.
Historians assess the authenticity and trustworthiness of sources, often engaging directly with original documents and archival materials. They scrutinise documents for their origin, consistency and internal coherence, employing tools such as palaeography, philology and scientific techniques, when necessary.
Archives safeguard these sources, allowing historians to examine the evidence firsthand and trace its creation, storage and use. Even sources that are biased or flawed hold value, as they provide insight into the beliefs, assumptions and social contexts of their creators.
By carefully examining original records within their archival context, historians reconstruct a more nuanced and accurate picture of the past. We emphasise “context” because context allows us to tell the whole story. Events such as wars and revolutions do not occur in a vacuum, they are shaped by political, economic, cultural and other factors.
Understanding the context is crucial to grasping why something occurred, rather than just knowing what took place. Without context, people can be misled into overlooking injustices and failing to address existing issues. Context is like the backdrop of a painting, allowing one to see the complete picture and accurately comprehend the narrative. In its absence, history can become misleading, distorted or entirely misunderstood.
Most of what people accept as “truth” today comes from influencers, podcasts and social media, where hosts present opinions as facts, cherry-pick anecdotes and completely ignore evidence by specialists. This is dangerous as it mobilises millions to narratives that are misleading and distorted.
History is not just abstract ideas, it is built on real evidence that historians have a responsibility to handle carefully. Conflicts around the world are sustained and exacerbated by the incorrect interpretation of historical events.
Historian Patrick Wolfe said “settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies”. This should be our starting point when talking about apartheid South Africa and apartheid Palestine, rather than prioritising settlers’ claims to land and power. The conversation should begin at the systematic dispossession, erasure and control of the indigenous populations.
We know memory can be faulty. We cannot mistake memory, nostalgia, tradition or how we feel for truth — propaganda is not historical facts. Trained historians are our best defence against the lies of nationalism and the growing far right agenda. History is one of the most necessary disciplines in our society and how it is taught matters. We need mass education in historical thinking so that our communities are able to detect and resist propaganda when it shows up in their homes. History is not just an academic pursuit, it can be used as a tool for resistance and to guide us in building a fair and just society.
Ncebakazi Makwetu is a lecturer in the Department of Liberation Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities, at the University of Fort Hare.