Fascism on the Rise Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show · Burt Cohen

The Power of Photographs and the Truth That Threatens Dictators

·55 min

1. KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show centers this episode on the Trump team’s purge of Pentagon photographs and the truth that threatens dictators. 2. Host Bert Cohen interviews Arnold Skip Isaacs, a writer, educator, and former Baltimore Sun reporter whose Tom Dispatch article on the Pentagon photo purge anchors the discussion. 3. The episode asks what happens when a government treats education, history, and public images as enemies. 4. Skip Isaacs says the Pentagon said it was removing images inspired by diversity, equity, and inclusion, and he says thousands of photographs were taken offline. 5. Burt Cohen presses him on why the defense bureaucracy would target pictures of women, Black service members, and military history. 6. Skip answers that the removals appear designed to appeal to a base uncomfortable with people who are not straight, white, and male. 7. The conversation names the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie Robinson, and the Navajo Code Talkers as examples of photos that were removed. 8. Skip says some of the images later went back up after an uproar. 9. The Enola Gay example becomes the clearest illustration of the purge’s logic. 10. Skip explains that an AI search for banned words found “gay” in Enola Gay and pulled down bomber photos. 11. He compares the Pentagon deletions to Chinese publications after Mao Zedong’s death. 12. In that account, Jiang Qing and other members of the Gang of Four were blurred out of photos and their names were blanked in captions. 13. Skip also recalls a 1990 exhibit in Vladivostok about Stalin’s terror and Soviet deportations to camps in the far north. 14. He describes a separate Lenin exhibit where Stalin was absent from photos, and a teacher told him she had never seen a picture of Trotsky. 15. Cohen and Isaacs connect those erased images to the current use of AI, Photoshop, and web filtering as tools for altering the record. 16. Skip says the larger aim is not just to edit pictures but to control what Americans can learn in schools and universities. 17. The tone stays conversational and political, with Cohen’s questions pushing Isaacs to connect history, military imagery, and censorship. 18. The format is a long, back-and-forth interview with examples, comparisons, and repeated emphasis on institutional safeguards. 19. Listeners interested in authoritarianism, censorship, and U.S. history will find a direct, specific argument here. 20. Listeners wanting a light, entertainment-first conversation will probably skip it.

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