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Whitewashing is the act of minimizing orcovering up vices, crimes or scandals, or of exonerating the guilty by means of a perfunctory investigation or biased presentation of data with the intention to improve someone's reputation.[1]
Whitewash is a white paint or coating of chalkedlime that can be used to quickly give a uniform clean appearance to a wide variety of surfaces, such as the interior of a barn.[2] The first known use of the term is from 1591 in England, referring literally to the process of coloring a surface.[1][3]
In 1800, in the United States, the word was used in a political context, when a PhiladelphiaAurora editorial said that "if you do not whitewashPresident Adams speedily, theDemocrats, like swarms of flies, will bespatter him all over, and make you both as speckled as a dirty wall, and as black as thedevil."[4]
In the 20th century, manydictatorships,authoritarian andtotalitarian states used whitewashing in order to glorify the results of war. For instance, during theWarsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia following thePrague Spring of 1968, the Press Group of Soviet Journalists released a collection of "facts, documents, press reports and eye-witness accounts."[5] Western journalists promptly nicknamed it "The White Book", both for its white cover and its attempts to whitewash the invasion by creating the impression that theWarsaw Pact countries had the right and duty to invade.[citation needed]
In the study ofreputation systems by means ofalgorithmic game theory, whitewashing refers to the abandonment of a tarnished identity and creation of a blank one,[6]: 682 which is more widely known ininternet slang assockpuppeting.
According to the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk director for theInternational Federation for Human Rights, Ilya Nuzov, Russia is trying to whitewash the country's repressive Stalinist past.[7] On August 30, 2021,Russian Foreign MinisterSergey Lavrov said that the "attacks" on the Soviet dictatorJoseph Stalin are part of attacks on Russia's past and the results ofWorld War II.[8][9] Russian politician and former deputy of theState DumaAlexei Melnikov [ru;arz] said that Lavrov "made an attempt to whitewash Stalin, which clearly, during the period of repressive measures carried out by the authorities, showed the kinship of the authorities with theCommunist Party of the Russian Federation– the same Stalin admirers." Russian literary critic and culturologistNikolai Podosokorsky [ru;hy] noted that "the whitewashing of domesticghouls only indicates that the current rulers feel a spiritual kinship with them."[10]
Media related toWhitewashing (censorship) at Wikimedia Commons
