The history we know today is not at all reliable in almost no point, subject or period, and far from becoming increasingly aware of this and try to be more precise in modern historiography, people, academics, and historians, today, share a history increasingly biased and ideologically modified to go according to their positions.
If you have read the story from different sources, you will notice that there is no real historical reality about how things happened, but on the contrary, there are all kinds of imprecise approaches based on the speculations of the authors, which are closely linked to their ideological positions.
George Orwell once said:
"During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn’t they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn’t happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners."
Source
And this is not something that happens a few times, it is something that happens every day and every year, Orwell also mentioned how Francoist Spain falsified many data of the Spanish Civil War, of which he, who fought in it , like many of his companions, they knew that they were false, but what would happen when they were dead? After none of those who lived at that time could tell Franco that his history was false, then it would become the only historical reality.
It does not matter if the regimes that rule over us are fascist, socialist, or "liberal democracies," history will not tell us something that harms those who currently rule over us, ever. Since the one that controls the present, controls the past, and the one that controls the past controls the future.
Something that has been used repeatedly as a way to change the past, questioning the sources, the data, the biases, or the validity of the historical record, is historical revisionism, however, most of the time it is used by the same governments or by people who just want to change past events that are not in accordance with their worldview and ideology.
In Latin America it is almost a tradition when it changes the ruler, to apply a severe historical revisionism in which it is established that everything has been done wrong during previous governments. In Europe and the United States we see how a massive historical revisionism is currently being applied that questions all the bases of Western civilization based on modern ideological biases. In countries like Russia or China, something similar happened to the arrival of the Socialists in power during the 20th century.
Currently, historical revisionism, more than a weapon to combat the doubtful or erroneous information of our past, has become the main driver of this, with the deliberate change of history for the favoring of political or academic objectives that are in total contradiction with our past.
The historical revisionisms carried out at present, sin of biases of all kinds, use recurring fallacies to approve historical facts, and completely distort the amphibologies until they give it a totally non-existent meaning, besides basing the study on tertiary and unreliable sources.
If we cannot base our knowledge of history on primary sources, since as we have already seen, history is written by the winners, based on their interests and objectives, and we cannot trust those who are supposed to fix historical biases through revisionism, because at the same time, these distort information due to their modern interests, we are in a limbo in which all the historical knowledge that we possess is doubtful in many different aspects.
By this stage of the game, I have personally decided to be quite pragmatic, and try to extract the information that seems useful from the history we know, applying it in daily life in order to reach conclusions and personal reflections. If you have read the book "The 48 laws of power" by Robert Greene, you know what I mean, although as a curious fact, I must mention that many of the stories that appear in this book are simply fallacious from beginning to end, but as nobody takes the time to check them one by one, these stories end up being as valid to reflect as the story we know, after all, not much difference.
History is more or less bunk.
Henry Ford
One could almost approach history as a contrarian. Whatever the textbooks say, the opposite is likely true. However, you then must also consider that there are always two (or more) sides to any story. So what is really the true story if each side is telling its version of the truth as best it can?
Personally, I find truth generally lies in between the two (or more) different narratives. This can be applied to virtually any narrative (i.e. politics, history, markets, gossip, etc.). All we can do is take in an appropriate amount of information from trusted sources, consult our intuition, and form our own opinion while keeping an open mind to a world that is dynamically changing. Great post my friend!
there is no ‚‚truth" in the way people love to talk about it.
take just single event, in one 5 storys building. if there was 10 people, thats 10 stories, 10 fragments, 10 limited views. and they do not complete eachother, they create more empty places.
now imagine some civil war. or world war.
some people spend years to connect only 2 dots, and often they fail.
mainstream history is just a tool to grow assumptions, accept generalizations, and breed prejudices to pass them to next generations.
Yes, this is why I never take reading history, at least from primary sources, very seriously. I think one gets more historical knowledge and ultimately important wisdom from reading philosophical literature, essays, stories, and general life experience than reading a book on say the "The Colonization of America". And even then you have to take the authors account with a grain of salt.
Exactly, the important thing is to be able to extract a good content from which to learn something, because the sense of learning history is not to have a couple of dates and names of characters or events, but to be able to learn from that to apply them in the present.
After all, you do nothing to read a book of "The colonization of America" and do nothing with that knowledge, it really would not be more than a story like those of the kindergarten.
The fact that history is written by winners is more evident than ever in the recent decades. I'll give an example from my region: although there were tons of extremely gruesome and mass war crimes on all sides in the Ex-Yugoslavia war, which is even confirmed by "neutral" sources such as UN, movies always and only portray Serbs as the bad guys.
Oh, no, no no no no, the UN is not at all a neutral source, at all. It also has its political agenda and as such, will only show the facts that seem right to fulfill it.
The fact is that in wars there are always two sides that proclaim themselves good, when one of them loses, there is no one to say that they are represented and, as such, the winners impose their "truth".
i agree, history as we know it, is almost worthless bunch of faerytales.
and not just some of it / all of it.
im working with few more colleagues on study about what happened in single day of february 1942. near my area. and its about many years of research, diggin through archives, interviewing witnesses who were still alive, and talking with relatives of those who died.
there was around 2.300 people massacred in their homes, 500 kids among them, one whole class is killed in school. and they re not killed with firearms.
so,after all that work and research, i wouldnt dare to say that i know what happened that day. i have more unanswered questions than answered ones.
and yet, i see people discussing or even writing essays about intentions, feelings and deep thoughts of 15 century leaders... about what were Soviets afraid of. What Romans expected...
Most relevant history we can get is personal experiences of old people, narrowed to individual perspective and blurred by time. Fragments. Cant find any better than that.
its always funny when i hear someone
want to see the whole picture/ by reading second opinion :DUnfortunately, yes, the best way we have to learn history is from those people who know that they will not lie to us to manipulate us, and that they were not manipulated either, because they lived it.
All the other history is just what is supposed to happen, it is likely that 90% of that information is incorrect, but it does not matter, that is what is supposed to happen and is what we know.