Continue To Rewrite History - Happened Or Not?

Discussion in 'Historiography' started by leunga, Mar 21, 2005.

  1. leunga

    leunga Member

    I am thinking that if our history is subject to rewrite to reflect the untruth, will our discussion here be totally meaningless. Insteresting topics and could be sensitive!
     
  2. morse1001

    morse1001 Very Senior Member

    Given that we gain access to more and more information concerning past events every day then we are always rewriting history. Where it gets difficult is where the rewriting is done not from a purely factual viewpoint but from a political one.
     
  3. leunga

    leunga Member

    Constant rewriting of history due to growing understanding on the factual context is correct. But, political bias is unavoidable for every new interpretation? We knew that shameful act did happen in reality. Perhaps, study of history is truly a complex and evolving subject, and most importantly, its content changes with political atmosphere. Still I am uncomfortable with our history and perhaps this is why we are so attracted by it.
     
  4. morse1001

    morse1001 Very Senior Member

    Originally posted by leunga@Mar 22 2005, 12:33 AM
    Constant rewriting of history due to growing understanding on the factual context is correct. But, political bias is unavoidable for every new interpretation? We knew that shameful act did happen in reality. Perhaps, study of history is truly a complex and evolving subject, and most importantly, its content changes with political atmosphere. Still I am uncomfortable with our history and perhaps this is why we are so attracted by it.
    [post=32405]Quoted post[/post]

    I agree that that history is evolving every day and it does help shape our future.

    However, I disagree that it changes with the political atmosphere. places like this forum serve the purpose of keeping a channel of study open which detached from the offical or political view.

    I should point out that many people have their own agenda when they come on here but to a certain extent that improves the content of the postings and debate.

    What I meant was, to give examples, the kind of reworking that was done in the Soviet union and even by Churchill inthe last days of the war.

    I suspect that most people who study history want to know the answer to question - why?
     
  5. Devil

    Devil Junior Member

    I think that the history writers are the winners.Like in the war the history was writen by the Allies.Maybe the history woud be different if the Axis woud have won.I dont want to say that they are liers, the soldiers woudnt lie but who nows the same for the man that lead the armies on both sides.Excuse me if I hurt someone with this post
     
  6. morse1001

    morse1001 Very Senior Member

    Originally posted by Devil@Mar 22 2005, 06:45 AM
    I think that the history writers are the winners.Like in the war the history was writen by the Allies.Maybe the history woud be different if the Axis woud have won.I dont want to say that they are liers, the soldiers woudnt lie but who nows the same for the man that lead the armies on both sides.Excuse me if I hurt someone with this post
    [post=32413]Quoted post[/post]

    its true that in writing thier history of various wars that the brass hats have tried to justify their actions rather than give a factual account.
     
  7. smc66

    smc66 Member

    If you read Keith Jenkins' Rewriting History (I think that is the title) he says much the same thing. Your writing is influenced by your surroundings or the era you live in. If people are saying certain things then subconsciously you pick them up and include it. What you cannot do when writing history is to create the past, it is impossible. As an historian you are constantly reinterpreting what has happened in order to reach a particular conclusion about an event or series of events.

    The biggest change in the study of WW2 was the fall of Communism and the gradual opening up of the old Eastern Bloc archives to outsiders and not just those who toed the party line. Consequently, whereas in the past Western historians have had to use old German sources for events on the Eastern Front, since 1991 the various Russian archives have no become available subsequently giving a much better view of both sides action.

    Language is also another indicator of the time and place a piece has been written. The phrase 'Ethnic Cleansing' was coined during the Wars that followed the break up of Tito's Yugoslavia, yet I am now reading books on WW2 which describes the actions of both German and Soviet governments as ethnic cleansing. Those reading these books many years down the line will perhaps think the phrase has been around for much longer than it has.

    History is always moving and always being rewritten, things are always being discovered and reinterpreted and that is always as a consequence of the present we live in.
     
  8. Kiwiwriter

    Kiwiwriter Very Senior Member

    I think George Orwell said it best, when he wrote in ‘1984,’ “Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.”

    History is rewritten regularly, often to suit present conditions. The Soviet historians put Josef Stalin in a figurative elevator in his lifetime and after. During his life and immediately after his death, Stalin was described as almost a sainted and saintly figure. Nikita Khrushchev slapped the more appropriate devil’s horns on Uncle Joe in his “secret speech” of 1956. After that, Stalin vanished from public awareness, much like the people he purged off.

    In dictatorships, as a general rule, history is rewritten to glorify the glorious leader. Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam, Dr. Field Marshal President-for-Life Al-Hajj Idi Amin Dada, King of Scotland, Holder of the British Victoria Cross, Appointed by God Almighty to be Your Savior, were all deified by their public relations team and population…or else.

    In democracies, history is rewritten often to suit political agendas. The extreme example of this is Holocaust Denial, which would be ludicrous if it wasn’t overladen with vicious anti-Semitism and flagrant Hitler-worship.

    A more common example comes when book writers, seeking to grind their personal penknives, manipulate history to advance their personal cause, viewpoint, or theory. A good example: the wave of books about the mess in the Middle East.

    Another common example comes when the former bigshot pens his or her memoirs, which is usually an attempt to justify his or her decisions. “The current mess isn’t my fault, it’s because you didn’t listen to me.” Generals are among the worst at this type of writing – American Civil War generals seem to have been more violent and aggressive in their postwar written attacks on their colleagues than on their wartime attacks on enemy troops. They blamed their buddies for all their failures.

    This trend went on into World War II. Field Marshal Montgomery insulted everyone in sight in his memoirs, being forced to put an apology to Field Marshal Auchinleck in the front of his book. General of the Army Omar N. Bradley returned the insults and added Patton to his targets. Lord Tedder beat up on Monty. Ike was careful not to blame anybody, as he was running for office. Truman, who held office and fired MacArthur, trashed him again in his memoirs. MacArthur returned fire.

    The German generals topped them all. They all blamed their defeat on Hitler, insisted that if Der Fuehrer had only listened to them that Germany had won the war, and that the Reich was not fighting to invade its neighbors and kill every Jew it could find, but to save Europe from the Bolshevik horde. And none of them had anything to do with the concentration camps, and all were connected, no matter how tenuously, to the July 20, 1944 bomb plot.

    But I think the worst rewriting of history takes place in the most mundane setting of all: the American high school history textbook. Dragged to class by generations of bored and sullen teenagers, whose main interests in life are sports, music, being seen as “cool” and finding out what’s under that hot babe’s dress, school textbooks are the means by which American school boards try to impose understanding of both history and citizenship on their targets…I mean students.

    Unfortunately, as I’ve written earlier, history textbooks don’t do the job. Written by committees, designed to be inclusive and non-controversial at the same time, they wind up being insufferably dull and utterly uninformative. They often get their facts completely wrong, and in some cases, leave out important topics. Reading most history textbooks, you’d never learn that Helen Keller was a Communist (she was nearly deported) or that Woodrow Wilson was a racist (he loved “Birth of a Nation”). They brush aside hard questions about US-led coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, by simply saying, “Communist-inspired chaos was about to break out,” and present every American president and leader, regardless of his achievements, as a great hero.

    Ironically, after spouting these cliches and patronizing the reader, history textbooks then require their students to answer open-ended questions (in 25 words or less) that graduate students usually have trouble tackling in their Master’s Theses. The idea is to “create topics for discussion.” Someone should have told the textbook writers that among the guiding rules of the American classroom are “No talking, eyes on your paper.”

    The worst thing about school history textbooks, however, is that they make history dull. They present history as a series of inevitabilities in which the good guys (our government) always triumphs, no matter what. Progress is good. Progress is inevitable. When there’s an election, it was “time for a change.” When something goes wrong, what matters is that the government learned from it.

    From this teaching of history, students learn that they, as citizens and Americans, play no role in their own nation’s destiny. Their choices and views are irrelevant. The government knows best. The good guys always win. The whole thing is inevitable. The average American’s job is to shut the heck up, salute the flag, do what he’s told, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and pay tribute to the “Great and Powerful Oz.”

    (Today’s reference, of course, to the “Wizard of Oz,” which was originally written as a political allegory, not a fantasy about going home. Another fact that is obscured by history textbooks)

    With that as the message taught by textbooks and equally bored history teachers, kids soon learn the biggest history lesson of all: it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t matter, and once you’ve passed the final, you can forget all about it.

    Which is a wrong answer.
     
  9. morse1001

    morse1001 Very Senior Member

    Field Marshal Montgomery insulted everyone in sight in his memoirs, being forced to put an apology to Field Marshal Auchinleck in the front of his book

    Alexander was forced to do the same after he tried to claim the credit that was due to Monty.

    At school we were not taught about the williamine wars of 1690s and the troubles in Northern ireland as they were classed as being too controversial. this led to ignorance which fuelled the situation!
     
  10. angie999

    angie999 Very Senior Member

    Of course out understanding of events changes over time as new information emerges and in Britain one of the key examples of this has been the release of documents under the 30 year rule. Another key example from WWII was the emergence of the Bletchley Park material into the public domain.

    Some works of history are clearly highly opinionated and politically biased fro the start and I think Churchill's work is increasingly seen as in this category. When you consider his background it would be a bit much to expect any different.

    Then you get dominant schools of thought. I used to do a lot of study of the period of the French Revolution of the 1790s, where the dominant school of thought was definitely tilted towards a classical Marxist approach and followed very much the leading academics at the Sorbonne, such as Lefebvre and Soboul. In the post war period this has been challenged by a "revisionist" school, more based out in the Anglo-Saxon world.

    I think this is why we all have an obligation to study critically, read a variety of sources when we can and make up our own minds. Even different sources from the same author can be revealing and I see that in his book about the last days of the war in Europe, Armageddon, Max Hastings has retreated somewhat from his position of 20 years ago on the relative quality of the German army.

    In theory, history had just one set of facts, although as we have no hope of ever getting hold of the full set this is a bit of a metaphysical concept. But even if we could, we could never get it down to one set of interpretations.

    It is up to all of us to think.
     
  11. Kiwiwriter

    Kiwiwriter Very Senior Member

    Originally posted by angie999@Mar 22 2005, 12:52 PM
    Of course out understanding of events changes over time as new information emerges and in Britain one of the key examples of this has been the release of documents under the 30 year rule. Another key example from WWII was the emergence of the Bletchley Park material into the public domain.

    Some works of history are clearly highly opinionated and politically biased fro the start and I think Churchill's work is increasingly seen as in this category. When you consider his background it would be a bit much to expect any different.

    Then you get dominant schools of thought. I used to do a lot of study of the period of the French Revolution of the 1790s, where the dominant school of thought was definitely tilted towards a classical Marxist approach and followed very much the leading academics at the Sorbonne, such as Lefebvre and Soboul. In the post war period this has been challenged by a "revisionist" school, more based out in the Anglo-Saxon world.

    I think this is why we all have an obligation to study critically, read a variety of sources when we can and make up our own minds. Even different sources from the same author can be revealing and I see that in his book about the last days of the war in Europe, Armageddon, Max Hastings has retreated somewhat from his position of 20 years ago on the relative quality of the German army.

    In theory, history had just one set of facts, although as we have no hope of ever getting hold of the full set this is a bit of a metaphysical concept. But even if we could, we could never get it down to one set of interpretations.

    It is up to all of us to think.
    [post=32456]Quoted post[/post]
    Yes, people often expect writers of 1500 to have the sensibilities of 2005, which is often a bit much. But I'm glad to see that Max Hastings is less worshipful of the Wehrmacht in World War II. Stephen Ambrose made the point that for all of their alleged skill and expertise in Normandy, they still lost their battles, and not entirely because of Hitler or ULTRA or Allied air and logistics supremacy -- the Americans and British ultimately forced the Germans to fight the battle the Americans and British wanted to fight -- which by definition meant the overwhelming application of power at the point of pressure.
     
  12. morse1001

    morse1001 Very Senior Member

    since 1991 the various Russian archives have no become available subsequently giving a much better view of both sides action.


    Boris yeltsin donated 104 telegrams relating to the outbreakof the korean war and their release changed the writing of the war completely. Now, we knew that it was Stalin who not only launched the war but controled it.
     

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