“Who controls history, and how it is written, controls the past, and who controls the past controls the present.”
What would your view point be on Hitler if you never learned or were exposed to all of the horrendous things that he and the Nazis did? If historians kept all of these crucial bits of information from us, we might think Hitler was a great, positive leader. The point is, people who write about history control the past. The way they write about certain events, and the details they decide to include or exclude influences the minds of modern day people. Historians may not be intentionally lying to us, but if they decide to only include half of the facts, as readers, that’s all we’ll ever know and essentially, that’s all we’ll ever believe, hence also controlling the present. This can drastically change or viewpoint, and although we expect history to be completely unbiased and strictly factual, that is not the case at all. In essence, when we read about history, we are forming our own opinions based on other people’s opinions, not raw facts. So, are our thoughts considered to be valid if what we read is already a skewed version of the truth? My real question is; how is our society supposed to “learn from the past” if we’re only given one side of the story where certain aspects are embellished and downplayed?
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