18 ms·

Is history written by the winners?

70 points by benbreen 3y ago

aerialfrog 3y ago
History is written by the literate.
roenxi 3y ago
It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet. Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically. It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
- revskill 3y ago
  History is written by not the winner, but those who accuire power.
  - macrolime 3y ago
    Or by those who make the headlines that get the most clicks. Often stories are exaggerated or twisted, not for any particular side, but for attention and clicks.
  - 77pt77 3y ago
    Potato, potato.
  - visarga 3y ago
    History is written by those who know how to write. For a long time they were a small minority. Even poor monks could leave manuscripts. Not necessarily the "winners".
    - nicbou 3y ago
      Although certain writing has a greater chance of being considered important, and of surviving through time.
    - echelon 3y ago
      Is this why "defeatist" narratives feel so much more prevalent lately? Those at the bottom are sharing their pain and suffering more widely on social media? Not that their experiences aren't valid, but that there is an overwhelming feeling that "America sucks and is failing" when this isn't a true assessment. Not for the middle class and above, and especially not relative to the rest of the world on average. Social media lumps all voices in together and tends to amplify strong feelings. But if you zoomed out, you'd see a very different picture of what constitutes this collective voice.
      - mxkopy 3y ago
        ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop? I seriously don't understand your point, nor the level of mental gymnastics it takes to see a trend of independently dissatisfied people and say - oh, my neighborhood is doing fine, you're just being defeatist. I'd wager that if you "zoom out" what you see is a dangerously reckless societal experiment for some, and a life of modern amenities for others. Both can be true at the same time.
        echelon 3y ago
        Good news is seldom shared or amplified. It's also seldom relevant, but I'd argue the same is true of the negativity. Online content is overwhelmingly negative. Bad things happen, but in reality the proportionality is much smaller than you encounter online. But negativity is what gets amplified, since that drives engagement. The smallest grievances become threads that take up disproportional space in the attention feed and crowd out the rest. I guess I'm wondering if this isn't just the algorithm, but also an amplification of certain subpopulations over others. The ones that tend to be angry. > ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop? I want a mute button. Or a threshold that caps it past a certain point. Or, if this is just some people contributing to most of the problem, maybe just a way to opt out of their noisiest signals. People can say all they want, but it doesn't mean they deserve a place in my limited attention and emotional energy feed. Emotion is contagious. I want my media use to drop to only the most salient bits. And I want it to be more positive.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  > It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past. Establishing provenance and reliability post 2020 is going to be...interesting...
  - anamexis 3y ago
    Why 2020 specifically?
    - tarkin2 3y ago
      Generative AI
      - Mezzie 3y ago
        Specifically the combination of generative AI and the lack of current understanding of it by the history-making professions (archivists and historians). Historians and archivists rely a lot on primary sources and right now digital provenance is already a dumpster fire - I don't even want to think of what generative AI is going to do. A lot of the methods traditionally used for identifying an authentic primary source aren't going to work with generative AI.
      - kiba 3y ago
        It isn't particularly new, given that most of our media are either doctored, touched up, or manipulated in some ways. Most of us don't have VFX knowledge or the ability to detect minute flaws in Deepfake works. We do it through by filtering and selecting sources of information.
- HellDunkel 3y ago
  > It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet. So "the media" has no internet? > Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically. Is the fact they write or record history stopping them from digging out those real deep youtube videos about the truth behind everything? > It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past. Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11? That's a funny question to ask, because a huge amount of people on the US lost confidence on the media exactly because most of them conspired to lie to the public about Iraq's WMDs shortly after 9/11.
    - HellDunkel 3y ago
      Even funnier: most US citizen were pro Iraq war first, then embarrassed, then looking for someone else to blame...
      - esafak 3y ago
        I don't remember the embarrassment stage. I think it went from pro-war to forgetting about it. President Obama said it himself: "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards".
      - joenot443 3y ago
        I’m curious, are you deliberately avoiding the very obvious implication that “most US citizen” only felt that way because of CNN/Fox messaging? I feel like you’re remembering this timeline pretty poorly. Were you living in the US at the time?
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
  This reminds me of old shows about Big Foot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, etc... Now that many people can easily take videos/photos on there phones, it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. At least not yet.
  - sbuk 3y ago
    > …it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. One can argue they are the monsters
  - bigmattystyles 3y ago
    Similarly, miracles and credible supernatural events have all but stopped. Odd.
    - signalToNose 3y ago
      Didn’t they just release a lot of military ufo videos. Most of them already debunked by several YouTubeers
      - imtringued 3y ago
        The end result of analyzing the UFO videos just ends up publicizing more and more details of military technology that should be kept secret. By that I don't mean that aliens are real, I mean the far more mundane implications of military espionage such as your enemy having extensive knowledge about your sensor capabilities because that is what most of these UFO sightings are, they are sensor artifacts.
    - dustymcp 3y ago
      yet the earth is more flat it is remarkable..
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    There have been far more sightings and phone recordings of the LNM than there used to be. They just don't make the headlines any more. I'm agnostic about the LNM and don't lean either way. And of course this is now History Channel click-tainment, so it's not a serious topic. Even so - it's not factually correct to suggest there are no recent photos or videos of surface phenomena that seem to match the profile.
- _8j50 3y ago
  I disagree. Historically, having a lot of subcultures wasn't a thing in any society I've heard about. Even in the west today, what people call a subculture is just people doing stuff that is conformant with the dominant culture (mostly individualism and progressivism, what indivduality or direction of progress might change and people think that's a subculture). History looks at all available sources not just popular ones. Merely surviving up to the present age is a huge feat for any historical evidence. I am constantly seeing disputed history when I look into historical events or figures. I only agree with your last sentence because much of history was oral and like the game of telephone it has gotten distorted or just lost.
oblak 3y ago
Concludes with > So yes, of course history tends to be written by the winners. But luckily there is a dedicated band of highly trained, poorly paid and badly dressed historians out there trying to circumvent that. Duh. But these unsung heroes don't have the means to pump out an endless amount of hollywood movies, cop dramas, and historical pieces. Even if one is educated and smart, they don't get to decide what society, at large, has accepted as truth. Even these days, I'd think propaganda is most potent once it reaches word of mouth.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  That's the difference between history and historical memory, largely.
- webdoodle 3y ago
  Yep. Like a virus, once an idea's replication rate is high enough, it doesn't need to be seeded by propagandists.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  A rare exception to the almost universal rule that when the title of an article is a yes or no question, the answer is no.
- pseudostem 3y ago
  I am a history enthusiast. I have a reason to believe this belief by populations in untruths is short term (I'd define it as <50 years, YMMV). Long term chronicling goes beyond short term propoganda. Society eventually (IMO) accepts the truth. And the highly trained, poorly dressed, unsung heroes are to be credited for it. Unfortunately, society at large pays importance to the short term "stuff". Regardless, I feel these guys stand for correctness and should be recognised (preferably much before they die).
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    This may come as a surprise, but most professional historians don't accept the idea of there being a singular "truth" to be known. I'll link some different perspectives discussing this ([0], [1], [2]), but suffice to say that most historical work becomes dramatically less useful to society if the primary purposes of history are to satisfy our idle curiosity about the past and figure out some objective temporal ordering of events. Those fuzzy questions of narrative and "propaganda" are a huge part of why we do history, even if they cause all sorts of issues. [0] https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.htm https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.h... [1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/october-2022/responses-to-is-history-history https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec... [2] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/march-2013/the-frailty-of-historical-truth https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...
deleted 3y ago
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mongol 3y ago
When speaking about this, it is good to be clear about what kind of history is being talked about. In my opinion, the most important history is the one being taught in schools, because it is the one that everyone will relate to later on.
- sillystuff 3y ago
  LMTTM is an excellent book on the subject of (poor state of) history being taught in K-12 schools in the US. I bought it for my son when he was in elementary school, and the "history" he was being taught was mostly just uncritical hero worship of famous people combined with made up bullshit to improve narrative flow. "After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he [Loewen] has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past." "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" - James W. Loewen https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-dp-1620973928/dp/1620973928/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-dp-16...
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Every country has its own schools and what gets taught there is drastically different, evolves with time. This does indeed seem to work, to my surprise since I can't positively remember a word of what were taught at school. Went in one ear and out of another.
agumonkey 3y ago
It seems that it's mostly written by their sons. People who weren't there but interpret the present based on their glorious present and the average depth of historical inquiry will not be very high. It's mostly appraisal of the current status-quo. for instance, people will talk about computing today with react/javascript/facebook/google.. maybe good old microsoft/apple. But almost nobody will go deeper and read about backus team in the first FORTRAN compiler and his later years around FP influencing the 70s/80s functional school of thought that led to rust, ES6, react and the likes.
jmclnx 3y ago
I hope historians are keep close track to the facts these days in the US. Seems the current political environment is making historian's jobs rather tough. Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors. That's called "the market." Many schools are happy, within reason, to offer whatever programs students want to major in--whether they offer good post-graduation employment opportunities or not.
  - blackbear_ 3y ago
    We should stop invoking "the market" as some sort of almighty deity who is always right. Sometimes what "the market" does is fine, sometimes it is not.
    - mc32 3y ago
      That’s not what poster is claiming. Poster is claiming Higher Ed provides majors that are in demand by students, be the majors useful to gain employment or not.
    - adamisom 3y ago
      It's just shorthand for something like "what people (show they) want". In the past, college-degree holders were scarce, so a history degree had "economic" value. It's not that the past valued the humanities more. It's just that good jobs were a thinner slice of society and tended to be filled by the also-thin ranks of degree holders.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Of course, plenty of people who get history majors do perfectly well professionally. Many of us have mostly worked in things only tangentially related to our undergraduate major.
nokya 3y ago
History is written by men and selectively erased by other, more privileged, men. Once we acknowledge this and everything it implies, we can only assume we know what someone allowed us to know.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Critical race theory is only relevant to a particular time and place. The broader concept is that of hegemony in general. Do not confuse the former for the latter.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    Did I miss something in the previous comment? They don't mention anything close to CRT. It sounds more like they're talking about feminist history, given the context.
throwaway743 3y ago
After rewatching Fog of War the other day, it reminds me of a McNamara quote of Lemay regarding the fire bombings of Japan. McNamara: "LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say, we were behaving as war criminals."
- 77pt77 3y ago
  "The only war-crime is losing."
- zabzonk 3y ago
  Chuck Yeager to his wingman (or vice versa, can't remember) in WW2 after being given orders to strafe everything, including civilians, when coming back from escort missions - "Jesus, we had better win this!"
  - 13of40 3y ago
    "Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it." Gosh. https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=89735 https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=89735
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  How many people have actually been prosecuted as war criminals even on the losing side?
brent_noorda 3y ago
Yes. And apologies are written by the winners’ grandchildren
AlbertCory 3y ago
I searched for "Carthage" in the original article, and in this thread. Crickets. Did they have a lot of written material that all got destroyed? Or is it just that, if they'd won, they would have written a lot of stuff?
cainxinth 3y ago
Are people still hating on GPT-4 summaries? I find them useful: >The text notes that while powerful institutions and victorious factions may influence the preservation and interpretation of historical records, factors such as literacy also play a role. History's portrayal of England's Reformation illustrates how the 'winners' can shape historical narratives, in this case favoring Protestantism over Catholicism until recent reevaluation. The notion of 'winners' itself is questioned as too simplistic, potentially obscuring historical diversity. The text also explores the fluidity of 'winning', using the example of the Cold War's end and the subsequent scrutiny of neoliberal ideals. Lastly, the text asserts that contemporary history is largely crafted by historians, professionals dedicated to analyzing history's complexity and including the voices of marginalized groups.
deleted 3y ago
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Georgelemental 3y ago
Excellent blog post on this question: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/ https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/
- waveBidder 3y ago
  Checking to see if someone posted this. those chronicling history frequently being the losers is an interesting take.
throwawaydd 3y ago
[flagged]
flybrand 3y ago
It’s certainly written by the literate.
comprev 3y ago
People rarely remember the first loser - the person with the silver medal award. Regardless of how good/evil the winner was, the simple fact they came out on top is used as positive motivational material.
Animats 3y ago
It's amazing what's been covered up. - The Tiananmen Square demonstrations. (1989)[1] At least in China. - Britain's efforts to get the US into WWII before Pearl Harbor. (early 1940s) [2] - DuPont's attempt at a US coup (1933) [3] - The Israeli nuclear bomb test. (1979) [4] The first one is a successful outright suppression. The rest were obfuscated and obscured at the time, but the historical record exists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... [2] https://www.history.com/news/wwii-us-entry-secret-british-campaign-mi6 https://www.history.com/news/wwii-us-entry-secret-british-ca... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
- max_ 3y ago
  Add COINTELPRO to the list [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO [1]:https://youtu.be/IGIYam3p-Yc https://youtu.be/IGIYam3p-Yc
- rajin444 3y ago
  With regards to #2, Wendell Willkie winning the republican nomination over the isolationist candidates was extremely fortuitous for FDR and Churchill. There was no real desire from the US population to get involved in another European war, but Willkie (lifelong democrat with no previous political experience) securing the republican slot (and basically guaranteeing FDR's win with no policy adjustments) made that issue a moot point since his stance on the war was similar to FDRs. Willkie eventually ended up with a position in FDR's administration. The only truths taught in US schools are those beneficial to the empire - it's best viewed as propaganda.
- grecy 3y ago
  Also add. What really happened at the first and second thanksgivings in the us The time the White House was burned down by an invading army ( who then left because they couldn’t be bothered) The number of times the us has overthrown democratically elected governments around the world The illegal drug testing the us has performed on peoples around the world There’s plenty people inside the us are not taught.
bee_rider 3y ago
In general the answer seemed to be something like: yeah, mostly, but not always, and the winners don’t always have a perfectly unified voice, so this can be mitigated to a great extent by careful study. Which seems like a fine answer although not super enlightening. The bit that stuck with me was a little aside near the beginning. > Whether we like it or not, we view the past from a modern standpoint, privileging (consciously or otherwise) the interests and ideals of the world we know. As a result, we tend to treat developments towards modernity as natural – and disparage the apparent dead ends that stood in its path. I think modern values are pretty good. But we sit on a branch in a big tree which history has explored stochastically. The idea that, going back, some figures could be seen as good or bad not because of the fundamentals of their deeds, or because of the propaganda (good or ill) recorded about them, but because the just mismatch with modern values is interesting… But I dunno, I can think of any, I must just be too throughly soaked through with modern values.
momirlan 3y ago
the current desire to rewrite all history as per politically correct ideology is remarkable, but it too will pass.
scop 3y ago
> It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds? - Norm MacDonald
qubex 3y ago
History is written by the drives, the literate, whatever side they’re on. Those who are on the side of the victorious get exhaled in the immediate aftermath, but the writings of the defeated re-emerge in due course. The illiterate leave no trace.
thom 3y ago
I don’t know if exceptions to the rule are interesting, but the best sources for much of Macedon’s conquest of Greece come from the defeated Athenians (especially tidbits from Demosthenes who, alongside Cicero, is one of history’s more voluminous losers).
hulitu 3y ago
> Is history written by the winners? No, as Frank Herbert said, it is written by historians.
bazoom42 3y ago
My favorite counterexample is the Vandals. They conquered Rome, but how are they remembered by history?

70 points by benbreen 3y ago

History is written by the literate.

It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet. Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically. It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.

revskill 3y ago
History is written by not the winner, but those who accuire power.
- macrolime 3y ago
  Or by those who make the headlines that get the most clicks. Often stories are exaggerated or twisted, not for any particular side, but for attention and clicks.
- 77pt77 3y ago
  Potato, potato.
- visarga 3y ago
  History is written by those who know how to write. For a long time they were a small minority. Even poor monks could leave manuscripts. Not necessarily the "winners".
  - nicbou 3y ago
    Although certain writing has a greater chance of being considered important, and of surviving through time.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Is this why "defeatist" narratives feel so much more prevalent lately? Those at the bottom are sharing their pain and suffering more widely on social media? Not that their experiences aren't valid, but that there is an overwhelming feeling that "America sucks and is failing" when this isn't a true assessment. Not for the middle class and above, and especially not relative to the rest of the world on average. Social media lumps all voices in together and tends to amplify strong feelings. But if you zoomed out, you'd see a very different picture of what constitutes this collective voice.
    - mxkopy 3y ago
      ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop? I seriously don't understand your point, nor the level of mental gymnastics it takes to see a trend of independently dissatisfied people and say - oh, my neighborhood is doing fine, you're just being defeatist. I'd wager that if you "zoom out" what you see is a dangerously reckless societal experiment for some, and a life of modern amenities for others. Both can be true at the same time.
      - echelon 3y ago
        Good news is seldom shared or amplified. It's also seldom relevant, but I'd argue the same is true of the negativity. Online content is overwhelmingly negative. Bad things happen, but in reality the proportionality is much smaller than you encounter online. But negativity is what gets amplified, since that drives engagement. The smallest grievances become threads that take up disproportional space in the attention feed and crowd out the rest. I guess I'm wondering if this isn't just the algorithm, but also an amplification of certain subpopulations over others. The ones that tend to be angry. > ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop? I want a mute button. Or a threshold that caps it past a certain point. Or, if this is just some people contributing to most of the problem, maybe just a way to opt out of their noisiest signals. People can say all they want, but it doesn't mean they deserve a place in my limited attention and emotional energy feed. Emotion is contagious. I want my media use to drop to only the most salient bits. And I want it to be more positive.
Mezzie 3y ago
> It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past. Establishing provenance and reliability post 2020 is going to be...interesting...
- anamexis 3y ago
  Why 2020 specifically?
  - tarkin2 3y ago
    Generative AI
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      Specifically the combination of generative AI and the lack of current understanding of it by the history-making professions (archivists and historians). Historians and archivists rely a lot on primary sources and right now digital provenance is already a dumpster fire - I don't even want to think of what generative AI is going to do. A lot of the methods traditionally used for identifying an authentic primary source aren't going to work with generative AI.
    - kiba 3y ago
      It isn't particularly new, given that most of our media are either doctored, touched up, or manipulated in some ways. Most of us don't have VFX knowledge or the ability to detect minute flaws in Deepfake works. We do it through by filtering and selecting sources of information.
HellDunkel 3y ago
> It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet. So "the media" has no internet? > Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically. Is the fact they write or record history stopping them from digging out those real deep youtube videos about the truth behind everything? > It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past. Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11? That's a funny question to ask, because a huge amount of people on the US lost confidence on the media exactly because most of them conspired to lie to the public about Iraq's WMDs shortly after 9/11.
  - HellDunkel 3y ago
    Even funnier: most US citizen were pro Iraq war first, then embarrassed, then looking for someone else to blame...
    - esafak 3y ago
      I don't remember the embarrassment stage. I think it went from pro-war to forgetting about it. President Obama said it himself: "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards".
    - joenot443 3y ago
      I’m curious, are you deliberately avoiding the very obvious implication that “most US citizen” only felt that way because of CNN/Fox messaging? I feel like you’re remembering this timeline pretty poorly. Were you living in the US at the time?
omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
This reminds me of old shows about Big Foot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, etc... Now that many people can easily take videos/photos on there phones, it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. At least not yet.
- sbuk 3y ago
  > …it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. One can argue they are the monsters
- bigmattystyles 3y ago
  Similarly, miracles and credible supernatural events have all but stopped. Odd.
  - signalToNose 3y ago
    Didn’t they just release a lot of military ufo videos. Most of them already debunked by several YouTubeers
    - imtringued 3y ago
      The end result of analyzing the UFO videos just ends up publicizing more and more details of military technology that should be kept secret. By that I don't mean that aliens are real, I mean the far more mundane implications of military espionage such as your enemy having extensive knowledge about your sensor capabilities because that is what most of these UFO sightings are, they are sensor artifacts.
  - dustymcp 3y ago
    yet the earth is more flat it is remarkable..
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  There have been far more sightings and phone recordings of the LNM than there used to be. They just don't make the headlines any more. I'm agnostic about the LNM and don't lean either way. And of course this is now History Channel click-tainment, so it's not a serious topic. Even so - it's not factually correct to suggest there are no recent photos or videos of surface phenomena that seem to match the profile.
_8j50 3y ago
I disagree. Historically, having a lot of subcultures wasn't a thing in any society I've heard about. Even in the west today, what people call a subculture is just people doing stuff that is conformant with the dominant culture (mostly individualism and progressivism, what indivduality or direction of progress might change and people think that's a subculture). History looks at all available sources not just popular ones. Merely surviving up to the present age is a huge feat for any historical evidence. I am constantly seeing disputed history when I look into historical events or figures. I only agree with your last sentence because much of history was oral and like the game of telephone it has gotten distorted or just lost.

oblak 3y ago

Concludes with > So yes, of course history tends to be written by the winners. But luckily there is a dedicated band of highly trained, poorly paid and badly dressed historians out there trying to circumvent that. Duh. But these unsung heroes don't have the means to pump out an endless amount of hollywood movies, cop dramas, and historical pieces. Even if one is educated and smart, they don't get to decide what society, at large, has accepted as truth. Even these days, I'd think propaganda is most potent once it reaches word of mouth.

UncleMeat 3y ago
That's the difference between history and historical memory, largely.
webdoodle 3y ago
Yep. Like a virus, once an idea's replication rate is high enough, it doesn't need to be seeded by propagandists.
idopmstuff 3y ago
A rare exception to the almost universal rule that when the title of an article is a yes or no question, the answer is no.
pseudostem 3y ago
I am a history enthusiast. I have a reason to believe this belief by populations in untruths is short term (I'd define it as <50 years, YMMV). Long term chronicling goes beyond short term propoganda. Society eventually (IMO) accepts the truth. And the highly trained, poorly dressed, unsung heroes are to be credited for it. Unfortunately, society at large pays importance to the short term "stuff". Regardless, I feel these guys stand for correctness and should be recognised (preferably much before they die).
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  This may come as a surprise, but most professional historians don't accept the idea of there being a singular "truth" to be known. I'll link some different perspectives discussing this ([0], [1], [2]), but suffice to say that most historical work becomes dramatically less useful to society if the primary purposes of history are to satisfy our idle curiosity about the past and figure out some objective temporal ordering of events. Those fuzzy questions of narrative and "propaganda" are a huge part of why we do history, even if they cause all sorts of issues. [0] https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.htm https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.h... [1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/october-2022/responses-to-is-history-history https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec... [2] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/march-2013/the-frailty-of-historical-truth https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...

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mongol 3y ago

When speaking about this, it is good to be clear about what kind of history is being talked about. In my opinion, the most important history is the one being taught in schools, because it is the one that everyone will relate to later on.

sillystuff 3y ago
LMTTM is an excellent book on the subject of (poor state of) history being taught in K-12 schools in the US. I bought it for my son when he was in elementary school, and the "history" he was being taught was mostly just uncritical hero worship of famous people combined with made up bullshit to improve narrative flow. "After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he [Loewen] has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past." "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" - James W. Loewen https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-dp-1620973928/dp/1620973928/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-dp-16...
thriftwy 3y ago
Every country has its own schools and what gets taught there is drastically different, evolves with time. This does indeed seem to work, to my surprise since I can't positively remember a word of what were taught at school. Went in one ear and out of another.

agumonkey 3y ago

It seems that it's mostly written by their sons. People who weren't there but interpret the present based on their glorious present and the average depth of historical inquiry will not be very high. It's mostly appraisal of the current status-quo. for instance, people will talk about computing today with react/javascript/facebook/google.. maybe good old microsoft/apple. But almost nobody will go deeper and read about backus team in the first FORTRAN compiler and his later years around FP influencing the 70s/80s functional school of thought that led to rust, ES6, react and the likes.

jmclnx 3y ago

I hope historians are keep close track to the facts these days in the US. Seems the current political environment is making historian's jobs rather tough. Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors.

ghaff 3y ago
>Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors. That's called "the market." Many schools are happy, within reason, to offer whatever programs students want to major in--whether they offer good post-graduation employment opportunities or not.
- blackbear_ 3y ago
  We should stop invoking "the market" as some sort of almighty deity who is always right. Sometimes what "the market" does is fine, sometimes it is not.
  - mc32 3y ago
    That’s not what poster is claiming. Poster is claiming Higher Ed provides majors that are in demand by students, be the majors useful to gain employment or not.
  - adamisom 3y ago
    It's just shorthand for something like "what people (show they) want". In the past, college-degree holders were scarce, so a history degree had "economic" value. It's not that the past valued the humanities more. It's just that good jobs were a thinner slice of society and tended to be filled by the also-thin ranks of degree holders.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Of course, plenty of people who get history majors do perfectly well professionally. Many of us have mostly worked in things only tangentially related to our undergraduate major.

nokya 3y ago

History is written by men and selectively erased by other, more privileged, men. Once we acknowledge this and everything it implies, we can only assume we know what someone allowed us to know.

nerdponx 3y ago
Critical race theory is only relevant to a particular time and place. The broader concept is that of hegemony in general. Do not confuse the former for the latter.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Did I miss something in the previous comment? They don't mention anything close to CRT. It sounds more like they're talking about feminist history, given the context.

throwaway743 3y ago

After rewatching Fog of War the other day, it reminds me of a McNamara quote of Lemay regarding the fire bombings of Japan. McNamara: "LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say, we were behaving as war criminals."

77pt77 3y ago
"The only war-crime is losing."
zabzonk 3y ago
Chuck Yeager to his wingman (or vice versa, can't remember) in WW2 after being given orders to strafe everything, including civilians, when coming back from escort missions - "Jesus, we had better win this!"
- 13of40 3y ago
  "Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it." Gosh. https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=89735 https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=89735
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
How many people have actually been prosecuted as war criminals even on the losing side?

brent_noorda 3y ago

Yes. And apologies are written by the winners’ grandchildren

AlbertCory 3y ago

I searched for "Carthage" in the original article, and in this thread. Crickets. Did they have a lot of written material that all got destroyed? Or is it just that, if they'd won, they would have written a lot of stuff?

cainxinth 3y ago

Are people still hating on GPT-4 summaries? I find them useful: >The text notes that while powerful institutions and victorious factions may influence the preservation and interpretation of historical records, factors such as literacy also play a role. History's portrayal of England's Reformation illustrates how the 'winners' can shape historical narratives, in this case favoring Protestantism over Catholicism until recent reevaluation. The notion of 'winners' itself is questioned as too simplistic, potentially obscuring historical diversity. The text also explores the fluidity of 'winning', using the example of the Cold War's end and the subsequent scrutiny of neoliberal ideals. Lastly, the text asserts that contemporary history is largely crafted by historians, professionals dedicated to analyzing history's complexity and including the voices of marginalized groups.

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Georgelemental 3y ago

Excellent blog post on this question: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/ https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

waveBidder 3y ago
Checking to see if someone posted this. those chronicling history frequently being the losers is an interesting take.

throwawaydd 3y ago

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flybrand 3y ago

It’s certainly written by the literate.

comprev 3y ago

People rarely remember the first loser - the person with the silver medal award. Regardless of how good/evil the winner was, the simple fact they came out on top is used as positive motivational material.

Animats 3y ago

It's amazing what's been covered up. - The Tiananmen Square demonstrations. (1989)[1] At least in China. - Britain's efforts to get the US into WWII before Pearl Harbor. (early 1940s) [2] - DuPont's attempt at a US coup (1933) [3] - The Israeli nuclear bomb test. (1979) [4] The first one is a successful outright suppression. The rest were obfuscated and obscured at the time, but the historical record exists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... [2] https://www.history.com/news/wwii-us-entry-secret-british-campaign-mi6 https://www.history.com/news/wwii-us-entry-secret-british-ca... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident

max_ 3y ago
Add COINTELPRO to the list [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO [1]:https://youtu.be/IGIYam3p-Yc https://youtu.be/IGIYam3p-Yc
rajin444 3y ago
With regards to #2, Wendell Willkie winning the republican nomination over the isolationist candidates was extremely fortuitous for FDR and Churchill. There was no real desire from the US population to get involved in another European war, but Willkie (lifelong democrat with no previous political experience) securing the republican slot (and basically guaranteeing FDR's win with no policy adjustments) made that issue a moot point since his stance on the war was similar to FDRs. Willkie eventually ended up with a position in FDR's administration. The only truths taught in US schools are those beneficial to the empire - it's best viewed as propaganda.
grecy 3y ago
Also add. What really happened at the first and second thanksgivings in the us The time the White House was burned down by an invading army ( who then left because they couldn’t be bothered) The number of times the us has overthrown democratically elected governments around the world The illegal drug testing the us has performed on peoples around the world There’s plenty people inside the us are not taught.

bee_rider 3y ago

In general the answer seemed to be something like: yeah, mostly, but not always, and the winners don’t always have a perfectly unified voice, so this can be mitigated to a great extent by careful study. Which seems like a fine answer although not super enlightening. The bit that stuck with me was a little aside near the beginning. > Whether we like it or not, we view the past from a modern standpoint, privileging (consciously or otherwise) the interests and ideals of the world we know. As a result, we tend to treat developments towards modernity as natural – and disparage the apparent dead ends that stood in its path. I think modern values are pretty good. But we sit on a branch in a big tree which history has explored stochastically. The idea that, going back, some figures could be seen as good or bad not because of the fundamentals of their deeds, or because of the propaganda (good or ill) recorded about them, but because the just mismatch with modern values is interesting… But I dunno, I can think of any, I must just be too throughly soaked through with modern values.

momirlan 3y ago

the current desire to rewrite all history as per politically correct ideology is remarkable, but it too will pass.

scop 3y ago

> It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds? - Norm MacDonald

qubex 3y ago

History is written by the drives, the literate, whatever side they’re on. Those who are on the side of the victorious get exhaled in the immediate aftermath, but the writings of the defeated re-emerge in due course. The illiterate leave no trace.

thom 3y ago

I don’t know if exceptions to the rule are interesting, but the best sources for much of Macedon’s conquest of Greece come from the defeated Athenians (especially tidbits from Demosthenes who, alongside Cicero, is one of history’s more voluminous losers).

hulitu 3y ago

> Is history written by the winners? No, as Frank Herbert said, it is written by historians.

bazoom42 3y ago

My favorite counterexample is the Vandals. They conquered Rome, but how are they remembered by history?