4 ms·
It doesn’t take much to reject someone else’s accounting of history. In fact, almost every conflict involves competing histories because they’re an essential p
by swatcoder 3y ago
It doesn’t take much to reject someone else’s accounting of history.
In fact, almost every conflict involves competing histories because they’re an essential part of establishing legitimacy for a cause. People put a lot of effort into developing persuasive ones.
Histories can do a better or worse job of relating facts, but they’re never authoritative. Activists will always have their own, as will the authorities that they are agitating against.
- refurb 3y agoThis is a great comment. And not only that, a lot of history involves interpretation of motives, which attempts to boil down rather complex, multi-faceted decisions into one overarching motive which makes it easy to paint historical events in very positive/negative lights.
- tcbawo 3y agoAll histories are a simplification of reality into a digestible and memorable form. It is never the complete story. The further back you go, the more of a caricature historical figures become.