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Saturday, October 25, 2014

"Revisionist history"

One accusation that has always bewildered me is when someone gets upset and cries "Revisionist history!"

It's as if new information- if it chips away at the official story- is automatically bad.

That's the height of stupidity.

It's like refusing to accept the news that you were adopted. Or that you were born, the product of sex, if you had always been told the stork brought you.

History isn't the same as what really happened. Sometimes it's similar, but it is filtered by those relating the tales, and is often more what they want you to know than how it really went. And, there is a ridiculous focus on States and politicians and other nasty characters, while mostly ignoring the main important things of what normal people did in their normal boring lives. "Boring"- that's the problem.

Disasters, death, and disease are exciting, and nothing can bring those things about like States and bad guys acting on "behalf" of States, so they get the attention, while being extreme cases rather than normal. I mean, how many times has a president actually come into your life and affected you, personally? Me, never. Yet presidents are considered history, while the people who actually affected me (and you and everyone else, except for a tiny sample of people in the world), for good or bad, are ignored.

And, since those bad guys and people who think like them are the ones who relate the tales of the past to the new generation, they don't like it when new information leaks out showing they have cherry picked- or lied about- things that happened in the past.

Especially when it disrupts the narrative they want to push on you.

So, they need you to think that the new information is somehow revising history- by which I guess they mean "changing" the past- rather than what it is actually doing: wiping away lies and misconceptions that protect some people's "legacy" at the expense of others.

And, often, at the expense of the present and future. After all, if you don't understand where you came from, it is often hard to see where you are going.

History- the story of what happened in the past- will never (without a scope that peers through time without disrupting anything) be known with 100% accuracy, but new information will keep coming to light, and shouldn't be tossed aside simply because it doesn't fit with what you wish to believe. History will always need to keep being revised unless you love ignorance.

Of course, I have noticed the same people get upset and think that because the process of science discovers new things that sometimes modify what was previously believed to be the facts, science is unreliable and based upon whims because it doesn't remain chiseled in stone, like religion does.

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