Tuesday, March 11, 2008

I have another tired but popular Politically Correct phrase to retire: History is written by the victors. I generally hear this repeated by college students. They say it with a smug looking arrogant smile. But the smile slowly disappears when I suggest they are merely repeating something they heard from one of their instructors and chances are they never investigated this peculair notion on their own.

The idea is that victors whitewash their history and never say anything negative about the courses of action chosen by their own country.

Let’s take an example from Roman history. We have the Roman version.  We also have the Greek version, writers who lived under Roman suppression. We have the Jewish version, Jewish historians such as Josephus and Philo who were able to tell us how their people “enjoyed” being conquered by Rome and paying taxes to Rome. We have the writings of the Christians who were persecuted for centuries under the Romans. We have the writings of Roman cynics and satirists (Seneca, for example) who were very critical of Rome. Face facts!  One couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive record of ancient Rome from the widest variety of opinions and perspectives.

What about the history of ancient Israel?  Have you ever read the Old Testament?  You could not find a stronger condemnation of Israel’s sin. The only problem is these scriptures were written by Jews, Jews who were being painfully honest.

And for those of you who think you know of a history that has been unfairly changed, I have a simple question for you.  How exactly do you know it’s been changed?  Is it because you know of another people who wrote an alternative record?  Well, if that is the case you just threw out your first argument, did you not?  If there is more than one version, then the history was not entirely written by the victors, was it?

You see, there is an agenda behind this nutty and unscholarly idea. The agenda is that people want to re-write American History primarily and the wider Western History secondarily.  It is part of the Politically Correct onslaught to make us feel bad about our own culture. America is to be painted as nothing but a slave trading, Native American slaughtering nation. I have even heard students say things like,”If the Germans had won World War Two, we’d have a whole different version of who was right, America or Germany.”

Are you catching the horror here?  We have a new generation that doesn’t even know how to critique the Nazis, these same Nazis who actually confessed to their atrocities at the Nuremberg Trials (Oh, that’s right.  You’d have to know something about history to be aware of that little confession.)

When I grew up, I did not hear about a perfect America.  I heard about an America that was guilty of many things. I also heard that we were a people with great ideas and a wonderful constitution who in time alligned our practices with our founding document. I did not learn that Thomas Jefferson was a saint but neither did I learn that he was a devil because he owned slaves. I learned that he was a man who wrestled with his own skeletons as any of us do, a man who hated slavery but found it difficult to simply release every slave without his plantation collapsing financially. But he hated himself for putting money ahead of people and he lived as a tortured human being.

I also learned that the problem of human nature, is a universal problem, not a uniquely American problem.

I once spoke with a college student, telling him about a quote I had read from a Cherokee. This quote was pre-Revolutionary War and the honest Cherokee admited that violence was the nature of the tribe, that if conflicts did not exist with other people, they would need to go out and invent some kind of conflict to satisfy their natures.  The student immediately dismissed the quote. He did not even want to hear the source. If it said something against Native Americans, if it said something contrary to what he had learned in college, he was simply uninterested.

“We cannot live without war. Should we make peace with Tuscarous we must immediately look out for some other nation with whom we can engage in our beloved occupation.” ( A Penguin History of the United States 54 early 18th century)

No, it is not true that history is written by the victors. It is true that history is being re-written by a bunch of anti-American, Politically Correct Marxists who deny the ability to know truth in one breath and teach new truth from the other side of their mouths at the exact same time.

This is Bob Siegel, making the obvious, obvious.

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