The agenda behind saying “history is written by the victors.

Matitya’s Musings on a Myriad of Matters Episode 11

(Chapter Headings: Introduction)

Hello, my name is Matitya and welcome to Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. Today’s topic, the agenda behind saying “history is written by the victors”

(Chapter Headings: Previously on Matitya’s Musings)

In a previous Matitya’s Musing, I debunked the lie that “history is written by the victors.” I brought up that “Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Josephus, Jordanes, Gildas, Machiavelli et cetera. They were all on the losing side and all wrote histories of their conflicts which were read for years and years to come. The claim that it’s “the victors” who write history is so false as to be laughable.” I also pointed out that “unless you’re a religious Jew or Christian then you should add the Babylonian conquest of the Jews and the Roman crucifixion of Jesus as examples of history not being written by the victors” and that “there are more examples, the history of the Vikings was written by the people they conquered”. The claim that history is written by the victors is a lie.

(Chapter headings: Why lie?)

Why do people tell this lie? Part of it is that several people heard the lie without critically analysing it and naively believe it. The other aspect of it is a specific agenda. What is that agenda? I’ll tell you in one word Revisionism.

(Chapter Headings: Historical revision isn’t malum en se)

Historical revision is not inherently bad. Much of the work of historians is to update our understanding of why events happened in response to new information. That is revision. For instance, declassified intelligence reports from the Second World War give us a better understanding of the motivations of people involved. Likewise, when the German anthropologist Karl Mauch first came across Great Zimbabwe, he wrote that it “could never have been built by blacks” and instead speculated that it was built by ancient Jews loaned by King Solomon to the Queen of Sheba. Because of the prejudices of Mauch’s time becoming less commonly accepted in the West, 20th Century archaeologists were willing to ask why it couldn’t have been built by black people? It is now commonly accepted that Great Zimbabwe was built by Zimbabwean natives. All of that is revision and an improvement upon historical knowledge.

(Chapter Headings: Debunking Conspiracy theories Part 1 Shakespeare)

Unfortunately, there are people who misappropriate revisionism and use it to mean rejecting any historical fact they dislike. For instance, claiming that William Shakespeare didn’t exist even though Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon maintained his baptismal record and even though when King James the First granted the Lord Chamberlain’s Men a new license to perform plays as The King’s Men, William Shakespeare was listed as one of their actors. And even though one of Robert Greene’s reasons for disliking Henry the Sixth was that its author believed himself capable of being a playwright due to having been an actor. And even though a contemporary named Ben Jonson described Shakespeare as a man he knew and a writer of plays saying

“ I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature”

And Jonson elsewhere described Shakespeare as “Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!” And lest you think he was talking about a different Shakespeare, Jonson said in the same piece

“Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,

That so did take Eliza and our James!”

(Eliza here is Queen Elizabeth and James is King James. Jonson is saying that Shakespeare came from Stratford-upon-Avon and endeared himself to Elizabeth and James with his writing.)

And when Jonson published the list of actors who performed in his play Sejanus His Fall, it included Shakespeare and the other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Shakespeare existed, he hailed from Stratford-upon Avon, he became an actor with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and he became famous as a playwright in London. Certain people claim that Shakespeare was a pseudonym of whatever historical figure they like better or a fraud who stole the work of whomever they view as the ‘real Shakespeare’ or a front for that person as part of a conspiracy. That is contrary to the historical record. The Shakespearean authorship critics attempt to legitimise their view by framing it as simply historical revisionism when it’s a conspiracy theory.

(Chapter Headings: Debunking Conspiracy Theories Part 2 The Moon landing)

Other conspiracists set their targets for much more recent events like the Moon landing. There are different versions of this conspiracy theory but one of them is the claim that NASA staged the Moon landing to win the propaganda war against the Soviets.

For these claims to be correct, it would not only require that Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins repeatedly lied to the entire world about the original Moon landing until their graves and that Buzz Aldrin repeatedly lied to the world about this and continues to do so to this day. It would also mean

· that Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon lied to the entire world about the second Moon landing for the entire rest of their lives

· that Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa lied about the third Moon landing for the entire rest of their lives

· that David Scott lied about the fourth Moon landing and continues lying about it to this day.

· that James Irwin and Alfred Worden lied about it the entire rest of their lives.

· that Charles Duke lied about the fifth Moon landing and is still lying about it.

· that John Young and Thomas Mattingly lied about the fifth Moon landing to their dying days.

· that Harrison Schmitt lied and is even today lying about the sixth Moon landing.

· And that Ronald Evans and Eugene Cernan went to their graves lying about it.

And that’s ignoring, Jim Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise having to have lied about their unsuccessful mission to the Moon. And

· that all the astronauts on Apollo missions Four through Ten would have to have been lying about having gone to space to enable the later astronauts to land on the Moon

· that the astronauts who tried but failed to launch the first three Apollo missions would have to have been lying as well.

· And everyone on the mission controls for every one of these missions would also have to have been lying.

· And US Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon would have to have been lying to America and the world about this.

· And the video crews for those lunar landings would have to have been lying about them.

· And all the Soviet spies who were clandestinely monitoring their enemies would have to been lying about them (even though it would have been much more useful to the Soviets to expose an American Moon landing hoax to win the propaganda war.)

· And that’s ignoring how much money it would likely cost to stage the failure of three separate failed missions into space, seven successful missions into space, two successful missions to the Moon, one failed mission to the Moon, and four more successful missions to the Moon.

There is no conceivable way that “they” somehow orchestrated a conspiracy that lasted that long involving that many people. It’s not possible. The Moon landings happened. The only a way a conspiracist can avoid acknowledging that is to deny facts of historical record.

(Chapter Headings: The lie that history is written by the victors. Part One Communism)

At least Moon landing conspiracists can come up with a plausible motivation for faking the Moon landing. (Though they’re still wrong.) The desire to beat the Soviets in the Space Race. Of course, that ignores that the Soviets had their own program to land men on the Moon and they landed more than their fair share of space probes on the Moon to photograph it. And that, as I mentioned previously, the Soviets would have gone out of their way to expose any Moon landing hoax the Americans somehow managed to orchestrate.

That leads me to another point. Soviet apologists today still pretend that Communism in the Soviet Union was not a cruel tyranny. For instance, the Leftist YouTuber Hakim defended Stalin for the Holodomor. Hakim is hardly alone. I’ve seen posts on Medium defend the Soviets (and other Communist dictatorships) on the grounds that the history of Communism was written by its enemies. Their argument is essentially that history is written by the victors and the Soviets lost the Cold War such that the history of the Soviets is incorrigibly biased against them rendering its record unreliable.

To that I would respond with the words of George Orwell that

“ Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts — the casualty figures, for instance — were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.”

Orwell’s point was that since the Nazis routinely lied about both past and present (and censored the truth) it made no sense for future historians to take Nazi claims at face value. Orwell saw that as a reason why it was necessary for the Allies to defeat the Nazis. So that the truth could prevail. He was right.

Orwell’s thesis applies just as well to the Soviets as it does to the Nazis. Stalin was no less of a liar than Hitler was. The only way to justify taking the Soviet side is to pretend the historical record is subjective. The way to do that is to disseminate the lie that “history is written by the victors” and use it to claim the accounts of Dekulakization and the The Holodomor and the Gulag are simply a reflection of the Soviets having lost. In reality, the Soviet Union was an evil empire.

(Chapter Headings: The Lie that history is written by the victors Part Two — The Nazis)

It’s not just Communists. Nazi apologists exist as well. The American political commentator Pat Buchanan claims that Hitler wanted peace with Great Britain but that Churchill and his ilk insisted on being warmongers and drove Hitler to the point where he had little choice but to start the Second World War. Buchanan therefore blames the Holocaust in large part on the Allies. He also claims that the Allies drastically exaggerated the Holocaust to justify their own war atrocities. For instance, Buchanan denies the historical fact that Treblinka was used as an extermination camp. Someone like Buchanan has every motive to spread the lie that history is written by the victors because after all if that were the case then he could more easily get away with downplaying the evils of the Nazis.

Buchanan is not the only one. In 1977, the British author Daivd Irving wrote a book titled Hitler’s War wherein he claimed that Hitler was at no point aware of the fact that Nazis were killing the Jews. In the early 1990s, Irving published a revised edition which omitted all references to the Holocaust. He boasted that “You won’t find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in a footnote, why should [you]. If something didn’t happen, then you don’t even dignify it with a footnote.” When the American Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt rightly denounced Irving as a Holocaust denier, Irving sued her for libel though thankfully he lost. When Irving and his ilk express the sentiment that history is written by the victors, there is an obvious agenda there. Irving (and people like him) claim that the British bombing of Dresden and other Allied activity was unjustifiable and so they claim that that the Allies fabricated the Holocaust to justify their own behaviour. And Holocaust deniers can justify the historical record contradicting their claims by pretending that history is written by the victors.

Even quite recently, the anti-Israel political commentator Kim Iversen denied that several of Hamas’s recent atrocities against Israel happened. When her critics responded by comparing that to Holocaust denial, she responded by questioning the historicity of several aspects of the Holocaust. Iversen defended her willingness to “mainstream” Holocaust denial on the grounds that history is written by the victors and the Allies had every motivation to make it reflect poorly on their enemies the Nazis.

(Chapter Headings: Conclusion)

Does this surprise me? Not in the slightest. The kinds of people who feel compelled to pretend history is written by the victors are the kinds of people who need the historical record to be subjective for their claims to work. It, thus, makes perfect sense that people who cannot justify their political ideologies without deceit resort to the false claim that history is written by the victors. That is the agenda behind the lie.

My name is Matitya and this has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.