Six Ways to Change History I
Destroy it...
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This is the first of a series of essays based on the Nicole James article by the same name in Epoch Times in October 2023.
Many people mistakenly consider George Orwell a novelist, but his true talent lay in his ability to foresee future events, making him more comparable to a modern-day Nostradamus or seer.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Eric Blair/George Orwell
However, I think this one is more appropriate for our times:
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Eric Blair/George Orwell
To clarify, as I have pointed out before, we rewrite history all the time, or there wouldn’t be so many books on Gettysburg (and don’t try to tell me they’re all unique.) Every original version of the past is a rewrite of someone else’s version with one or two more sources. All those different versions of the same event are proof-positive there is no such thing—and never will be any such thing—as time travel, because if it were possible, there would only be one version of everything, and future historians would simply get rid of all those wrong ones for us.
The First Way: Destroy It
In 1981, a mob of Sinhalese individuals burned down the Jaffna Library in Sri Lanka. This was one of the largest libraries in Asia, housing over 97,000 books and irreplaceable manuscripts steeped in Tamil culture. Throughout the centuries, people have repeatedly engaged in this form of cultural cleansing...but in the 21st Century, some individuals have taken the practice to extremes.
Digitalization can distort to the point of obliteration.
In the 1975 film Rollerball, that takes place in 2018, Jonathan E (played by James Caan) visits a “library” to find out where corporate decisions were made and who made them. The librarian (Ralph Richardson) is the keeper of the “library” that comprises a computer and terminals. At the beginning of the scene, the librarian complains the machine has lost the whole of the 13th Century, which he passes off as a mere clerical error.
There are no more books in Rollerball.
Consider the consequences for culture if no physical copies of documents are kept, but only digital ones. Future generations will lose much of the world's history if, or when, the cyber pandemic, foretold by the globalists, hits. But more dangerous than that...what if someone willfully deletes all that history—by accident, of course?
History gone in a moment or less.
Now, who would do that? Well, we’re doing it all the time, actually. How many statues of George III are there in America? Compare the zeal of the Revolution to destroy the images of their past (and present) to that of those who would destroy the statues of Robert E. Lee for obvious reasons, and of Abraham Lincoln for the same reason: they owned slaves! The horror!
Many more Lee statues have come down in recent years than Lincoln.
But the point is the same. Those who don’t like the past have the same ability and reasons for destroying or recasting it. And if they don’t have a reason, they’ll make one (or more) up, like the Islamists who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in March 2001. Initially, they said they destroyed them because of their belief that they were graven images forbidden by Islam. When they realized this prohibition only applied to the Prophet Muhammad, the Afghans said they wanted to allocate funds donated for their preservation to feed hungry children, but authorities denied them permission. So they destroyed the 8th Century artworks in the middle of nowhere. The logic is inescapable.
People destroy history because it does not suit their narratives.
The destroyers destroy statues, books, and images of all kinds because they don't like what they say, what they represent. Sometimes, of course, people destroy history because it doesn’t serve current purposes or sensibilities. Using the present to destroy or alter the past, called “presentism,” is nothing particularly new, but it’s getting gradually worse. And it’s getting easier with each repetition. And we lose more of the past every time.
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
The Past Not Taken is about sources and what we do with them, how we interpret them, and how they can be distorted and destroyed. There’s also some discussion about…just ignoring those same sources because, well, they don’t fit.
Serious historians rarely involve themselves in the destruction of history, but they know that it often occurs for various reasons, few of them good. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Money and World War Two
What Made Japan Do That?
And Finally…
On 11 May:
868: The first dated book, The Perfection of Wisdom Text that Cuts Like a Thunderbolt (commonly, the Diamond Sutra), is printed in China. Originally printed in Sanskrit, it is a Mahāyāna (Buddhist) sutra or condensed manual that was eventually translated into many languages.
1969: The battle for Ap Bia Mountain/Hill 927/Hamburger Hill in the western A Shau valley near the Laos/Vietnam border begins. Fought over for nearly ten days, US and South Vietnamese forces battled North Vietnamese regulars, inflicting casualties that both fudged for the rest of the conflict, and still distort to this day.
And today is NATIONAL TWILIGHT ZONE DAY. Not because 11 May means anything to the series that started in October 1959 and ran to June 1964, but because…cue the music…you just crossed over into…The Twilight Zone.
How about overemphasizing/exaggerating one (or a few) select part(s) of it?.... seems like this is how it's most often done!