All of history is an interpretation of chronology. Only the most simple of all chronologic charts provide us with an objective account of what happened. Any attempt at explanation of those facts is essentially changing them and that is part of our human nature in a way that accepting cold facts is not. Sometimes history is rewritten with evil intent and the other times it was simply necessary. History should not be rewritten, but it is simply impossible not to do so. In order to retain the stature of the great men of old, we give them a face-lift and forget about the details. People like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are the marble columns supporting our ideals and without their image; the house would crumble.
From the very dawn of time of the western civilization, we have not shied away from manipulating history for our purposes. The glorious verses of Homer and Hesiod were considered factual for quite some time and did the fictitious Aeschylus not complain that his opponent Euripides debauched the hearts of men by writing lousy characters in “The Frogs” by Aristophanes? The Poets wrote history precisely to serve reasons that they considered noble and they were not alone. In “The Republic”, Plato paints a picture of an ideal city where so-called bad stories displaying the vices of gods should be left out in order to build a perfect character in the city’s guardians. Those men laid the foundation of our civilization and it could be said that other civilizations might not have developed in the same way, but sadly there is enough evidence to say that they did.
Several millennia ago in China, it was a stroke of genius and a fatal self-inflicted wound when the Zhou dynasty usurped the mandate to rule from their predecessors and rewrote all of history in their image. They won the battle, but lost the war, because just a few hundred years later they were the ones to be written out of history. The power stemming from being in control of history, however, demonstrates itself even in less advanced societies. The Aboriginal tribes of Australia live with a profound connection with their land. They possess no literature of the kind we know and yet they live surrounded by the stories of their past, written in the landscape of their land and soul. We have been told very little about their past, because in their world such knowledge is reserved for the oldest and wisest and we are nothing but infants in their eyes. What they tell us is not what they tell themselves. In a way, they are writing their history for us the way they wish us to see it.
All regimes, cultures and peoples write, change and reshape their history. They have various reasons for doing so. Some were doing it to influence the actions of the men of the future. Others did it to justify their right to rule. We do it to hide the uncomfortable truth. Some of the great men were despicable slave-owners who never relinquished their vice, nevertheless, our house of virtue will not stand without their support, therefore we chose not to look too closely. How is that different from the Nazi book burnings, Soviet purges or even the work of the inquisition? Morality aside, it is not different at all. We should never rewrite our history, but we do it regardless.
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