Morning!
Apologies to those who tuned in to the Horizon Scan Episode recording yesterday morning. After three false starts with technical issues where we couldn’t hear Hugh, I then had a power cut. That was our only window to record, absolute ball ache. Next episode is recording Tuesday morning.
How about this, the job of historians is to make all efforts possible to find and safeguard records of the past intact and unaltered for future reference by all. They can then interpret the facts they find however they see fit, that’s never not going to happen with information going through a human filter, so we might as well be honest about it. People will attempt to see their pet projects in what they find, but very often the slightest analysis proves easily that those findings are unsubstantiated. What’s being described here is very different, this is a deliberate attempt to ‘muddy the waters’, to lie in effect. ‘De-weaponising the past’ translates to removing or altering events/people from the past we know to be true, from the argument because they are politically inconvenient to the present. That is not doing history, that is rewriting the past as propaganda. Another example of professions, like institutions, squandering trust built up over generations in order to push a particular theme or worldview. The disrespect shown to the public here is huge. Many people who would be thrown in the conspiracy theorist bucket today when asked by government or institutions ‘how did you get here?’ Would simply say ‘I used to trust you and thought you had my best interests at heart, but then I saw you were lying to me, so I asked questions and I saw you’ve lied to me consistently, so I can no longer trust you’. On the topic of history it has been shown many times to be true that the winner of wars and those in power at the time write it and so we can expect an element of bias in their favour, they’re humans, that’s natural. An excellent way to side step some of that bias is to find as many personal accounts from the period you’re interested in as possible, go to the source. Trust human nature, which at its core has not changed for thousands of years. Instead of hearing their story though the filter of other people like chinese whispers, listen to them directly and deconflict what you hear with others telling their story from the same time period, you will always get closer to the truth. There are often instances of events that we’re told today were pivotal somehow in the past, that hardly get a mention and sometimes not at all in any direct accounts from the period, or otherwise contradict the modern established view. We should be interested to know why that is.