History is Written by the Winners

George Orwell once wrote in reference to the Spanish Civil War, “the history of the war will consist quite largely of 'facts' which millions of people now living know to be lies”, and in the end, “[those] lie[s] will have become truth.” In the same vein, Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as having said “history is a lie contested by no one”.

The reality is that the history we (in the West) know has more likely than not been written in bias with certain perspectives being eliminated from the discourse.
Think for a moment about why the majority of us in colonised countries don’t feel guilty about the reality of the actions of our ancestors and our colonial pasts? Probably because we learn at school that Christopher Columbus was a brave explorer, who set out to conquer the world in the face of superstition and adversity. Probably for the same reasons that we are taught that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone; because, in the end, history is written by the winners.

As Orwell makes clear with the above statement, lies over time become truth, especially when those lies relate to historical events. The lies get written down, published in textbooks and then taught to the ensuing generations. Again, thinking about the educations we received and the facts we were taught as facts , questions emerge about what we know to be the truth. Because, Alexander Graham Bell did invent the telephone, didn’t he?

I was reading an essay posted up to www.archaeologyonline.net by Ricardo Palleres in which he states: “It very well may come to pass in the near future that those concerned with truth will wrestle primarily with history rather than science. The obvious reason for this is that, in the words of Dr. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, author of Theology and the World's Religious History, "Humanity is more important than things. The truth about humanity is of a higher order than the truth about things.".”