ANST - re: my rant on destroying legends (long)

[I. Marc Carlson]

<"j'lynn yeates" <jyeates at realtime.net>>
>an important point to remember about history ... it is based on the histories 
>that came before and often those histories have been "rectified" in major way's 
>when one power falls and another rises (the victor writes the history ...).

This is entirely true, and one of the major reasons why we need to strive 
to improve our knowledge of the truth, rather than simply rely on the same
old myths and legends for building our worldviews from.

>it's also based on the accounts of men, and as a species we often see only what 
>we want to see or what we individually deem of importance ...

Which is why I suggest that we may never be able to actually LEARN "the
truth".  If nothing else, our individual lack of objectivity can keep us
from it, no matter how close we may come.

>...understand things in a particular way by their cultures.  ergo, like you 
>mention, history is always subjective but ideally should strive for the 
>objective ... unfortunately, idealism is often sacrificed for practicality.

I'm not even sure that it's practicality.  I've been told by historians that
since we can't learn the objective truth, we should just write the histories
that tell the stories we want.  I personally find this appalling, but it's
true.  "History as artform" has never really interested me, except when it
comes to science fiction.

>in a manner of speaking the dividing line between legend/myth and what is 
>deemed "official" history is often not as distinct as most would believe.   

You are quite right.  It's often not distinct at all.  We have a lot of 
"official" cultural myths (many of them about the presidents) that are a 
major load of, um, hokum.  There are others (including a personal peeve 
of mine - the Witch Trials in the late Middle Ages) where the events have
been sensationalized to the point that the real suffering endured by the 
actual individuals who lived (and died) through the events has been utterly
trivialized by people saying (by implication) what *really* happened wasn't 
bad enough - let's make it sound even worse.

Some of these offical myths have only been expose in the past few decades
by historians willing to stand up and say "No, that's a lie".  For example,
the use of concentration camps in this country in WWII - you can call them
"relocation camps", but they were prisons for people who's only crime was
a poor choice of ethnicity.  The *myth* is that the War was fought to *end*
that sort of thing in Germany.  Now, it's easy to say that "well, we didn't
gas or starve our Japanese", and that's true.  It doesn't make it "right",
but it's true.  We treated our ethnic prisoners better than the Germans
did.

Anyway, 

Personally, I'd just be happier with more "well we don't KNOW what happened.
We THINK it was such and such, but we can't say for sure."  That's at least
honest.

Marc/Diarmaid
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