Rewriting History!

History as Viewed by the Victors…

History is typically viewed from the perspective of something happened that had an impact on something else happening. As it is portrayed for the most part by scholars and intellectuals, it is mostly dry and boring. Aside from the dates and figures, none of us really knows much about any event. For the most part, history becomes a mélange of facts and figures used to explained a series of events that are blamed on nationalistic tendencies or demands for power.

But how can history be boring? Just look at what has happened in just a few generations. Not only has much of our lives changed but we have engaged in Wars all over the globe; we have had hostage crises, recessions, political challenges, threats to our way of life too numerous to mention. So something is wrong in the way we tend to look at things.

More often than not, we don’t look for prime causes. We accept some manufactured connections that may or may not exist and accept what the historian wants us to believe for the most part because it fits into a nice, comfortable pattern. And It doesn’t get much beyond that!

Hogwash!

Once an Austrian Supreme Court judge explained history to my graduate class from the perspective of the mistresses of royalty. This put history in a whole new perspective. In a flash, it occurred to me that if you can talk about history from the perspective of a mistress or a series of mistresses, why not take off the gloves and go beyond all of those artificial limitations and probe for what really causes history to take place: Human motivation.

This is kind of a whole new way of thinking about history. But it so fraught with cynicism that nobody wants to touch it. However, the truth remains, that if you really want to get beyond the cursory text which is oftentimes very predictable, you really need to view history through the prism of simply who has the most to gain and what is that precisely.

. In the end isn’t that what history is all about? But what history books have ever explained history from that point of view? How many have started with the motive and developed the links between motive and action? Moreover, without knowing the imbedded motives of the prime-movers, you lose out on the vital subtext.

But the subtext is what it’s all about. All of the real meaningful stuff gets lost when the victors, who write the books in the first place, tend to excise the content when it gets in the way or simply because there intellectual focus or sophistication doesn’t allow them to plunge into the muck and mire that describes what really happens in life and in history.

History is not really clean facts and figures; it is oftentimes ugly, it is brutal, it is often chaotic; oftentimes it masks the reality of intentions, motivations or ego…
But until we understand the nature of what motivates the principal players we shall never truly understand the nature of history or our role in it.

I am sure that professional historians will descend on me like a plague of locusts for my cynical point of view; nevertheless it has much to commend it… And perhaps if we had a better understanding of history from such a perspective, we would be in better shape to guide the ship of state.

But, nevertheless, right now, we are looking for explanations and we are all wrong in our expectations. Many of us are asking the wrong questions because we don’t understand what the motivating forces are. To do that, we have to probe the cast of characters and understand their backgrounds and the things that motivate them to do what they do. Only then can we truly understand the nature of our own history.
And what we find, we may discover has little to do with maintaining our Constitution or our form of government.

Les Aaron