6 Ways to Rewrite History

A member of the public cleans the Robert the Bruce Statue which has been defaced with graffiti saying "Racist King" in Bannockburn, Scotland, on June 12, 2020. (Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images)

Commentary

George Orwell is incorrectly hailed as a novelist. While he is indeed a brilliant writer, his metier would be more aptly described as a modern-day Nostradamus or seer.

Arguably, his most famous words are, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Indeed his novel, “1984,” is looking more like a playbook for the globalists than just a dystopian novel.

Orwell also said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

This can be done in a number of ways.

1. History Can Be Destroyed

One example of the destruction of culture happened in 1981, when the Jaffna Library in Sri Lanka was burnt down by a mob of Sinhalese individuals.

Related Stories

Rep. Miller: Woke Ideological Education in Schools ‘Sloughs Over History and Civics’

10/25/2023

We Must Restore ‘Veritas’ at Our Universities

10/25/2023

This was one of the largest libraries in Asia housing over 97,000 books and irreplaceable manuscripts steeped in Tamil culture.

Libraries can be destroyed as a form of cultural cleansing, but consider what could happen to modern-day culture where no physical copies are kept but only digital ones. If, or when, the cyber pandemic that is being foretold by the globalists hits, much of the world’s history will be lost to future generations.

2. History Can Be Forgotten

Take for example the Nazi Waffen SS Officer Yaroslav Hunka who was given a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament for killing Russians in World War II.

Have these parliamentarians forgotten that Canada was on the side of Russia fighting against the Nazis in World War II?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take part in a standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, who was in attendance in the House of Commons on Sept. 22, 2023. It later emerged that Mr. Hunka had served in a Nazi military unit in Ukraine during World War II. (The Canadian Press/Patrick Doyle)

3. History Can Be Defaced

An example of this is when the statue of Robert the Bruce, (better known around the world as Braveheart from Mel Gibson’s iconic movie) was spray painted with graffiti in June 2020 calling Bruce a “racist king” amid the Black Lives Matter movement.

Those who defiled the statue seem not to have studied history too closely or have they forgotten it altogether because Bruce was not involved in slavery as there was no slave trade in Scotland until after Bruce’s death in 1329.

After this incident, Neil Oliver, a Scottish historian, remarked in the National Scot, “If we’re already making token gestures like taking down Fawlty Towers and Gone With The Wind, then I do worry and wonder and I am equally anxious about the genuine motivation—is this about addressing racism and the existence of slavery in our world community, or is it simply an attempt by anarchists, communists, to eat into the built fabric of Britain and thereby to bring down British society?”

4. History Can Be Cherry Picked

There is no denying there was a black slave trade but lesser discussed is a white slave trade.

White Christian slaves were sold into the Barbary slave trade and many Irish people in the Caribbean descended from these slaves.

The Ottoman slave trade under Muslim rule included European captives with a number taken as children in the form of a blood tax.

5. History Can Be Made Up

Who now believes Bruce Pascoe’s contention that Australian Aborigines were the first “farmers” in big towns rather than hunter-gatherers?

What about Mr. Pascoe’s heavily contested claim that he is of Indigenous heritage?

6. History Can Be Embellished or Blurred

In the United States, the Civil War is portrayed differently in textbooks depending on which location your school is in.

For example, the 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth was either ignored or distanced in Southern textbooks. Yet textbooks in the North showed Booth was part of a broad conspiracy plot that implicated many Southerners in the assassination.

However, starting in the 1930s, some textbooks from the North started to ignore this conspiracy and dismissed Booth as insane.

A sculpture of a young Abraham Lincoln sits in Lincoln Park across the street from the old state capitol building in Vandalia, Ill., in a file photo. (Jeff Louderback/The Epoch Times)

Rewriting of history is reminiscent of the Stalinist bureaucracy that erased leading figures or demonised them such as Leon Trotsky. This bureaucracy usually pronounced black as white.

Thus, many historians have been raised in the Stalinist school of falsification where the truth can be warped, and hence, will often adapt their writings to current narratives.

Oscar Wilde’s words in the Picture of Dorian Gray are pertinent in describing how those in power can change history, “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.