The Sacredness of History

History is the past, those things that have come before. Even as you read this, the words you saw before have become a part of history. The preservation of past events for future generations has been an obsession of mankind for as long as we have been able to walk upright. Oral traditions transmitted messages and testimony from one generation to the next, millennia before the creation of the written word. Admittedly, the use of oral transmission is filled with flaws, as history becomes legend, legend becomes myth, and things become forgotten, but the essence of the story is conveyed to its intended audience.

This means that, ultimately, history is the record of everything we as a people have done, and all the lessons we have learned. History is essentially the greatest story told by humanity, never ending and continuous so long as there is a single person who still lives, and never forgotten so long as a single book remains. The past defines the present and creates the future, so it is important not to forget. Without history, there is neither an identity in the present nor a future to create.

As the past is preserved through the hands of historians, this means that how the story is told is helplessly in the hands of humans. Obviously, this is a flawed process. The instinct of man is to make himself look good while making others appear much worse than they really are. While there are historians who seek the truth, there are others who seek to demolish heroes and conceal that which inconveniences them.

The most dangerous of the latter are the historical revisionists. First, I will add a qualification to this. Revision, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. Revisiting facts when research has put them in a new context is no more evil than correcting a typo on a paper. Take, for example, the dig at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. Large, clearly sculpted stones have been found here, covered in intricate carvings. What makes the find unique is the fact that the artifacts are 13,000 years old, almost three times the age of the Egyptian pyramids. Not only does Gobekli Tepe predate “history,” it defies the common state at that time by being a farming community in a world of hunters and gatherers. This first settlement in beautiful and lush terrain was abandoned when man wore away the countryside, resulting in the present-day desert and probably setting the foundation for the legend of the Garden of Eden.

However, for every revision, there is an equal and opposite counter-revision. Take the controversy over the height of Napoleon, Emperor of France. He was a bogeyman to scare British children (and adults!) while he lived…while subject to endless propaganda that he was a tiny tyrant. Unfortunately, this minor slur stuck in popular culture, despite strong evidence that Napoleon was actually a respectable 1.7 meters, the average height for his time.

Revisionism is another beast entirely. Revisionism takes the evidence of the past and discards it in favor of a completely false assertion. Take, for example, the revolting attempted usurpations of the accepted truth to Cleopatra VII, who enchanted Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonious, and Charlotte, wife of George III of England. Black authors have attempted to claim that these women were either black or of black descent. In the case of Cleopatra, this patently false assertion is bludgeoned by blunt reality; as a Ptolemy of Egypt, Cleopatra belonged to an in-bred Macedonian royal family that had no trace of any Nubian blood. Charlotte, and by extension the British royal family, are claimed to be descended from the black mistress of a Portuguese king, a claim refuted by noted genealogists.

The most heinous revisionism, of course, goes into the category of Holocaust deniers. It honestly is not enough to say that this sort of thing should be accorded the status of a crime. The Holocaust is one of humanity’s best documented atrocities; the Nazi penchant toward paperwork and bureaucracy provided an incredible amount of firsthand genuine sources that are irrefutable by any standard historical research method. What makes it worse is that these denials do not come from dedicated analytical research, but rather, from political opportunists out to improve their standing amongst their audience or to grandstand on the global stage.

The goal of a historian is to preserve the past accurately for the future. Revisionists are not historians, because they seek to change the past for their present. There is no worse nightmare for a historian than for the truth to be buried under a cascade of revisionist lies, and no worse fate for a society than to believe falsehoods without a shred of collaborating evidence. After all, if an identity is built on a lie, it's as sound as a house built on sand.