"“Fake History” is More Dangerous Than “Fake News”" Topic

" have complained a great deal about the pervasiveness of "fake news." What is less commonly spoken about is that for decades professors have also taught a good deal of "fake history." Fake history promotes false narratives, twists the facts, or omits certain key facts altogether. And it is this fake history that has established the foundation for fake news.

There are three respects in which the spread of fake history has been particularly dangerous and served as the foundation for attempts to spread fake news. First, some historians and political thinkers present extreme leftists as heroes worthy of emulation. Second, these same people too often twist history in order to present victims as oppressors and oppressors as victims. Third, these individuals often conveniently omit key statements by the nation's founders and other historical figures…"

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Amicalement
Armand

The falsification of the history of slavery, the American Civil War, white supremacism, and the Ku Klux Klan was far worse. Nearly a century of historians treated the accounts of former slaves and free blacks as lies and only reported the accounts of former slaveowners and Confederates.

That Fake History normalized the racism and racial violence in the South and contributed to our current predicament.

That Fake History appeared in every American History textbook in the country for decades. The idea that Mao was a great guy has barely touched the public consciousness and never made a splash in textbooks.

Jeynes piece commits the exact sins that he condemns.

Glorification of Mao and other communist dictators is certainly part of the fake history curriculum…Historical accounts of slaves were not necessarily discounted in favor of slaveholder accounts…that claim is fake history.

History is always "fake," in the sense that it is an imperfect attempt to record real events, often from the perspective of the victors.

According to the Sumerians, all of their neighbors were terrible nations of low character. Unfortunately for those neighbors, their versions of history have largely been lost…

Let's not forget outright falsification. When I lived in a trendy leftist part of Virginia, my son was given a history textbook which made the Bolsheviks--Lenin in particular--responsible for the overthrow of the Tsar. The February Revolution had been dropped down the memory hole. Some of the 1619 Project's statements are about equally accurate and sincere--and are now being formally adopted for K-12 curriculums.

emckinney, I can't speak for where and when you attended school. But I can say that your statement is not true of a fairly conservative midwestern town at the height of the Baby Boom. By the time I got to college, I was being handed provable lies--British cavalry charges in the Battle of New Orleans, for instance--as "slave narratives." History PhD's were treating them as facts without the slightest idea of verification.

I found it to be a good article. Thanks Tango!

Anyone willing to lie to you about current events will also be perfectly willing to lie to you about history. It is all part of the same agenda.

B

A votre service mon ami!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

The way Hindu nationalists are deleting Islam from the history of India is disgraceful.

Not to mention Muslim attempts to literally erase historical Hindu sites in some countries.

History is always "fake," in the sense that it is an imperfect attempt to record real events, often from the perspective of the victors.

Imperfect knowledge is NOT the same as 'fake' history.

Fake: not genuine; counterfeit.

Fake history is falsified or fraudulent, counter of the knowledge we do have, regardless of how imperfect it might be, created for the express purpose of supporting some claim or justification regardless of the facts.

The claim or belief that protecting slavery wasn't a primary rationale for the South seceding from the Union is a good example of fake history. It's created because it serves a purpose, a justification.

To suggest that fake and imperfect knowledge can be equivalent plays into the use of fake history.

Imperfect knowledge of history says we don't know X.
Fake history says we do know X,Y and Z when it isn't supported by the historical evidence.

I would say that fake news is simply the current fake history.

I and academics researching the military aspects of the colonial Australian frontier have encountered this problem.

There's a whole cohort of academic social historians writing about frontier conflict, which I call 'massacarists', for whom Aboriginal warriors (could there perhaps be a clue as to their social function and behaviour in the word?) can only ever be helpless, unresisting victims of coloniser aggression, and vast reams of evidence in the form of eyewitness accounts and official reports attesting to their martial qualities and conduct are apparently all mere deception and fantasy. Some members of this 'faith' even use the word 'war' in their book and article titles, but fail to see the contradiction.

And they call them social 'scientists'!

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I neglected to mention that the evidence also includes the oral histories of the Aborigines themselves.

Who had the rifles?

Hardly anyone that I'm aware of. Shotguns, muskets, carbines (increasingly breech-loading from the 1860s on), pistols, and revolvers were the favoured arms of police and civilians, and soldiers on the frontier were armed with muskets.

There was the 1864-67 ten-man royal marine garrison of the government station of Somerset at the tip of Cape York, who probably had Enfields, and an occasional civilian might have acquired a rifle, but they weren't that common.