But even then, it’s not hard to find counterexamples. The fucktwits of the American South teaching that the Confederation was Good, Actually spring to mind. It wasn’t, and they lost hard. Yet the victors (the literal US government) have not managed to retain control over that narrative.
Reality is that “victors” aren’t always an overpowering hegemony, “losers” aren’t always doomed to genocide, historians and teachers don’t always have an incentive to lie about their own history, and how a culture tells its own history is a complicated and highly situational socio-political process.
We should be extremely wary of the many inherent biases/incentives in how we teach history, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss the discipline outright or that democracies aren’t capable of self-reflection and of properly teaching past mistakes.
maybe instead of ‘written’ it should be ‘taught’ or ‘indoctrinated’
That is… more correct.
But even then, it’s not hard to find counterexamples. The fucktwits of the American South teaching that the Confederation was Good, Actually spring to mind. It wasn’t, and they lost hard. Yet the victors (the literal US government) have not managed to retain control over that narrative.
Reality is that “victors” aren’t always an overpowering hegemony, “losers” aren’t always doomed to genocide, historians and teachers don’t always have an incentive to lie about their own history, and how a culture tells its own history is a complicated and highly situational socio-political process.
We should be extremely wary of the many inherent biases/incentives in how we teach history, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss the discipline outright or that democracies aren’t capable of self-reflection and of properly teaching past mistakes.