Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed
upon?' History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the
loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which
glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. The losers do not live to tell their tale.
History is always written by the victor and never by the vanquished. This is fair game because generations to come
must know how success was achieved and not how their ancestors failed.
Have you ever imagined why history has treated Alexander and
Hitler so differently? Alexander the
Great is perceived generally as well, great. Alexander stabbed and slashed
through so much land and so many people yet remains a hero for his conquering
ways. Hitler on the other hand did almost exactly the same, annihilated the
jews and is painted as the devil’s incarnation! Both leaders had a magnetic
personality and an enviable attitude. The two, although centuries apart,
steamrolled opposing armies and inflicted untold hardships and miseries on the
civilian enemy population. Yet to this day Hitler is remembered as among the
most vilified men on the planet while Alexander is a sterling example of
courage and demonstrated a superb ability to forage for his army's food despite
ineffective supply chains; something Hitler was unable to overcome in the
diesel department. How heroic would he have been portrayed in victory I often
wonder?
Cleopatra ruled Egypt exceptionally well for two decades. She was charismatic, spoke many languages, was skilled in the sciences and attracted a lot of scholars to Alexandria. But as soon as she and her lover Anthony were defeated, the first Roman emperor Augustus had history rewritten. Her statues and carvings were destroyed and his historians portrayed her as a siren and seducer and not a scholar and piticician that she truly was.
Up to two decades ago, the history of America was taught as
the wanton aggression of the Native Americans, the so-called Red Indians, on
the gentle white settlers who simply wanted to farm and raise their families in
a wide land that had room for many people. This was the predominant view of
Christians and of educated Europeans in America. The real history was one of
the genocide of native peoples and their cultures in a greed for land and
power. The so-called savages honored all treaties. The so-called civilized
white man didn’t honor any.
The European history of Africa followed similar prejudices,
with the native blacks as uncivilized barbarians that had to be civilized by
the white Europeans. That the Africans did have venerable and rich old cultures
and were really the target of exploitation and genocide was all covered up. The
same phenomenon occurred throughout the colonial world, including Asia, where native
peoples were subjugated and their cultures denigrated. Like the Africans, some
Asians were turned into slaves or serfs, uprooted from their land and taken to
foreign countries and commercially exploited. This was also done in the name of
civilizational advancement through Christianity and European culture. That is
how over a million Indians ended up in the Caribbean in Trinidad and Guyana.
Stalin's pogrom and Hitler's genocide were both brutal. Yet
nobody views Stalin in the same light as Hitler, even though Stalin was
responsible for the death of about 20 million people and that too not through
war! People still name their children Stalin, but nobody names them
Hitler. After dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the
Americans lost the Second World War, they would have been treated as war
criminals. Instead they won and wrote history. Same might go for
German. They leveled Dresden. The same with Mao too, the great cultural
leap forward was brutal, but people still refer to Mao as the venerable
chairman. Of late Iraq was attacked and bombed back to Stone Age by the western
allies because of some fictitious weapons of mass destruction which were never
found. Yet historians are not asking any tough questions to the victors but are
busy vilifying Saddam Hussain, why……because history has a history of treating
the winner with respect and kindness.
The European treatment of India was the same as that of
America and Africa, starting with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, who
brought the cruel ways of the inquisition to India. The Dutch and the British
followed the same pattern and the Muslims rulers were then responsible for religious
and economic exploitation as well as genocide and plunder. But as the British
scholars wrote the history of India and the British educated Indian elite took
the baton from them and our history has always been very kind to the invaders.
The native Indians did not lose independence only, they lost the opportunity
and the authority to write their correct history. Liberals and leftists in
America sympathize with the native cultures of Africa and America and their
need not only for correcting historical accounts but also for restoration for
historical wrongs. But, strangely, leftists in India still vaunt the colonial
view that India was uncivilized before the British and denigrate their own
native traditions! But why have we not corrected our history even 68 years
after our independence is a question which baffles one and all.
History is not a material science like physics that deals
with hard facts and even physics textbooks are continually being updated. The
West has often tried to give its version of history the finality of science,
but political changes since the end of the colonial era have revealed the
biases behind its accounts, particularly of Africa and Asia. The western
account of history cannot be given the finality of the physical sciences and
should be expected to change radically over time. Victor’s power to write
history is in inverse proportion to the elapsed time between the end of the war
and today, but victor’s power to influence the general perception of the
outcome of the war remains stable over time. So, no matter if the winners write
a distorted version of a conflict it's just a matter of time until the defeated
version hits the bookstores (or the Kindle Store), but that doesn't means that
the general perception of the outcome would change after all the facts are
balanced. You will just have another point of view……..but even that is better
than a prevailing wrong view!
No comments:
Post a Comment