History is written by the victors

Discuss relevance to Wikipedia...

Victor Mature? Victor Borges? Victor Frankenstein?

Vic Damone?

Surely not Michael Vick...?

Victor Hugo perhaps? (that's the one I was thinking of)

Do you mean WikiPolitics or articles in the encyclopedia?

If you mean the latter, the articles on American Indian history and religion aren't as developed as the ones on, say, Christianity, because there are far fewer researchers of Native American history and religions than there are Christians on Wikipedia. I doubt that will ever change, because history is written by the victors. Thousands of examples could be given.

If you mean history as written by the victors in regards to WikiPolitics (blocked users unable to edit, leaving articles to be written largely by the victors of edit disputes), that's true, too.

In high school we were taught this, and I think that practically everyone is taught this kind of thing in high school history class. History is written by the winners.

In ancient times, loser accounts were hard to find. The most powerful ancient empires, like the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Babylonians and so forth were written about in glowing terms, without any hint of them ever doing anything wrong. Julius Caesar was a wonderful man, and Augustus Caesar was a hero. The only time when there was any discrepancy was when the empire fell.

One of the earliest popular accounts that was written by losers was the Christian Bible. Whilst the bible wasn't generally regarded as a work of fact (it is regarded as primarily a myth, as are all religious texts), it did nonetheless include some pieces of historical significance, which criticised the Roman empire (and the Egyptian empire). This then brought about many questions about what the Romans were really doing, and eventually led to a great overhall in what the Roman empire really was. This was made much easier when the Roman empire converted to Christianity and began to criticise itself, under Roman Catholicism.

As was discovered, the Roman empire had gone to lengths to change history. Amongst other things, the Romans had claimed that they had created the Olympic Games, whilst the reality was that they had stolen it from the Greeks. The Roman gods were also stolen from the Greeks, and so forth. Critical analysis of many of the issues in the Roman empire discovered that indeed they had lied and perverted truth to an enormous degree on a number of topics.

Following Empires, such as the Spanish, British, Portugese and French were criticised to some extent during their reign, but it was still discovered after their empires ended that they too had lied and had perverted history.

Since the fall of the British Empire, officially there have been no other empires. The Russian Soviet Bloc was a grouping of communist countries. The American alliances and loans to poor countries were officially countries of mutual aid. The Japanese and Germans who during world war 2 did much to control the world was officially simply a war. And the Chinese dominance in recent times is also simply just control of their own country and countries allied to it, officially at least.

But at the same time, there can be no dispute that today the 3 most powerful countries in the world (USA, Russia and China) are telling whopping great lies about their own activities. People in USA are well aware of the kinds of lies that Russia and China are telling, and people outside of USA are well aware of the kinds of lies that USA are telling. Indeed, it stands to reason that as the more powerful of the 3, USA is probably telling worse lies than anyone else.

Today, of course, we are more informed than we were 3,000 years ago, and we have historians and journalists and all sorts of people trying to find out what is really going on. This should in theory mean that history is no longer written by the winners. But in reality it simply means that they have to be more sneaky with their lies, and employ agencies to do it, and push misleading conspiracy theories as the only alternative to their way of thinking, give out disinformation, and so forth. The Iraq war (the 2nd one) was a good example of when a government failed to tell a lie, and was eventually caught out. However, for many years, that lie was well and truly hidden. It highlights what kinds of lies are really out there.

Wikipedia now is offering a new way for governments to tell whopping great lies. For the time being, it offers a great opportunity for an easier way to lie, an easier way to distort truth, which is more difficult to catch. In time, of course, we will have people who act like historians and journalists do with regular media, and people will catch these lies on Wikipedia. For the moment, however, Wikipedia's version of truth is very difficult to stop.

Bitter losers become admins... then torment the people who write history.