I am a documentary film maker and I believe that modern day accepted version of history is faith based nonsense religion. It is very hard to almost impossible to predict what happened long ago in the past even as late as a few decades ago historical accounts are mostly assumptions and wild guesses. To further illustrate my point I made a documentary about world war II that shows it through an alternative lens yet remains as accurate as any other modern day counter part even though the accounts are radically different. For all we know History played out completely differently then we realize and in all likely hood it did.
Indeed. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, history is merely a pack of lies on which everyone agrees. The point is that, in order to 'understand' history, we must construct a
narrative out of it. And like any narrative, our own chosen historical narrative can only exist by omitting awkward facts or events which don't 'fit in' with that narrative. In other words, the past gets edited and censored until we can make sense of it. History, in that sense, is written by the victors and one of its functions is to act as a retrospective justification of the actions of the victors. As Churchill famously put it, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." Until it gets retrospectively edited and reshaped, the past is just a bunch of stuff that happened. Once our chosen narrative has been constructed out of it, then it becomes
history, from which the appropriate 'lessons' can be drawn.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Marx (Groucho)