The premise is flawed, so the question cannot be answered.
The "victors" generally write history, but often the "victors" follow no one view. For example, the United States won the war in the Pacific. But the accounts of that war were very mixed. There were books such as "Guadalcanal Diary," a memoir of life on a miserable tropical island where American marines and Japanese troops forces fought the first land battle in which the Americans beat the Japanese. Written by war correspondent, it told precisely how the Marines survived. The book is still required reading in Marine Corps Officer Candidate School.
On the other hand, an Army draftee who served in the Philippines primarily as a cook wrote a very different but very influential account. "The Naked and the Dead" by Norman Mailer never won the formal praise of the military, but it is regarded as one of the great American novels.
Almost from the dawn of history, historians have set a standard to which modern historians adhere: be scrupulously accurate. One of the greatest adherents to this standard was the first person we call a historian, Herodotus of Halicarnassus. At the beginning of his work of history, he wrote: "This is the setting-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, set out so that neither what has come to be from man in time might become faded, nor that great and wondrous deeds, those shown forth by Greeks and those by barbarians, might be without their glory; and together with all this, also through what cause they warred with each other."
In English, this is a complex sentence. In Greek it contains nuances that add complexity, so that a better rendering might be: I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, here I present a record of my inquiries (a Greek word istoria). I do so because Greeks and non-Greeks alike have done great and wondrous deeds, and these men, their deeds, and much else should retain glory. And I will also tell you why they fought wars with one another.
Herodotus was a Greek, but he did an astounding job of recording the great deeds of the non-Greeks, especially the Persians, who invaded and tried to overwhelm the Greeks, and failed. Much of what we know of Persia we know from Herodotus. Further, much of Herodotus is confirmed by discoveries of fragmentary writings or archeological evidence verifying what he said. There are very few finds that have contradicted what he said. Herodotus, for example, is the foremost source of the battle at Thermopylae, where the 300 Spartans and their allies made a heroic stand against an overwhelming force of Spartans. They were annihilated, but they so moved the Emperor of Persia that the Emperor sought an explanation. Here were men who would fight knowing they would surely die. Knowing they had a chance to escape, they let that chance slip away. Knowing they would die in the morning, they groomed themselves, wanting to look good in their last moment.
For Herodotus, the battle the following morning was brutal, with the Spartans fighting to the last. However, he did not do as the creator of "300" did, trying to make the Persians into comic book monsters. They were brave men, just as the Spartans were. They knew that thousands of their own number had charged against the Spartan defenses in the narrow pass, and had been cut to shreds. Herodotus treated them fairly.
The next great historian was Thucydides. An Athenian, who had been sent into exile before he began writing his history, he could have been vehemently pro-Athens, or anti-Athens. Instead, he raised the standard for historians by discussing what evidence he considered reliable and relying on that evidence. He had been an Athenian commander, but he showed the dreadful blunders that the Athenians committed, especially in their ill-fated invasion of Sicily.
The Romans kept this same tradition going. One of the greatest Roman historians, Tacitus, was hardly generous in his comments on the Romans: "They rob, kill, and plunder all under the deceiving name of Roman Rule. They make a desert and call it peace." Tacitus may have been among the Roman victors, but he hardly gave them glowing reviews.
I could go on, but I trust I have made a point. Historians have never been cheerleaders. They have always tried to tell the truth. Sometimes, the truth becomes something they manipulate, but often history is remarkably trustworthy, especially as you learn to dissect it and read it critically.
Answered By: westsidedavid - 10/4/2012 |