Facts and truth
Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall an observation from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing.
Fact-free history
In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students. War is peace, &c.
“In 1917 they say, right?”
“Just to set the record straight on your command of history: could you tell us when the Second World War took place, who was involved, and what its consequences were for the twentieth century?”
Today in history
“August 5, 1974, was the day the Nixon Presidency ended.... “On August 5, 2018, precisely forty-four years after the collapse of the Nixon Presidency, another President, Donald Trump, made his own public admission.”
Orwell on totalitarian history
“From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.”
History, rewritten
My cable company summarizes a show: “The on-going protests in the U.S. lead to the end of the war and Richard Nixon securing the presidency.”
“Past events”
From Nineteen Eighty-Four.