Confronting Columbus: Revisionism Versus Reality

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--by Colin Jenkins

(Snip)

" Regarding the painstaking process of historiography, someone of relative importance once remarked, "History is written by the victors." A statement which echoes Plato's dictum that, "those who tell the stories also hold the power," its modern source is unclear. Still, many do not hesitate to attach these words to Winston Churchill, Britain's renowned Prime Minister during the Second World War. Considering Churchill's own history – born into an aristocratic family; his grandfather the 7th Duke of Marlborough; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a wealthy British statesman; his mother, Jennie Jerome, an "American socialite," herself the daughter of a financier, speculator, and mass landowner – and the fact that he made an early living overseeing the mass killing of indigenous Africans and Indians located everywhere from Bombay to Sudan to South Africa, such a statement would hardly come as a surprise. If "victory" is defined in terms of deploying one's immense privilege – whether socioeconomic, "racial," or national – to enslave, oppress, and murder others who lack such privilege in order to maintain that very system for oneself and generations to come, then Winston Churchill was certainly one of history's "victors."

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"The act of whitewashing history – whether literally through the domination of Eurocentric perspectives, or figuratively through blatant omission and revisionism – is certainly common practice. It is the "victors" main tool in shaping history. Historical revisionism has been defined as "a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present;" "a collective task in a nation's cultural development, the full significance of which is emerging only now: to redefine a nation's status in a changing world;" or the act "of 'truth-seekers' finding different truths to fit the needed political, social, or ideological context." In the United States of America, such revisionism becomes immediately apparent when one steps into a public school classroom, where histories of indigenous genocide and human enslavement are, at best, minimized and, at worst, utilized to stroke a false sense of superiority and exceptionalism; and where the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity are magically transformed from conquerors to "explorers," from murderers to "adventurers," and from slave masters to "patriots" and "founding fathers," all in the stroke of a pen or the voice of a lecture."

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"Historiography is the proving ground for this ongoing struggle between revisionism and reality. The ruling classes deploy their army of "traditional intellectuals," born and bred of privilege and churned through the most prestigious schools and universities, to protect the dominant ideology through a sophisticated presentation of revisionism. The working classes, struggling to maintain actualities, look upon their own ranks to create a semblance of reality as the torchbearers of truth. Hanging in the balance is the direction of society: towards continued polarization, inequities, and dehumanization, or towards a sense of being – something that cannot be realized without truth."

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"The "whitewashing" of history has an intended purpose: to control information and knowledge, to keep the "huddled masses" ignorant, and to maintain the status quo. The Churchills of the world and their keepers would have it no other way. For if history were reality-based, the immense wealth and power they have enjoyed and continue to enjoy – which has been accumulated through the stolen resources of indigenous peoples, and multiplied on the backs of the enslaved, the imprisoned, the working classes and the peasantry – would cease to exist. If history were reality-based, the hierarchical systems that keep this illegitimate wealth and power intact, and the government watchdogs that protect these systems, would cease to exist."

" Reject revisionism. Embrace reality. We have nothing to lose but our chains."

Full article at link...

http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/confrontingcolumbus.html