"history is written by the winners"

I know the general reason people say this is to call attention to the bias of accepted narratives, a good thing.

But first: the narratives of the marginalized are marginalized, not non-existent. You might, sometimes, have to work to uncover them, but a lot of the time they aren't really even hidden, people just don't look?

People sometimes define history as "the things I was personally taught, and remember, in school" & idk, this seems to me a remarkably incurious way to argue for intellectual curiousity.

But bigger than that, it's just… not fucking true? Look at the twentieth century and tell me that history is written by the winners.

sits in here

love me some historiography

Nationalism and state propaganda can weaponize the memory of defeat just as easily as triumph

oh my god i never thought about that but what a good point

if history were written by the winners i wouldn't have to see confederate flags on trucks in fuckin washington state

And maybe this is just like— US bias, Anglosphere bias, because the United States doesn't have that sort of foundational loss. But friends, the reason why some people are just kind of waking up to the fact that we have military bases named for traitorous generals is because the Confederacy fucking won the history.

mfw the Nazi generals literally wrote the history of the war in the East to the point that people in the west still believe a good amount of their bullshit mythmaking

There is a reason states like Missouri, became more "Southern" after the defeat of the CSA!!

But it doesn't stop there, that's just easy example #1

Where would the Afrikaner Broederbond be without the memory of the Boer War?

or the whole historiographical argument about Versailles being an exceptionally harsh treaty?

Why do you think the government of Israel brings every visiting foreign dignitary on a trip through Yad Vashem? The Chinese suffering during their "one hundred years of humilation" during the first part of the twentieth century is a cornerstone part of how the CCP justifies their regime today

Grief, victimhood, loss, these are potent, powerful, potentially unifying things. And to be clear even though most of these particular examples are not what you'd call positive, I don't think "history of the loser" is necessarily the start on the road to authoritarianism.

I just want to illustrate that histories of loss or victimhood can be incredibly powerful, and so are also often enshrined as the dominant narrative.

I've totally been thinking about this lately when I've heard people say that

the Confederacy, specifically

yesssss

yeah ia. not to get bogged down in a specific example but like

i feel like mainstream historiography in the US tried to... mm. idk how to really put this, but fully grappling with the CSA as what it really was would be holding up a mirror to a lot of foundational problems with america that reactionary historians already really try to rehabilitate or ignore

and that strain of thought goes hand in hand with...well, a lot of things, but what comes to mind is the emphasis on reconciliation that ended up cutting Reconstruction short. like, of course reactionaries latch onto the memory of the confederacy, it ended up being in the "best interest" of the established order left after the war to soften it

To do whatever work the narrative needs to do.

There's a book called Race and Reunion that is basically the text about how the memory of the war changed in the decades after the war

i think the myth is useful in reminding us that what we accept as history may not be the full story, and to encourage us to look beyond just main narrative

because in the decades after the civil war there were plenty of unionists trying to "wave the bloody shirt"— not everyone was for reunion, or the kind of reunion we got. (after all it wasn't really a war of northern aggression, and even if the north won the war, the experience of trauma was still real and terrifying and left people feeling victimized)

the thing is I've seen people more than once defend the CSA using this "history was written by the winners" truism that isn't a truism. if you apply it as a rule, it's not going to be doing anything for you.

sure, i don't know much about what's going on with the CSA these days, but as a saying and not as a truism, it has its uses

esp in the context of colonialism when ofc colonizers try to justify their oppression by saying well these ppl are savages anyway, and only now am i learning more and more that this is patently untrue

if you want a better truism it's that history is written by writers— it's changed some in the past few decades but there's definitely a bias toward written records over say, oral tradition, and that has its own set of privileges and biases

the idea that history is necessarily "written" is perhaps the most problematic part of that phrase

but history as an academic construct blah blah blah 19th century germany blah blah professionalization, that's a whole other tangent.

yeah like, history is written by the victors is supposed to be a pithy little saying to remind you that you need to be mindful of the authorship of the history/primary documentation they're reading so you can do your best to account for their possible biases. Not that all history everywhere is written by whoever won the war.

/rambles

but one thing I encounter a ton re: colonization (and keep in mind I am primarily a united states historian, so my thoughts on this topic are colored a lot by Native history in particular) is that there's a supposition that these non-colonist narratives are forever lost, and don't exist

b/c only the "victors"/colonialist stories are preserved, and that isn't true. there's a problem of seeing Others as a "people without history", and that's obviously a kind of marginalization that begets further marginalization.

but obviously my distaste for this phrase and how people don't really think about it isn't an argument against facing east from indian country

yup! and i'd go so far as to say the problem of seeing others as without history or with overly simplistic history is not just a byproduct of colonialism but one of its most vicious tools