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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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First the Anne Frank graphic novel, now this comment. Fascists really hate the "narrative" of historical truth.
I don't know, historical "truth" is all about focus, editing and which documents, details and context are hidden, lost, forgotten, censored, omitted, overlooked, not even recorded. In the end it is a narrative and can be shaped by bias like a newspaper: you need to read a few different ones to get an idea of what actually happened, unless you lived it and even then it's interesting to see what it looked like to others. What is important is that there is free access to historical documents and information so you can ask questions that were never answered before in textbooks and still get answers instead of an uncomfortable void in some parts.
Okay, but this actually happened and is well documented. The event is not under question.
Yes, this case is pretty clear and the intentions and alternatives are clear too as far as I can tell, it's a classic imperial strategy of homogenisation.
PS: What I was thinking of in the comment above when I wrote that was the Wikipedia article on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and how the Soviets were apparently chummy (not just non-aggression) with the Nazis before being invaded by them (1st order correction to what I used to think: that they hated each other) and there is actually a 2nd order correction to that correction from documents found showing that Stalin tried to form an anti-nazi pact with France and the UK, but it was rejected in favour of appeasement, which puts that in a different light too...everyone comes out of it looking foolish.
this is the longest, most mentally gymnastics holocaust denial I have seen in a long time
Actually, I was talking about the way authoritarians manipulate history by denying people access to information, but you can shoehorn whatever you want, sure, lots of other people seem to have done so too looking at the downvotes, lol. The truth is what you can prove, not reality. There is proof of the Holocaust, but that is what we are aware of. Lots of other things happening at the time, like the Crimean Tatars goes unnoticed until focus moves there.
translated to normal: "I was talking about the way (((they))) manipulate history"
I think you're being unfair - I legitimately think they're talking in the abstract here.
I mean ya, sure, I agree they are referring to it in the abstract, but does simply referring to it in the abstract really change the meaning of what he is saying? other than, it allows for one to basically offhand discredit reality and atrocities by insinuating that some shadowy "they" is controlling the global narrative.
No, I mean, I think they're talking about narratives in the abstract. There was a great deal of debate about this in the early 90s, over the role of historians in creating narratives.
To an extent, yes, but at the same time, I find that a lot of people who started these debates did so out of what I can only describe as an attempt to reconcile their beliefs about the east block and the stories coming out of the region as the soviets started losing control. and in doing so ended up arguing for the same conspiratorial world view that the holocaust deniers employ, in part because these arguments came about in collaboration with holocaust deniers. caugh caugh Chomsky
Maybe in the sense of broader political discussions, but the shift in historical academia towards the importance of narratives and not just facts was very much a reaction to the triumphalist 'end of history' mindset of the early 90s. I would also like to note that Chomsky is a linguist, and very much not a historian or anyone with influence on historical academia. despite his... prominent and questionable political following.
it's not even the shift towards narratives that is the issue with the reasoning of the guy I was responding to, but instead the conspiratorial framing
It's true that it was official policy in soviet-colonized spaces to erase the local culture and power structures, replacing it with Russia's, and paper over what happened with self-serving stories as the story of record. It's also true that this is a thing they have in common with every other colonizer; just as the Europeans colonized the shit out of the Americas, Russians colonized the shit out of the Soviet republics (and their own territory).
Yes, the process of colonizing in this fashion involves the deliberate destruction of inconvenient fact- but saying "we can't know the truth" participates in its erasure.
I didn't say we can't know the truth. I said the truth can't be known if you can't ask questions and don't have free access to investigate the dark past. Some dude even called me a holocaust denier 🤡