Centerfield

There Is No History Without Freedom

Outside free societies, there is no history in the real sense of knowledge of what has happened and true analysis of why big things happen.

The Tibet history I'm currently reading has several pieces of evidence that most Chinese historians don't try to understand what's really happened, and why, so much as they try to throw smoke over past Chinese limitations and problems, with the support of state torture to keep people within the party line. The Mongolian conquest of China, for example, was, they say, actually a conquest of Mongolia by the glorious Chinese Empire. The Tibetan Empire that conquered the Tang capital was actually a province of China, of course.

In unfree states, writers have to brown-nose to be published, and it's even more true of history, which can be a delicate line of business if too much truth appears. You will read first about the greatness of the writer's diet(ies), then about the greatness of its rulers, and then about the greatness of the writer's patrons. THEN you get actual stuff - but just the bits that make those in power look good. Victory will be ascribed to God, the ruler's superior relationship with God, the ruler's or the peoples' inherent and obvious superiority, anything but what really happened.

Intermediate examples I've always found interesting are Roman Imperial subjects Plutarch and the Byzantine historian Tacitus. They both lived within the limits of state unfreedom while still delivering pretty good histories, Plutarch about the fall of the Roman Republic and Tacitus about the Byzantine Emperor Julian. They had no doubt read real history, written by free men, and were able to put more perspective into their writings than normal for unfree historians.

Most historians agree that real history started with a free man with the intellectual tools, time, money to do the job, and a war to tell the job - a Classical Athenian named Thucydides. After all those years of history not being invented, it was a free man who did the job. No accident, "History of The Peloponesian War" is the first history to have real respect for evidentiary standards, and the first to use physical evidence to deduce how the past was (Ch1).