As I was sitting in my house, drinking eggnog, and flipping through the T.V. looking for a good Christmas special to watch, I noticed a film that made me stop in my tracks. The film was called Anastasia, who was the daughter to the Romanov Czar in Russia around the early 90’s. The beginning of the film starts out with Rasputin, a mystical monk in the Russian Orthodox Church, threatening to destroy the Romanovs. Then, the film cuts to the riot in which Anastasia’s family was killed and she was able to flee. The reason the film stopped me in my tracks was due to this historical inaccuracy in the film This one inaccuracy ruins the whole film, once you know it. You see, not only was Anastasia fifteen in reality, but she also died in the riot that killed her family. This begs the question: How important is historical accuracy in the modern age?
Winston Churchill once said that “History is written by the victors.” That seems especially true now, in a society where fake news is a big issue. The same goes for news that is huge, but doesn’t get reported. A good example is the protest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is still going on, despite the U.N. (United Nations) ordering Obama to stop the protest. Additionally, the people who are building the pipeline have recently spilt around 160,000 gallons of crude oil in a creek near the protest camp.
This is primarily due to a few reasons. One of the main reasons comes from a quote from the film Night Crawler “if it bleeds it leads”. This means that if the story is violent, then it will get views, because humans had to be violent in order to survive for so many years. At this point, violence is hard set in our minds. It is almost as though violence was like our job. Now, we don’t need it in order to survive. We can go and grow our own food and live off the land, anytime we need. However, people either become violent, because they enjoy it or if they are in compromising situations.
This brings us to a very violent man who you all may know as Christopher Columbus. A very large majority of people were taught at a young age that Christopher Columbus discovered America, and that’s it. Now, what we weren’t taught was that Columbus killed many natives, looted the village, and sold many of the children into slavery. Additionally, another important detail is that he didn’t actually discover America. No, Columbus discovered the Bahamas. This means that the average American student went from grade school to high school believing false history. The most common excuse I’ve heard for this is that the kids aren’t ready to hear about how awful a person Columbus was. In some respects, they’re right. However, if that is the case, then why not just teach that Columbus discovered the Bahamas and was very harsh to the natives, instead of the normal bullshit we were taught?
Well, I believe that we are taught many misconceptions about history for one main reason. We want the future generations to believe that our country is the best and can do no wrong. If we believe that our country is the best, then who would want to leave it? Nobody would, and this is apparent in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where the government can change anything from the history books to the dictionary to make the people believe whatever they want them to believe. For a more modern example of this, there is an episode of a cartoon called Star vs the Forces of Evil, where there is one day of the year where the people of Star’s civilization reenact a “battle” of humans against monsters. In reality, it was a massacre of monsters by the humans.
What am I getting at? It’s like I said before, history is purposefully changed to influence the people who believe it. It is just like the concept of group think: if enough people believe something and someone else doesn’t, then that one person will be forced to conform and believe what the others believe, due to social constructs of conformity. With this in mind, we have to consider a few things, in order to find just how important historical accuracy is.
The first thing is that due to how humans have progressed, we may never have the exact information that we strive for in historical documents. I often think of something that one of my high school history teachers said to help explain this a little better: here we learn that we won the Cold War, but in Russia they may be teaching their students that they won the Cold War. However, due to advancements, we can pinpoint a few key essential details that allow us to figure out what happened in history without interference. Then, there is the question that we have to ask ourselves if we do take interference out: are we going to like what we see?
Knowing all of this, we can come to the conclusion that historical accuracy should be priority number one if we are to improve our society and way of living. Now ask yourself, "how much do I really know about history?"
