(03-01-2025, 03:15 AM)19Bones79 Wrote: I believe that the official history of watershed events have been lies intended to cast the narrators in a suitable light. 

I believe some lies to contain varied amounts of truth while others are straight up false flags. 

As I don't believe that humanity can free itself through violence, the only way forward is for the correct version of historical events to be shared globally.

And that is one hell of a mountain would you agree?

If our civilization is built upon lies that inhibit and enslave us, then we are in deep waters right now. 

Having children compels me to understand the true nature of the threat being handed down to them.

Ah, so it's a general belief that our historical record contains many lies and that knowing the truth would set us on a better path.

What would you say are (likely to be) some of the biggest or, if you prefer, most influential lies in the historical record?

It reminds me of an interesting experience I had reading a book, "To kill a nation" by Michael Parenti. It's about the Yugoslav wars and takes the rather contrarian position that Milosevic's Serbia was the good guy (denying genocide in the process), and America was the evil imperialist bad guy that was using its global influence to push Yugoslavia into civil war in order to discredit socialism (Yugoslavia was a socialist state, and the author claims it was doing well. Too well...).

It was a book recommended to me by some rando on Reddit. I had no idea what it was about, or that it took such a contrary position to established historical record. I just pirated it and started reading because why not? Mind you, I was not at all informed about the Yugoslav wars, and didn't remember much from when they were going on. And I remember finding the book entertaining and convincing, no doubt because I had my own biases coming in (I was in a bit of a "the US is evil" phase). Then afterwards I researched the issue more and found out that the author was very much on the wrong side of history and his framing of events was dishonest. It really opened my eyes to how easily we can be convinced by smart framing and the occasional, hard to fact-check lie sprinkled in.

All that to say that yeah, history is often disputed, and it takes effort to find the truth sometimes. But I do think that when it comes to big events that are widely reported on and written about by people with different sets of biases, if we do our due diligence, are critical of our sources, and don't just take one biased guy's word for it, we can form a pretty reliable model of what happened. And when it comes to events in history that we would learn from in our efforts to shape future society, I think the historical record mostly serves us well. It's good, for example, that the established wisdom is that communism and fascism are bad ideas.