Hey Doug,

Revising history is the only game in town when you find out it's been mostly
a fabric of lies woven to support a particular view of the world. The widely
accepted theory of history is what was written by the winners. That's what
we're given, and presented as fact. More often than not, it ain't so. We all
know that, there's no work involved in reading history books and keeping
private reservations to ourselves about the truth value of what we're told.

The work comes in when you try to dig up the stories of the losers. There is
good reason to believe that there's more to be learned from the material
which never made the history books, because it conflicts with the official
version of what went down. For example, my researches on West Florida
completely put the lie to the official version of history, which says the
West Florida patriots beat the Spaniards, then asked the United States to
come in and rule. The official version leaves out the West Florida
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the War Powers Act
declaring a state of war between the West Florida Republic and the invading
United States. Some historical revisionism is called for in that case,
n'est-ce pas? The prejudice is in the eye of the beholder. That this
particular bit of history concerns my native land, and my own ancestors, does
give me a vested interest in the case.

I specified modern racism, which is an institutional and organized affair. It
differs in scope and in intent from the feeling that my tribe is better than
your tribe because it's mine. That is not racism, even if the tribes differ
in their appearance or their language. Racism is a deliberate policy of
systematically denigrating and depersonalizing a particular people for
purposes of exploitation. It is found in the historical record only in
connection with monotheists, to my best recollection, so your accusation that
I'm a prejudiced revisionist is ill-founded. Find a fact and come back.

The Greeks would call other folks "barbaroi" but that was mostly sour grapes
because these people, of Boeotia, Macedonia and the Balkans, didn't want to
be Greeks and wouldn't let the Greeks get around them. The Macedonian
barbaroi named Philip and Alexander pretty soon taught the Greeks about
inferior savages. The Balkan barbaroi were casting metals while the Greeks
still learned to chip flint. History is a collection of dead peoples' prejudice.

Our view of history is extremely narrow, because it has been filtered through
one of the greatest disasters ever to befall humanity, the Roman Empire.
The Romans conquered everybody within reach, but as a rule the peoples
subdued by the Romans each had a more accurate calendar, better
astronomy, superior mathematical abilities, more expressive writing,
a longer history and greater cultural creativity than the Romans.
All that was lost. Who were the savages?

Does every empire fit this pattern?
History doesn't need revision, it needs revolution.

Thoughtfully,
Johnny Thunderbird
Day of Infamy
http://www.oocities.org/~jthunderbird/infamy.html