Winning over history

Who do you think was the most brutal tyrant? Most people would say Hitler, though most (non-Russian) historians would concur on Stalin. Reasons: “Hitler caused the Holocaust and the Second World War” or “Stalin killed 20 million of his own people”. But there might be a reason for why most people think this way : Propaganda and bias which is meant to show them as tyrants.

“History is written by the victors”, once said Winston Churchill, and Leon Trotsky, right after the Bolsheviks had took power, told the Mensheviks, the losers, to rot in “the garbage-heap of history”. So according to these experienced people, history, ideas and information is dominated and controlled by those in power!

But let us experiment this hypothesis on ourselves: of course we know about the Holocaust and the Purges, but how much of the victor’s atrocities do we remember? How well known are allied area-bombings, conducted not for tactical bombardment, but to intentionally target the civilians. Populous cities like Dresden, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, Schweinfurt, etc. were targeted multiple times, the bombing of Tokyo with incendiaries and napalm claimed more lives than the Little Boy, which reminds me weren’t the Atomic bombs, or any of the above tools of “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity” and thus the people in charge should have been prosecuted under the Charter of International Military Tribunal under the Nuremberg Trials?

Eric Blair, more widely known as George Orwell, wrote an essay conveying his ire on the British propaganda toward the Soviet regime at the time of the Second World War. He stated that at the time, Stalin, who was then known as ‘Uncle Joe’, was portrayed as a good leader, people in Britain were aloof of the details of the Purges, and the details of the killing of thousands of innocent Polish officers by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest were massively covered up. The British sent a batch of Cossacks to the Russians in full knowledge that they were to die in the hands of the Soviets. Events like these and the hushing up of the Russian conduct in the Warsaw Uprising, where they could have prevented numerous Polish and Jewish casualties is definitely an act against the Geneva Conventions. Still they are justified and most of us know nothing about these acts.

Selective information has so skewed our way of thinking that Japan, once it became an ally of the United States was sympathized with and horrors such as the Rape of Nanking are seldom remembered. The Second World War was just one example of how much information can be controlled and could further be used to control us, it is just one domain of knowledge in which information received by us is be filtrated and biased and it could also true for other areas of knowledge.

Even now, how credible is the media? How impartial is the information we receive? For how long can we allow ourselves to get enmeshed in the knowledge imparted by influential entities, which for “sundry weighty reasons” might influence us away from the truth? The only solution I find is in skepticism, to be impervious to any source of information till it can be and has been cross-referenced by a source of a different perspective. Ironically, doubt seems to be the gateway to truth and belief to be the trap into indoctrination.

By Ashish Kumar, 1st Physics