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Comment by oblak | Hacker News Reader

Concludes with

> So yes, of course history tends to be written by the winners. But luckily there is a dedicated band of highly trained, poorly paid and badly dressed historians out there trying to circumvent that.

Duh. But these unsung heroes don't have the means to pump out an endless amount of hollywood movies, cop dramas, and historical pieces. Even if one is educated and smart, they don't get to decide what society, at large, has accepted as truth. Even these days, I'd think propaganda is most potent once it reaches word of mouth.

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I am a history enthusiast. I have a reason to believe this belief by populations in untruths is short term (I'd define it as <50 years, YMMV).

Long term chronicling goes beyond short term propoganda. Society eventually (IMO) accepts the truth. And the highly trained, poorly dressed, unsung heroes are to be credited for it. Unfortunately, society at large pays importance to the short term "stuff". Regardless, I feel these guys stand for correctness and should be recognised (preferably much before they die).

This may come as a surprise, but most professional historians don't accept the idea of there being a singular "truth" to be known. I'll link some different perspectives discussing this ([0], [1], [2]), but suffice to say that most historical work becomes dramatically less useful to society if the primary purposes of history are to satisfy our idle curiosity about the past and figure out some objective temporal ordering of events. Those fuzzy questions of narrative and "propaganda" are a huge part of why we do history, even if they cause all sorts of issues.

[0] https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.h...

[1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...

[2] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...

Are we past World War II propaganda yet?

I have a feeling that most of us still believe a pretty twisted narrative where things are just black and white, which frankly, can absolutely never be the case. Humans are never completely evil or completely good, but that's the narrative I hear most of the time, not just with current events but with a lot of wars more recent than I would say 200 years... for example, today, Napoleon is not considered to have been the devil himself, though for at least 100 years after his defeat, I believe the countries he briefly overpowered thought of him as such. What do you think about that?

I got the impression that the UK WWII vets had come around on the issue already, as they faded to oblivion. "Was that other guy going to put mosques everywhere? Was he going to operate a vast white slave trade? Was he going to destroy us eternally, like this?"

We are very much past most WWII propaganda. It’s not just that words like Nip have lost their negative connotations in most peoples minds, people don’t even know what they were referring to.

Some propaganda that was around in WWII continued to be pushed, but it’s not WWII specific.

We still have people believing WW1 and WW2 propaganda, or have a very cliché view of the middle ages for example. With tons of fact that have been debunked over and over again being spread.

At no point in history have we been free from propaganda. I mean various rulers in ancient time claimed that their position was literally ordained by their society’s god(s). I dunno, things aren’t always great, but we muddle along and somebody usually writes down what actually happened, or at least gives the future some hints.

The reach of propaganda has increased immensely though with technology. Everyone has a little box in their pockets and many of them use it to read propaganda many times per day. Not true in Roman times!

If you wanted to read or hear propaganda multiple times a day in Rome, it wasn’t actually hard.

The propaganda devices in our pockets point every which way, they might have a great reach, but they don’t seem to be as good at producing a unified message as, say, a state-sponsored religion.

Plus being much more educated. That might even be a bigger problem.

The idea that more educated people are easier to propagandize practically goes against our self conception and mythology but that doesn't make it less true.

I am pretty sure most people believe that their education insulates them from propaganda or lets them decipher what is true or not but that is actually part of the problem. If what they read lines up with what they want to believe, viola.

Yep. Like a virus, once an idea's replication rate is high enough, it doesn't need to be seeded by propagandists.

A rare exception to the almost universal rule that when the title of an article is a yes or no question, the answer is no.

That's the difference between history and historical memory, largely.

I trust historians even less than i trust Hollywood. Hollywood (eventually) has to make a profit, historians have no incentive except to push a narrative.

The narrative they want push is the truth. Why would they go to the trouble of inventing a falsehood about something that happened in the past? Nobody reads academic history.

Hollywood's profit motive is exactly the problem. Who wants to pay to see an uncomfortable or boring truth? Do you really look to Hollywood for accuracy?

Historians seeking truth makes sense, but this principle is corrupted when ego/credibility enter the fray. Historians are human like the rest of us and they will dig and defend their bias. Beyond that there are those who enter the profession in order to push a preconceived bias or narrative. I’m differentiating the first (unconscious bias)and the second (historical manipulation). None of this is specific to historians, historians simply aren’t exempt. Robustly principled truth seekers seem to be a small minority of the population. ~1% seems like a good approximation.

As far as the why.. every case has its own reason. But there seems to be no shortage of humans who want to convince others of how to think on a given subject.

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