Interesting read, but I don’t think the initial example and the following are very much connected. The shift of opinion about ww2 has presumably happened without fabricated evidence or misinformation about factual events. USSR and USA played a very different role in the defeat of Germany, so asking “which contributed the most” is sensitive to shifting narratives and highlighting of different events. Similar questions from more distant past: who was to blame for ww1? Was Napoleon spreading modernity and equality in Europe, or ruthlessly subjugating neighbors? Were the middle ages a dark age? Was the western Roman empire brought down by barbarians, or mainly by other factors? For all these you can have different answers without fabricated evidence, just by shifting some facts forward and neglecting others. That’s not to say that having tamper-proof historical sources is not important, just that it’s not sufficient. And personally I think most manipulation happens at the broader narrative level (in the past and in the present).
I meant the initial example as a justification for investigating the past in the first place, as a reminder that you don’t need to be a full-on conspiracy theorist to be suspicious of the historical record. When you say “shifting some facts forward”, I would also count that as the victors altering history. Had the US collapsed instead of the USSR, I suppose the facts that would be shifted forward wouldn’t be the same.
Interesting read, but I don’t think the initial example and the following are very much connected. The shift of opinion about ww2 has presumably happened without fabricated evidence or misinformation about factual events. USSR and USA played a very different role in the defeat of Germany, so asking “which contributed the most” is sensitive to shifting narratives and highlighting of different events. Similar questions from more distant past: who was to blame for ww1? Was Napoleon spreading modernity and equality in Europe, or ruthlessly subjugating neighbors? Were the middle ages a dark age? Was the western Roman empire brought down by barbarians, or mainly by other factors? For all these you can have different answers without fabricated evidence, just by shifting some facts forward and neglecting others. That’s not to say that having tamper-proof historical sources is not important, just that it’s not sufficient. And personally I think most manipulation happens at the broader narrative level (in the past and in the present).
I meant the initial example as a justification for investigating the past in the first place, as a reminder that you don’t need to be a full-on conspiracy theorist to be suspicious of the historical record. When you say “shifting some facts forward”, I would also count that as the victors altering history. Had the US collapsed instead of the USSR, I suppose the facts that would be shifted forward wouldn’t be the same.