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.
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.