“History is written by the victor”, a phrase that is so ubiquitous, so well known. A phrase that does have a ring truth to that. There are enough examples that can be easily called to mind that it seems so obvious that it would be real. Would be true. Must be true.
When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, his Commentary of the Gallic Wars became the definitive narrative on the conquest of those last free peoples. Roman culture, language, and structure came and replaced the Celtic civilizations that had preceded them.
When Caracalla had centurions kill his brother Geta in 211 CE, he carried out a damnatio memoriae, a campaign to erase all evidence and memory of his twin brother in an effort to remove Geta’s existence from the collective Roman conscience.
When Shah Muhammad II of the Khwarazmian Empire, an empire that had existed 154 years and spanned much of central Asia, executed an Mongol envoy seeking to open a trade route to western Asia, Genghis Khan led an invasion force numbering more than 150,000 that destroyed the empire in a matter of three years, razing cities and killing millions, establishing the now conquered lands as new Mongol territory and sending shockwaves of fear throughout Asia and Europe.
When the US Cavalry massascred the Lakota people at Wounded Knee in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, bringing a brutal end to the so called Indian Wars, the United States was allowed to continue and finish their campaign of Native American cultural, linguistic, and religous erasure, seeking to “Americanize” the inidengeous peoples and societies that had existed, thrived, and settled the continent long before europeans had accidentially stumbled upon it in the late 1400’s.
But like many things in this world, a ring of truth does not the whole truth make. The real truth, the whole truth, is not a single clarion bell that carries across the amphitheatre, but a symphony, a cacophony, often discordant, more akin to the orchestra tuning up in the pit before the show than the well conducted performance that is presented to the audience.
But it is within that cacophony, those discordant notes, that we find the whole of history, or at least as much as has survived to this present day.
When Caesar wrote of his conquests of Gaul, it is what he left out that fills in some of the blanks. Of how Vercingetorix was able to unite the remaining Gallic tribes and stage a resistance that threatened not only Ceasar, but Rome’s hold on much of Western Europe. Or how it was a near thing at thing at the Battle of Alesia with out the timely aid of reinforcements from a young Marc Antony to turn the tide and win the day. And though Caesar had the captured Vercingetorix executed in Rome, strangled during the celebrations of Caesar’s triumph, it is not his statue that sits upon Mount Auxois in France, the site of Battle of Alesia. It is not the winner of the battle, Julius Caesar, who the modern people of Gaul honor. It is their man. Their leader. THEIR Vercingetorix.
Caracalla, try as he might, was not able to fully erase the memory of his brother Geta. Even though Geta was lost, executed and damned; his memory, his history, though incomplete, persists.
Even Khwarazm, though utterly destroyed by Genghis Khan and the Mongols, still echoes through the annals of time, as a warning, a lesson.
As thorough as their conquest of the American continent was, the United States and their sword of cultural assimilation was unable to fully conquer the Native American peoples that had lived on this land for millenia. Bit by bit, struggle by struggle, those people are slowly reclaiming their heritage, their language, their religion, their land, their identity.
Over time, this recurring theme has led me to come to the realization that the epithet “history is written by the victors” is a tool of those in power to keep those out of power depressed, acquiesent to their own subjugation. To accept their defeat. To use as a mantra that it doesn’t matter what you do, the winners control the narrative and to fight the narrative is to fight fate.
But it is the vanquished. the losers, the discordant notes in history that make the symphony. A bell that only rings the notes of the victor is a frail, meager sound, unable to fill the auditorium of the world with naught but a tinny desparation, trying vainly to tell you that weak melody is the whole story, the only story, and that the discordant notes should be silenced from the symphony.
We cannot accept this. History needs to be full. It needs to be honest. It needs to not just accept that there is more to the story, the sound, the symphony; but history, and those that love it must strive to bring those sounds back into the fold, force them to be heard, out of the pit and into the first chairs.
The notes of the victors have been heard unaccompanied long enough.
historybyjake 