History
is written by the victors. So said Winston Churchill. Napoleon called it a
fable agreed upon.
In
my current WIP, a pre-teen learns that what she knows of history, even recent
history, is but a version of it and not the most interesting version.
Young
people learn from books and increasingly from games and other visual media, (such
as movies) what passes for the “true” story of humanity’s past.
Even
scientific truths are augmented by storytelling. Think of the visualization in
school textbooks of what the dinosaurs looked like. These are hypothetical
guesses, periodically revised. Yet these images are taken as true depictions of
a world now gone.
The
greatest achievement of winning in battle may not be the spoils of war or avoiding
the pain of being ravaged. It may be that you and yours get to be the ones
telling the story of who did what to whom.
Somehow,
perhaps because I began my life in an embattled region, I felt the need to
tackle this thorny matter. Even more, it
seems all the more important to make younger readers consider it.
Storytellers
have an outsized responsibility, one few can begin to achieve, to have their
audience made aware of what a vantage point does to perception.
Because
perception is reality is more than a cliché. It is what we carry forward
and use to make decisions. “Knowing history as to not repeat it” misses the
point. Whose history do we know? Because, Virginia, it seems to me we are repetitiously
repeating the repeats.
