History

History is a thing, right? Stuff happens, people record it and later on other people not born to witness it directly get to learn about what happened before they were around. Yeah, well; to a large extent that's true, but like politics, histories have bias, depending on the recorder and interpreter of those histories. And sometimes history is completely fluid and mutates to suit rapidly changing political expediencies: flip-flopping from one state to another and back again, just like Schrödinger's moggy.

Take the Bible - there's a thing in itself - the Word of God, right? Actually no: it's a historicist curation of largely oral histories that omits anything remotely bothersome to the collective bishopric of the established church which might just undermine their rather less than spiritual powers on Earth. The same could be said of just about any organised religion bar Zen Buddhism, which isn't exactly organised anyway: politics and the secular pretty much always take precedence over the spiritual.

Take the current shitshow in Afghanistan: it's like a slo-mo re-run of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was a confluence of [French] imperialism and western paranoia about Communism that dragged on for years and resulted in some of the most horrific atrocities, countless civilian deaths and wholesale ecological destruction hitherto seen, which ended in the US airlifting its personnel out of a beleaguered Saigon at the last minute, the whole enterprise to practically no avail.

Fast forward to now and essentially ditto; except that the enemy that has prevailed in this case is a creation - a creature - of the West's own making rather than a wholly imagined threat. A generation ago we mobilised local Muslim forces against the then Soviet Union, funded by our oil-rich  Middle-Eastern friends and allies. Exactly those people who are now, in our collective definition, the forces of evil.

Now I don't, as you might well gather, hold any truck with religion where it seeks to impinge on people's basic human rights: a concept that thankfully is more generally agreed upon and recognised now than at any time in history - there's that word again - but I do hold dear that the freedom to hold religious beliefs and to worship in whatever kind of Temple a person wants is sacrosanct, in the secular sense of the word. What I also believe is that the imposition of random philosophical beliefs on those who do not believe in any of this stuff is basically wrong. And dangerous.

I recently came across something which brings misinformation and the manipulation of historical fact into politically expedient fiction, front and centre. It revolves around who actually invented the automobile and who was the first person to develop the petrol-powered internal combustion engine. When I was at school in the sixties, we were taught the canon of Benz and Daimler, the 'originators' of the said conveyance: it was taken as 'read'.

However, that particular 'historical fact' omits one salient point: neither Benz nor Daimler were individually or collectively responsible for the invention of either the automobile or its motive power. Siegfried Marcus, working at that time in Austria, was indeed the inventor of both, and by some decades. His only problem was being born Jewish in Germany, and when the Nazi regime seized power in Germany in the 1930's, Marcus was officially expunged from the history books. To lift the translation of the text of the memo that initiated his disappearance from the history of the automobile from WikiPedia:

Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

Reference number S 8100 / 4.7.4.0 / 7 1

Berlin W8, 4 July 1940 
Wilhelmsplatz 8-9

To the Directorate of Daimler-Benz A.G. Stuttgart-Untertürkheim

Subject: True inventor of the automobile 
Referring to your letter of 30 May 1940 Dr.Wo / Fa.

The Bibliographical Institute and the publisher F. A. Brockhaus have been notified that in the future, [the encyclopedias] Meyers Konversations Lexikon and the Große Brockhaus are to refer to the two German engineers Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz as the creators of the modern automobile, not to Siegfried Marcus.

I'm sad that it has taken me until the age of nearly sixty-seven to discover this particular abuse of history, but I'm not greatly surprised - let's face it, we're living in an age of fantasy and disinformation like none before; but I believe - to not would court madness - that history, religion and culture are elastic and resilient enough to survive their occasional bastardisation in the service of Mammon; provided time and diligence are applied dispassionately and objectively: this takes effort.

Soundbites and Twitter it ain't. Ya gotta put in the hard yards and read stuff - real stuff - and you need an education that imbues the critical faculties that give you the ability to parse fish from fowl: basic stuff, really: it just needs passing on from one generation to the next. No bollocks & no AI. We need reality more now than ever before, and that's saying something.