The Truth about History

You know that saying "History is written by the winners"? Couldn't be further from the truth. History is written by the losers. It is also, more often than not, written by losers. This is why, for example, I had one professor tell our class about the Ukrainian famine, and how it was an unfortunate accident resulting from bad planning in a tough year. Yeah, Stalin had nothing to do with it.

I'm not going to make this into a rant about commie bias in the academy. Frankly, I don't care. My parents both did their time in good ol' fashioned soviet propaganda schools and made it out just fine, I figure I can handle the Ivy League without whining. It's just that you should be aware that a great deal you read in mainstream history texts is a lie or a distortion written by communists or their sympathizers. That's why we never stop hearing about the evils of the blacklist and crazy Joe McCarthy, yet never hear anything about all the honest-to-goodness Rusky agents in Hollywood and the government. Or about what America's professors were really saying about the USSR before it fell. Or the truth about Carter (who was not, as one of my professors insists, just a very kind and nice man who wasn't cut out for the presidency). And don't even get me started about Vietnam. (Okay, so it did kinda turn into a rant about commie bias in the academy - sorry!).

That's probably the greatest thing about the blogosphere. This time around, leftist idiocy, subversion, and treason won't just go down the memory hole, it will be archived forever. That's why part of me actually enjoys all this global warming hysteria - fifty years from now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop gloating, and I'll have all the heartfelt pleas from the Huffington Post to back me up.

Winners go out and lead productive and happy lives in the real world; losers have no lives of their own, stay in the comforting uterine warmth of the Academy (except the really dumb ones, who can't crack grad school and end up working for the New York Times), and devote themselves to writing with bitterness about the lives of others.

Only now, finally, thanks to the marvels of the blogosphere, do we finally get a chance to see history as written by the winners.