The victors write history.
As an example, in public schools, our children are reading about........
Bump for later
But while the term may be relatively new, the practice is much older.
It goes back a lot further than that. Even before “socialism” had been labeled, proto-socialists had embraced what could be called “historical revisionism” going way back, even to the 18th or 17th Century.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed many such proto-socialist ideas in his writings, with an idealized return of mankind to isolated, rural villages, having surrendered or been forced to surrender civilization and history. This concept still crops up today among radical environmentalists.
Emerson proposed that these isolated, rural villages be kept in a primitive state by itinerant “Orphic Poets”, who would travel from town to town, intentionally giving corrupt history lessons to keep any town from developing or returning to civilization and culture.
As an integrated example of this, Emerson cited a Biblical stories, that he twisted to show the opposite of its original intent. In that case, the story of Nebuchadnezzar II, who is made the hero of the story, and is favored by God.
Today, and for the last hundred or more years, socialism has viewed accurate history as its greatest enemy, and something that must be subverted and eventually destroyed, so that socialism can exist and thrive. In practice, this is the same level of lying that was used for Kim Jong Il, him showing how superior he was by allegedly making eight holes in one in a single game of golf.
In other words, it is ludicrous. But this does not stop socialists one bit from broadcasting and rebroadcasting naked lies, using the big lie theory, that with enough repetition, a lie will be accepted as the truth.
1948 in 1984
It is important to note that a common tactic used by revisionists is to accuse the opposition of what you are yourself doing. As in Pelosi calling the Tea Party nazis-- it is most certainly the other way around. The German communist party partnered with Hitler in the SA stormtroopers and labor. The parallels are quite eerie.
The other essential part of socialism gaining ground is to have an audience that does not know correct history-- and to take that audience and "revise" the history to fit what you are driving at-- revisionism in the colleges was and is easily done with uninformed naive dumbasses (like occupy- funded by obama supporters, how ironic).
Have come across a site that is at first hilarious and then
very informative. It is called The Peoples Cube. Could not stop laughing at all the parody and also the true stories.
Went there after perusing Kim Jong Dead funeral.
An all red rubik’s cube is part of the site— everybody can solve the cube, cause it’s all the same color— equality of outcome in the socialists worker’s paradise.
Apparently it is run by someone who says they were formerly in agitprop for the soviets.
The first time I heard the term in graduate school was actually applied to historians of the North Pole who claimed Robert E. Peary did not reach the Pole. But I think probably the first “authenticated” revisionist in America was Charles Beard with his “Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.”