LogFAQs > #959810053

adjl posted...

See also: "History is written by the victors." We openly acknowledge that recorded history is not a comprehensive, unbiased understanding of events. It shouldn't shock anyone to hear about theories in the context of history.

See the commonly stated lie about colonized peoples (especially Africans). "They didn't build any extraordinary monuments." They did. Invaders destroyed them and then lied about it, saying that the people whose creations they reduced to rubble had built nothing of value, because pushing the narrative that the people they were oppressing were inherently incapable of creating great things was a key component of justifying atrocities. Benin is probably the most obvious example, but if you extend your view beyond Africa, this attitude was also pervasive in the Americas. The systematic annihilation of Mayan literature is perhaps one of the grossest destructions of culture that most people know next to nothing about:

"of the thousands of books in which the full extent of their learning and ritual was recorded, only four have survived to modern times (as though all that posterity knew of ourselves were to be based upon three prayer books and Pilgrim's Progress)."

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Hi