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History is Written by the Whiners
After reading yesterday’s The Daily Shot — which you can subscribe to in the sidebar — I was eagerly reading up on the Turkish War of Independence, until my head ached. It’s interesting stuff, especially about the end of WWI in the Ottoman Empire. But I quickly got the sense that the Wikipedia article is largely written by Turkish partisans. Lots of stuff about the perfidy of the Allies, their lying about not planning to occupy defeated Constantinople, their bloodthirsty need to shoot unarmed civilians, etc. Eventually, I had to give up.
In the era of Wikipedia, we need to update that old line that “History is written by the winners” (or “victors” as most versions use, but close enough). On Wikipedia, history is written with the side with the biggest ax to grind. Sometimes, as regards the end of the Ottoman Empire, that’s the losing side. Other times, like in the War Between the States, that’s the winning side. It’s whichever side has the biggest number of obsessed partisans, with nothing better to do than get into editing wars on the Internet.
I think that’s largely going to translate into the Left, broadly defined.
It is not that new a phenomenon. The whole “Lost Cause” school of Civil War history developed from losers desiring to rewrite history.
One of its leaders was Jubal Early, who although outgeneraled, outthought, and outfought by Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, managed to successfully convince many that Early’s defeats were solely due to Northern logistical superiority rather than Early’s shortcomings as a leader. (For those interested in learning more, read this.)
Seawriter
“History is written by the whiners.”
That’s going straight into the favourite quotes section of my Facebook page.
For those who have not read it, here is Sharyl Attkisson article on Wikipedia’s Dark Side.
https://sharylattkisson.com/wikipedias-dark-side/
That was the winner’s view of the Allies. If he losers had written it it would have been worse.
Because conservatives have jobs and family and things to do.
Rather than the often repeated adage that the victors write the history of an event, the story of anything is actually determined by the unswerving adoption of one version of it, and the telling of that version by a determined cadre of writers. In time, the version with the most persistent adherents becomes the “truth.” – David & Jeanne Heidler in Henry Clay: The Essential American (2010)
I’ve often used the phrase, “the winners are those who write the history.”
I’d add to the Heidler quote above, this one from John Gillis, professor emeritus of history at Rutger (and, need I add, progressive):
This mission of the historian is not to study history and memory but to construct new memories of that history better suited to our progressive future.
As one joke popular in the old Soviet Union went: “The future is known, it’s the past that always changing.”
Soon, it won’t only be Jeremiah Wright who thinks that December 7 is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Hear, hear!
Well, it’s the winner’s side in the Turkish War of Independence, I’ll grant. But from what I can gather, that was pretty much the same people as the losing side in World War I, which is why I hedged a little in wording one sentence.
Although it’s outside the subject of history, this is a good place to repeat my general complaint about obsessed editors on Wikipedia. I’ve got a friend who’s a condensed-matter physicist. Prominent within his field, but not famous or known to the general public. He’s got a Wikipedia page. The entire reason for his entry’s existence is that somebody doesn’t like one particular paper that he merely co-authored in 2004. That’s the whole grouse. He has written or co-authored something like 169 papers and presentations over his career, and somebody’s so obsessed with this one paper that he created a Wikipedia entry just to trash him over it.
Even after my friend spent a lot of time trying to round out the entry with something about his actual research and career, the obsessive editors (it’s attracted new ones) kept cutting out nearly everything but the section on this paper. As a result, the majority of the article text is on just this. Try changing anything, and the guys living in their mothers’ basements fly to work and change it back.
The paper is on mutation rates and complexity, something outside his usual work, but it was presented by the lead author as having implications for intelligent design, so this has brought out the anti-intelligent-design crowd. It turns out that they are much more dedicated to Wikipedia than condensed matter physicists are.
They sound like academics. The smaller the stakes…
He’s back:
Exactly. To win these editing wars, you’ve got to be much more dedicated and focused than the other side. I want (and have tried) to help my friend get a neutral and balanced Wikipedia entry, but I have a family and a life and not much time for this.
What we need is to have as many people who are just as obsessed on these things as the other side has. The trouble is, you shouldn’t want to be that kind of person. You should want to see daylight and have a well-rounded life and a purpose outside of arguing with people on the internet.
I leave aside Ricochet, of course, given its civil nature and range of ideas. But this does remind me that I’ve got to get back to work for a bit. It may be the summer, but I’ve got hot quasar images on the computer, and they ain’t going to process themselves.
To the victor go the spoiled-brats!
I’ve encountered some pages on the war in Bosnia that read the same way. There’s just a flavor to it. The ingredients regarding genocide are factual, but there’s a subtext there of remembering that they were wronged, and that they will be using Wikipedia to justify what they’re planning to do when it’s their chance.
Wikipedia is not trustworthy. We discussed it a long time ago:
http://ricochet.com/archives/wikipedia-and-the-perversion-of-information/
In particular, Wikipedia is especially not trustworthy when it comes to Islam. In 2009 they discovered, through a number of complaints, that they had a special problem. For the previous four or five years there had been an editor who was very busy. It was either a committee or a full-time employee, who used the alias Jagged 85. Jagged 85 had put lots of disinformation into Wikipedia, to make Muslims look good to western readers. Jagged 85 pumped up the findings or discoveries or accomplishments of Muslim scientists, explorers, engineers, builders, artists and historians, using citations to Arabic sources or out-of-print works in French or Spanish, making it very hard to verify.
Wikipedia spent four years deliberately working to clean up the mess, but now not so much. The problem is that lies on the internet come around, and now they find that innocents will restore bad stuff that they had previously taken down.
And, since Wikipedia is dominated by Leftists who hate all things Western, they often don’t care or don’t recognize the errors. It is clear from the folk who follow these things that there are still Islamic editors who are doing similar edits, and, though they have become more subtle the overall result is that you cannot trust anything about Muslims on Wikipedia.
Just search for Jagged 85:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=wikipedia+jagged+85
Reading the editors talk page about that was very revealing.
Here is a fun read. This article was the one that blew the cover on Jagged 85, which the Wikipedia editors had been trying to keep under wraps.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2009/10/did-al-farabi-really-invent-sociology/
Here is a blog post from 2010:
http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html
My general rule of thumb for Wikipedia (and information in general): the more controversial the topic, the better you need to know the source.
Of course, each of us is curious about more than we are willing to devote hours or days of research to. So even with this cautionary standard one is bound to be hoodwinked occasionally.
I trust Wikipedia on two things: horticulture and pop culture.
No matter how much you care about history or battles some guy out there cares way more about the long-term consequences of Episode 3, Season 2 of Transformers on the toy line and he’ll spend every second of the day making sure that article is air tight.
Gotta do something after you’re slain by the Sword of 1000 Truths.
It is pretty good on technology also.
Same (similar? related?) people, different ideology.
Ataturk’s republic was in a lot of ways the antithesis of the Osmanli Khilafat.
Sometimes the topic does not need to be controversial to be wrong. I am currently writing a book on the Battle of Lake Erie, and I occasionally use Wikipedia for quick reference. I noticed the histories of several Royal Navy/Provincial Marine ships contained significant errors. I do not think there was malicious intent, just carelessness and using outdated sources. But it confirmed my habit of only using Wikipedia for quick reference . . . and not for serious research.
Seawriter
Early on in the development of my science-fiction series, it was going to move through history much faster than it is moving. So, I was researching some interesting characters in history. At the time, Mirabeau Lamar‘s entry had him running off with his gay male lover after his term in office.
Okay.
I’m betting it was either a snot-nosed kid who thought that was funny, or some sort of gay activist. Either way, it isn’t there now.
There was another one of a famous woman, and I don’t remember who now, but it had a weird insert saying she was a transgender male who had a homosexual relationship with his father.
Again…okay.
Certainly different ideology. I had expected, when I looked up the article, that the name of the war referred to Turkey gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire, and that it was Turks fighting Ottoman troops. I got too fed up with the ethnic and national grievances on display to read it all the way to the end, but I got the impression that it is referring to Turkey getting out from under Allied occupation.
It’s complicated. It was Turkey gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire, but the Turks were the Ottoman ruling class. The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity which included Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, and Arabs who were Orthodox Christian, Marionite Christian, Chaldean Chritian, Sunni Muslim, and Shia Muslim. The Ottoman Sultans had attempted to forge them into a single nation.
Following the end of WWI, with Wilson demanding ethnic self-determination, the Ottomans tried to go along. Turks of the Ottoman Empire decided screw that and created a secular state consisting only of ethnic Turks. It involved a deal of ethnic cleansing (not only the Armenians, but also the Greeks – many of my grandfather’s generation who came to America had been chased out of Anatolia). They also ditched the Arab portions of the Ottoman Empire.
Modern Turkey is to the Ottoman Empire what today’s Russia is to the Soviet Union. If you are interested read The Fall of the Ottomans, reviewed here.
Seawriter
The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side of WWI – and was occupied and basically divided up into zones of influence by the winners in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which was accepted by the defeated Ottoman Caliphate:
The Turkish Nationalists, led by Ataturk, did not accept the Treaty of Sevres, and after the War of Independence they signed the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which basically created the borders of present day Turkey:
Here’s a summary of the two treaties and how they differed.
It was Ataturk’s Government, not the Allies, that abolished the Caliphate and exiled the Ottoman family from Turkey.
One way of describing the end of the Ottoman Empire is the triumph of ethnic identity politics over a broader Ottoman identity – not just in the Balkans, but in Anatolia itself.
Forming ethnoconfessional* states in heterogenous areas (basically all of the former Empire) may have been inevitable, given the beliefs of the time, but caused immense suffering – depending as it largely did on ethnic cleansing of one kind or other.
It’s left a residue of bitterness, and imho explains all these countries’ slightly crazy denial of their remaning diversity.
(* eg Greek speaking Muslims went to Turkey in the population exchange, and Turkish speaking Christians to Greece.)
Brilliant.
And it makes sense if you break it down economically: Who has the most incentive, the most value to gain, by presenting history in their own way? The whiners.