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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.
Published in General
A slightly different view: history is written (and promulgated) by those who have vested interests in their point of view becoming dominant.
“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.)”
I’d known, just barely, of the forcible exchange of Moslems and Christians after the war, but I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which the break-up of the Ottoman Empire resembled that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at about the same time. I’ve learned a little bit about the latte, because my wife is from Suceava, Romania, which is in the Bucovina region along the present-day Ukrainian border. Bucovina had been taken from the Ottomans by Austria in the 1700s, joining the rest of Romania only in 1918, with the fragmentation of the empire.
It’s interesting to read of the dominant nationality of an empire effectively push for independence from it (I know this is a simplification). It’s like England wanting to leave the UK, Russia wanting to leave the USSR…well, the latter happened, and there is some discussion of the former.
Anyway, as someone who detests both empires and ethnic cleansing, I find it very hard to read the history and cheer for one side.