Writing Right with Dmitri: What's New About History?

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Writing Right with Dmitri: What's New About History?

Editor at work.

Marking the passage of time: it's a tradition. While some look ahead, making plans, resolving on improvements, others look back to see where we've been. That, too, is interesting for a writer.

As time passes, the glance backward changes perspective. Think about these titbits I've gleaned in the last few weeks:

  • Somebody (Netflix copywriter) pointed out that there are no eyewitnesses left to the US Civil War. Now, that should be obvious, but I hadn't thought about it. Even the Confederate widows have passed over the Rainbow Bridge. My dad used to share things his great-grandmother told him about her experiences in that war, but even those who heard it from the eyewitnesses have passed on. We're left with artefacts, memoirs and history books.
  • In a documentary on Hiroshima, an elderly man who was once a young White House aide pointed out that he was last eyewitness to the Potsdam Conference left alive. We kind of have to take his word for it when he says, 'This is how it played out.'
  • In that same documentary, a Japanese senior remarked that he was one of the very few eyewitnesses left who saw the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima that day. He was a child at the time, and of course, he never forgot that nightmare.

So what does that mean? It means that time passes. (Duh.) And people forget. And if you're not careful, the mental revision takes over, until you can't really imagine what happened at all.

Philip K Dick wrote a book once called The Penultimate Truth. In it, he imagined a world, not completely unlike our own, in which the media had falsified the history of World War II by using actors to represent the historical figures. The thing was, he said, that even those who had experienced the war came to believe that it had happened the way the moviemakers said it did. I'm not really surprised.

Do you remember Ronald Reagan? He was the president of the US once. He was also an actor, and he had a faulty memory. Reagan often made very stirring speeches about heroic events in World War II. Some of them only happened in the movies. But movie scripts were very vivid, and history is trickier than that.

I recently explained to someone why I won't watch certain historical films, as gross inaccuracy disturbs me. The person I was talking to said that if the movie was emotionally true, the history didn't matter. What do you think? Personally, I feel that these inaccuracies dishonour those who went before us, and I don't think it's fair to them, or good for us to make up untrue stories about them. If you write fiction, call it fiction.

What about the future? What's new about the way a new generation perceives the history we either lived through, or heard about from older friends and relatives? They might give us a new perspective, unhindered by the cultural baggage we and our elders carried around. But they won't be able to do that if the version of events they are handed is full of lies, half-truths, and snap judgements.

Think about it: what do you know about the Peninsular Wars? If you're like me, your first thought is, 'Well, at Talavera, Sharpe said to Wellington…' Bernard Cornwell's a great writer, and the BBC makes super television, and Sean Bean's amazing, but he didn't really liberate Spain from Napoleon. See what I mean?

This is why I think h2g2 has a really important mission in amongst all the fun: we can tell the truth. We can share our own experiences and memories. We can do honest research. We can cull the primary sources. Then, maybe we will leave the next internet generation with a decent record on which to base their assessments.

And yeah, keep watching those documentaries. Keep a notebook handy.

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

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