Hey y'all. So I was just thinking, as always, but this time about the saying that it's the victor that writes history. This is somewhat untrue. It's certainly true if you're talking about a conquering nation that annihilates another one, but really, if anyone is alive of the defeated nation, then they have the ability to write.
Granted, if you're part of a defeated nation, how willing are you to write about it? I've been reading a lot about Communism (I have a college thesis coming up), and one of my readings is the Gulag Archipelago. In it, Solzhenitzen notes that he wanted other people to help him write this testimonial, but only one person dared to do so, the committed escaper Georgi Tenno. If a person has been through crap, they are apparently reluctant to write more about it, it would seem.
So think about this for yourself: do you think you would want to write about something like that? I would, probably because I'm so Irish that nobody can tell me what to do. I'd like to write about the only "oppression" I've been through, but how many people in the end are really reluctant to talk about growing up a huge friggin' nerd? Are you reluctant? Have you written about any "oppression" or oppression that you've gone through?
That's the trouble with growing up in America or other places like that. We have basic freedom to whine about anything we want. Because we live in such an open place, it's not atypical to hear about problems we might not have known existed. We are not generally punished for having opinions, except in a few cases that I could mention but not without getting overly political.
That brings me back to the saying. Thing is, it's not necessarily the victor that writes history. It's the history writer that is the victor, no matter who really won. Think about the ancient past. What do we know of it? Only the documents and artifacts that have survived it. There is no evidence that humans were ever "cavemen" but because ancient drawings were done in caves, people think that our anscestors were cavemen.
Think also of Communism. It failed in every single country where it was implemented. Cuba's dollar used to be one on one with the American dollar. It's not even close now, and I've even heard of a guy who killed himself over a stolen cow -- he didn't dare be responsible to the government for its loss. North Korea is trashed and totalitarian. China, after having been abused by their Communist leader Mao, is slowly becoming more and more capitalist by following Hong Kong's example. Russia collapsed under the weight of Communism, and is still recovering twenty years later. All the little countries absorbed by the USSR in its day now struggle with previously nonexistant cultural conflict, because Communist leadership kept on switching around ethnic groups like it was playing chess.
After all these failures, guess what isn't dead? Communism. I even had, horror of horrors, a girl come up to me and actually say that we should have given Communism a chance. Guess what? We did. And it sucked. Socialist writing continues, and says things like Stalin and Lenin manipulated true communism or Marxism, but of course real life is going to be worse than someone's picture perfect view of life. After all, it wasn't good people who believed in Communism that first discovered its flaws, it was evil men such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao. They knew that by making a world where everything was provided for everyone according to their need, then all power would go to the providers. It's actually quite obvious, obvious enough for me to say, completely appropriately, "herp derp, you nerp".
So basically, the only victory over communism is communication of history and logical principles. It's wrong to condemn free speech, unless said speech is yelling "fire" in crowded theater. The question then becomes, how close can speech get and not be equivalent to yelling "fire"?
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