Template:History story

History is a story

"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." Thomas Sowell

All of History is a story but not all stories are history. When the people no longer want to hear the truth they will make up their own history where liars are heroes.

The statist theory of history is that it is a series of events culminating around kings, presidents and rulers, their wars and schemes and politics. Howard Zinn wanted to see history as a class struggle of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers, and resisters of slavery and war warding off the oppression of the opportunistic, depraved, and sinister powerful elite. But the real struggle of mankind is the endless quest to find the truth and the willingness to accept it at all cost.

While Lenin knew in his mind that “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Patrick Henry said “We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth… For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.”

So the question for you as an individual is do you want to know the whole truth and provide for it?

To take that journey we need to understand, like Daniel Webster that “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.”

Because something is unfamiliar or strange do you have the courage to explore the facts even if they prove to contradict what you want to believe?

The truth is, History is the story of every man who lives through it and they must be judged according to the content of their character, actions, and motivations as individuals. They are the author of history.

People are complex creatures living in a sea of relationships that can manifest both good and bad, righteousness and unrighteousness, sloth and avarice, virtue and vice. Any attempt to collectivize people as those Germans, those Indians, those Irish or those Africans immediately bias the author.

That sea of relationships in which we all move include not only family and friends, enemies and allies, strangers and pilgrims but the social structures of law and government, community and religion.