"Those who tell the stories also hold the power." - Plato
My apologies as yesterday's post was written in haste, contradicted itself and didn't make any discernible sense whatsoever. I swear that the reason behind that train wreck of an entry containing 0% intelligence is 100% justifiable and if that content somehow diminishes any credibility that has been afforded to me at any given time (yes, I know that's a stretch), my distraction was well worth depriving you of reading material with substance. So please forgive me as I go back and do a bit of housecleaning and revise a little history along the way.
James McPherson, the president of a really important organization that nobody has ever heard of, wrote to describe historical revisionism as "a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present."
That seems a bit heady to me. I prefer to consider historical revisionism as a means to deceive or a byproduct of denial. Or in my specific case, to correct a literary injustice.
"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." - George Orwell, 1984
Known as the "Fires of Qin", between the years 207 and 210 BC, the Qin capital city was sacked and burned, resulting in the destruction of the imperial library and official archives containing volumes of historical documents and literary records. Combined with the deaths of many scholars of the time, the "burning of the books and burying of the scholars", resulted in an incalculable loss to the history of China and to human knowledge in general. Centuries worth of knowledge and insight lost to the world, culturally significant accounts completely wiped from the face of existence forever.
Throughout time, there have been many examples of historical revisionism. Unfortunately, the history we've learned from that is only that history had been distorted, but nothing of the history that had been lost. The Nazis burned books, liberating prominent documents from existence just as they had attempted to wipe the earth clean of those races they deemed inferior. It seems that mankind is destined to repeat its own horrors, but if we erase our own histories, then what do we have left to learn our mistakes from?
Considering how much importance we seem to put on any one piece of ancient text, such as The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Bible, Plato's Republic, or just about anything written by Shel Silverstein, imagine the volumes upon volumes of written documents that we might regard as invaluable to this day had they not been destroyed by greed, fear, deception and denial. Or in my specific case, eradicating literary injustices.
Today's Jazz Hands told the story, revised the history and control the future.
Day three-hundred and ten complete.
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