In my classes I read, because I needed the grade, an altered history written by peoples who had lost, but wrote that actually they were winning because they had been wronged. As a class, we all were expected to weep at the Anglo injustices visited upon "indigenous" people at Wounded Knee. The book was moving. It contained some fact, but "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" ultimately was a fiction that was taught to a generation.
My professors were in love with the false parallels they were teaching to their own perceived recent histories of protest and perception failures that in their minds were victories, because misery loves company.
They did not love the slaughter of Southeast Asia, nor the misery of those under totalitarian and communist rule. They did love the promise these political theories promised and they loved the glimpse of power they perceived to be theirs through protesting and never looked into the eyes of the dead and beaten for any perception of truth. Their histories were more palatable, glorious and gratifying. As is most fiction.
History is always being written. Fiction as history is a history that ignores or twists facts to the personal. The personal becomes a "new" history just as heartfelt as the history of those that indeed look back in reality. The success of the reader becomes the ability to discern between the personal and the cumulative reality of history.
And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the
agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings
about "Iraq—who, me?"
A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is
always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and
is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is
being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no
foresight at all.
The great power of new technology is that the personal histories of self serving authors are more quickly exposed for what they are. Fiction that panders.
Tenent has written his own "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"and professors are lining up students to accept the "truth" of the book to support the fiction of their "history". It is history all over again.
