Quote:
Originally Posted by Fastolfe
Rewriting the past is a hallmark of dictatorships. What's scary is when private concerns or individuals, not governments, propose to do it: that means society is slowly internalizing the very idea that this sort of thing is okay.
Case in point, you'll notice that all the articles on the internet that lament this invasion of political correctness talk about "the N-word". How ironic...
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It's not ironic. It's a profane word and NSFW. Rewriting the past is not just a hallmark of dictatorships. It's a hallmark of modernity, especially of nationalistic ideologies that spring up as one component of modernity. For example, there's
American wins the war or
Israel made the deserts bloom. Of course, given that none of us have direct access to the past, only to the artifacts, records, and memories generated by it, we must all engage in a process of "rewriting the past" as we go about our lives. The question is how we deal with evidence that contradicts how we previously "wrote it." Do we ignore it? Do we abandon our own narrative entirely and adopt the new one? Or do we create a new synthesis?
That being said, altering documents is very distasteful. I don't mind adaptations provided they are explicitly identified as such, but if I buy a book that claims to have been written by Mark Twain, it damn sure better have been written by Mark Twain.