The Dangers of Historical Revisionism

“So now what?”

By guest contributor TJ Martinell.

Along with lost causes, another interesting intellectual hobby of the Dissident Right is their preoccupation with historical revisionism. As an ardent lover of history, I am always open to hearing about how a certain event didn’t happen the way we thought, or that some historical figure was greater or less great than portrayed in official histories. Primarily, it’s because I want to know the truth.

However, while the Bible says the truth will set you free, the truth also potentially comes with enormous consequences that the Dissident Right would do well to consider when it promotes revisionism that affects our national unity and collective identity.

Imagine you were born into a family whose wealth and values had been created by a famous patriarch long since dead. Imagine if for your entire life this patriarch was venerated and held in high esteem by your extended family. Imagine if your familial identity was inextricably linked to the achievements of this patriarch.

Now imagine a family historian claimed that, based on research, your patriarch was in reality a monster who secretly did atrocious things and whose success was predicated on engaging in nefarious behavior.

Imagine how that would impact your family and their relationships. Imagine what it would do to your family cohesion and their sense of worth. Imagine how its members would struggle to reconcile the emotions they have for who they thought their patriarch was with the facts presented to them by the family historian. Imagine the turmoil and confusion that would ensue, now that the familial narrative is shattered.

Moreover, imagine how enemies of the family both within and from without might try to exploit that confusion to turn them against one another.

This is the danger of historical revisionism.

To clarify, we are not talking about changing our attitudes about some obscure individual like Mark Fink or one like the Black Prince, whose marks in history are so distant in the past or obscure that how they are perceived has little effect on anything of importance. We’re also not discussing whether George Mallory was the first man to reach Everest’s summit. Nor are we discussing whether Shakespeare actually wrote his plays, which is a moot point because hardly anyone knows anything about Shakespeare the man. It’s the plays we remember.

My primary concern are narratives that have defined the American identity for decades, if not centuries. This isn’t an argument to avoid criticism of historical figures and the official narratives. It’s to say that when you’ve destroyed a narrative, the question implicitly asked is “Now what?”

Let’s return a moment to the hypothetical family situation I described. Let’s say you’re the family historian who reveals these unpleasant facts. Do you expect the family to rejoice in learning the truth, or to suffer an existential crisis? What would you have them think of themselves?

If you’re going to dismantle a narrative for a people, whether it be a family or nation, you must have something to replace it with that makes contextual sense and that allows people to feel pride in who and what they are. Historical revisionism typically undermines a positive identity and narrative in favor of a negative one.

“This person/event you thought was good was actually bad.”

Okay, now what?

If you’ve been raised to see someone as a hero or worthy of admiration only to find out that he wasn’t, there is a disillusionment phase similar in manner to discovering your family patriarch wasn’t the ideal man you were raised to believe and that the world he built and you inherited was brought about through unjust methods.

The danger of historical revisionism is that it is fundamentally deconstructionist in nature, and too often those who pursue it do so without looking one step ahead of their own ideas.

This is why I have equally healthy skepticism towards revisionists as I do toward an official narrative. A false narrative is harmful, but far worse is a people with no sense of themselves at all, because an even worse narrative could replace it.

If those who dismantle these narratives don’t have a healthy, positive alternative for the American people to adopt, what you will get is a kind of societal and cultural chaos that is difficult to describe but ultimately ends when someone presents the masses with a narrative that offers them stability and the ability to experience pride in themselves once again.

The risk is that the wrong person with the wrong narrative replaces the one which historical revisionists have destroyed.

I’m not reluctant to consider revisionist interpretations of past historical events that challenge a prevailing narrative, especially one propagated by our wise overlords. But I am cautious as to whom I discuss it with, the same way you wouldn’t discuss private family feuds in public or amongst potential enemies.

Ultimately, we must ensure that the undermining of any official narrative does not open the American nation to further destruction of its heritage, and it should be the first question we ask ourselves whenever we reexamine the history that we have been taught about ourselves or Western Civilization itself. This will unfortunately have to be the case until we have settled on a better story for the American people that tells not only where they’re from, but where they’re going.