Why rewrite history

Not only individual decisions, but even corporate decisions are influenced by what happened in the past. In the past two decades, big data analytics have become the foundation on which many a corporate strategy is built. Big data is all about what happened in the past. The core belief that guides big data analytics is that data on past behaviour can help us predict what could happen in the future. So if the present actions of individuals and corporations are influenced by their past experiences, it cannot be too different in the case of a nation.

Data analytics experts would remind us that the quality of data determines the quality of the final analysis. So nations too need to have good-quality information on their past. Most historical data selectively captures what past rulers did. History rarely captures the lives and emotions of the ordinary people of that time. How do we correct this anomaly? There is often an immediate tendency by present-day victors to drop everything of the past that does not fit their current narrative and record only what suits their agenda.

This is just a repetition of the past mistake. Rewriting history should not be about extending the principles of guilt and responsibility backward in time over generations and trading apologies and forgiveness on behalf of people who are long dead.

It will only end up reopening old wounds without having the ability to heal them. The study of history should not be based on a selective reading of religious texts and other documents. Instead, history should be based on the science of archaeology.

In fact, archaeological evidence and not hear-say should be the foundation on which the history of a nation should be rewritten, if it must be. Along with specific archaeological studies, it is very important that we develop a good understanding of the actual context in which past events happened. It is a common strategy of biased manipulators to single out a past event bereft of the actual context in which it took place and present that in a present-day context.

P eople are suddenly very concerned about the perils of rewriting history. This is because rewriting history is our occupation, our professional endeavour. We are constantly engaged in a process of re-evaluating the past and reinterpreting stories that we thought we knew. The past may be dead but history is alive, and it is constructed in the present. The other important thing to hold on to in this debate is that statues do not do a particularly effective job of documenting the past or educating people about it.

Some people would have it that the British are just too polite to talk about the dark side of imperialism. For the British to be ashamed of their imperial history, they would have to know about it, and to understand both the worst excesses of imperial violence and the simple daily injustice of imperial rule. Instead, as a nation, we exonerate the actions of people in the past by claiming that it was simply a different time, with different values, forgetting that many brave people at the time protested against these atrocities, and resisted, and worked tirelessly so that they might be uncovered or condemned.

But they want it both ways: to be free of guilt for historical sins, but to be proud of what they see as historical achievements. The slave trade is referred to as the "Atlantic Triangular Trade" in an attempt to expunge slavery from our history by focusing on transportation of goods which happened to include slaves between countries i. The "new" history of the old America largely exorcises President Thomas Jefferson's role as a Founding Father in order to diminish the importance of the separation of church and state as delineated in same First Amendment of our Constitution that guarantees our freedom of speech.

Sarah Palin R-Alaska and Sen. John McCain R-Ariz. This selective editing process has extended into literature via the sanitizing of various books that coincidentally serves the same goal as the revised American history.

Conservative groups argue that hearing these words makes the teachers and students uncomfortable. It should be uncomfortable! Attempts to eliminate it or gentrify it e. Students and educators should learn to get past their discomfiture and use the warts of America's past as tools for a less blemished future. To be sure, the United States does not restrict information and expression in the way that North Korea does.

Islamists, Jews, isolationists, Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, etc. Our basic freedom of self-expression is legally limited in circumstances necessary to prevent harm to others. For example, Iowa Rep. Steve King R was free to say to Newsmax that "For every undocumented immigrant who's a valedictorian, there's another out there who weigh pounds.

And they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Personally, I cannot reconcile the idea that a compassionate divine entity — Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Buddha or Allah — would encourage barbarism and slaughter, rather than education, of nonbelievers, and I can't see why any U.