Past Tense, Future Perfect

What role does history and historical figures influence our culture and actions?

When we look back at any historical event we can paint a picture that suits ourselves. We can judge events based on our emotional association rather than factual evidence. What we do when we look at the evidence and make a historical documentation is to cloud the truth. And then future generations read this as the gospel truth and we believe the written word. Surely, we think and reason that historians were there as witnesses and they without pre-conceived notions based on evidence of their eyes and ears documented the truth without prejudice. The real truth is that historians’ knowledge may not always be first hand. A series of Chinese whispers takes place that distorts the real hard core facts and public opinion gets in the way of facts. Often interpretation of any events or a perception of the character of an historical figure is based on belief and values and emotions rather than sound judgment?  So how can we really trust or justify that Hitler was the bad guy and that Gandhi was the good guy? Are we seeing two dimensional creations that become historical fact? Is not the truth that we hope secretly that history will be kind to us. We want our epitaph and tombstone to be flattering and positive. We want to be remembered as perfect when we never are. We want to edit our mistakes so that others will remember us fondly. Is it at all possible that Hitler had some good points and Gandhi had some bad points but we conveniently ignore these to maintain our evidence and keep on proving our point? Would any evidence to the contrary destroy our inherent belief system of how someone or some event needs to be remembered? After all, history can be kind or cruel. This is similar in a way a movie or restaurant can get good or bad reviews. But unlike a movie or restaurant which may have its good or bad points history is always black or white.

Then if this is true then is not history manipulating us by controlling our cultural and emotional response to a person or event. And does history simply repeat itself or do we learn from our past mistakes such as wars?  Yes, of course we are influenced and controlled by history, but that control is never enough to change our instincts and intuition or us culturally as a whole community. Let us take the proof and evidence of Gandhi. He is revered in India and in fact the world as a great man, the Mahatma or great one. We all believe his truth and values relating to peace and non-violence. But experience has shown that India or the World does not blindly follow his belief system. We have not changed culturally as while we admire his beliefs, we interpret each situation we encounter with our own intuition. Therefore, India and the world still continues to have wars, violence and riots. The principle of peace lives on in theory but not always in practice. We acknowledge and reason that we as mere mortals cannot all conform to his perfection. We are imperfect, and therefore will scream and turn to road rage at times at simple events such as a traffic jam.

We believe with certainty that history is the truth but we never look to history to define our present or future. History, is after all simply that history….