I believe that historical revisionism is divided into two parts – speculative, even masturbatory history that serves mainly to pleasure the speculator or sleuth with no relevance to today…..and revisionism that is directly applicable to today in not repeating histories mistakes or mistakes made because past academics and nations got the causation of significant events All Wrong.
A classic of the 1st might be The Hood. Whatever “fresh insights” are uncovered on the tactics, construction, and fate of the Hood have no relevance to todays naval tactics, warship design, or what to do on the impossible scenario of being on a ship being hit with plummeting fire of 16 inch AP naval shells.
An example of important historical revisionism might be uncovery that government was far more involved in the “free trade” of the Hanseatic League and regulating it than economists ever suspected – and free trade and capitalist theory may have to be altered based on that new information.
Or Pat Buchanan and other revisionists that have said that WWII was not caused by “appeasement” of the wildly popular German effort to bring back to the Reich German majority territories ripped from it at Versailles – but by interlocking alliances that trapped nations into going to war in a manner similar to how WWI dragged parties into all-out assault on each other’s throats about shit as trivial to their interests down in the Balkans as the German city of Danzig was to the Brits, Poles, and French.
The US is committed by treaty to go to war if any of 50 nations is attacked, even if war is not in our vital interests. So we could get dragged in, like happened in WWI and WWII. And many nations that occupy land of others have drawn false analogies and dug their heels in in the decolonizing era, or questions about their conquered territories (West Bank, etc.) as “appeasement”. Or reactionaries in the US calling any acceptance of any loss of “US got & owned” property to natives as “appeasement”. (Granting the Philippines independence, talking at all to China, Iran over the years, “giving away” the Canal to Panamanians, “standing for the appeasement” of “letting” nations gain control of their natural resources).
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Wretchard’s other point about loss of clarity and ability to teach is quite important. Once upon a time the responses to all these questions would have been clear in the popular mind. Today along with a hundred different answers come a hundred different histories
Treating all opinions of history as having equal value in a postmodern world that has the cancers of deconstructionism, non-judgementalism, and moral relativism flourishing – means you essentially quit teaching it. What is the point of learning the Civil War from 16 different
schools of thought” at odds with one another and where the half-baked is given equal weight as what Lincoln and Congress and the Confederate Assembly said in primary sources??
It seems that mainstream theory of history should be separated from, be covered more, and be what people are tested on mostly – rather than give all revisionist, crackpot, or pure playtime or celebrity opinions of history or historical events equal weight.
Where there are true schools of thought – economic, Marxist, demography & education determinant – they should have a coherent academic basis that 9/11 Truthers, “blacks invented it all 1st” factions lack.
And historical events interpretation others are expected to learn should be left to those that those who were there in a substantial role, or came to understand the event from broad, in-depth study not the “opinion” of Sojourner Truth, a “university expert on movies of the Red Guard”, or someone claiming ties between Queen Elizabeth II and the “grassy knoll”.
