I have a number of problems with your post.
1. No real problems with this, but still, it holds no support for your arguement.
To be honest, I don't consider myself even trying to present an argument. This is just my view on history. As long as you can't present a better alternative for recording history, I find it ironic you're arguing against this.
2. Evidence can be destoried. If someone was determined enough, it is probable that he could destory all evidence of such an event. And this was much more true in Pre- to Early-Modern times. They lacked a vast majority of tech we have today. Perhaps far more then you think.
Evidence can be destroyed, but there are a few problems with that. The more significant, interesting or dramatic an event is, the more people are going to tell each other about it. And by chance, these are precisely the events that historians find interesting. A single unimportant person can and will be wiped out of history effortlessly, but let's consider a bigger event - a war for example. It would take extreme resources to hide that from the future, as you'd have to restore the battlefields, tear down the fortifications, search everywhere to get rid of war letters, diaries etc, and one would still have to speculate the advancements of human technology that might reveal evidence previously unthought of! While things are bound to become more obscure and abstract as centuries pass, it's near impossible to conceal any significant event involving lots of people.
3. You also do not seem to understand Human nature. I say again, would you rather be seen as an Asshole or a Hero in history? Not just for some time, but forever. You also seem to not understand how far history goes back. The Roman Empire Existed somewhere around 3000 years ago. We still know a majority of events about them, such as there Conquests, Leaders, and Culture. We also still know and hate the people who were Assholes among them, and we are not going to forget the Roman Empire any time soon.
History is not about people's personalities nearly as much as it is about people's actions. The same Galileo Galilei who is remembered today as a pioneering scientist was considered to be a prick by many of his contemporaries. Not because his world view differed from theirs, but because Galilei really was a bit of an arrogant, irritable fellow. But we don't consider Galileo to be an asshole, because whether he cursed loudly and was obsessive in proving his enemies wrong is not of interest considering Galileo's role in the evolution of Physics. Furthermore, proper history does not label people as assholes or heroes. To falsify such status, fake merits should be added, and that would require falsifying evidence to support those merits. And ultimately, the person would most likely have to be notable because of these false stories, as to be remembered, these dubious stories should surpass the person's actual merits. I find it near impossible to hire hero/asshole status for anyone. You'd need to falsify too much. To lesser extent, this is somewhat possible today, as rumors spread like wildfire with mass media and Wikipedia and so on. Consider Michael Jackson, the acquitted-in-court yet convicted-in-public child molestation suspect. On the other hand, after a fifty or so years, what have we got? Wikipedia entry that Jackson was acquitted, while the public belief in his guilt is unlikely to last. [/quote]
4. But everyone else will think that it was their harvest report, and since it was nothing of importance to most people, it is not really investgated. And when someone comes along wanting to record the Harvest reports, guess what they will get? As a hint, I will just say that the Ruler may not be so eager to release the truth, and telling that world that he had lied.
So, a harvest report has nothing of importance for most people? Nothing except revealing the amounts of food available for distribution? I say that's more important than most things. Falsifying a harvest report serves a clear political cause - people may be deluded into thinking that they have more food than the other nation, for example. But for those doing the actual calculations on dividing the food, for example, the false version won't do - unless they really want a portion of public to realize the truth by not getting food despite the nation's crops flourishing. Therefore, there are likely to be real equivalents of many false documents, and even if these documents are destroyed, usually government frauds are revealed as the government collapses, or simply later on when everyone responsible has been declared unperson for various causes anyway.
5. You also misunderstand how things back then worked. There was no TV News station, there were no Daily Papers, there were also no civil rights. Another thing is that there were not many historians who wrote History Books, because getting enough information could take Months, Years, even Decades! Combined with the fact that everything was handwritten, and you have not many people willing to take on the task. Rulers could however help, by providing funding and such, as long as you left out some certain pecies of information...
And even if you wrote a history book without any help back then, you still have to deal with a Nation not being so happy with what you provided. Fastforward a few decades, and you have someone wanting to write another history book, but all you have is what the last man wrote into the books. Given that they were funded or "encouraged" to leave out info by another nation, all you would have to work off of is false info.
There were surprisingly many historians, there always have been. Everyone who writes down or otherwise communicates factual information about events is a historian. A few lucky ones have got to write their tales on paper, papyrus or some other material, while some others have passed their stories by telling their friends, who told on their friends etc... and again, the more significant the story, the more likely it was to end on paper. Many other stories melded into mythology and became a part of it. It always has been very hard to suppress word of the mouth, civil rights or no civil rights. While these early accounts are often obscure because things tend to lose detail with time, they are also very hard to systematically distort. And, even if you're able to distort a story so it portrays someone as an epic hero or an antagonistic asshole, you'd have to rely both on everyone believing that it's your version of the story that's true, and that people are actually going to remember your version of the story for ages. And even if your contemporaries believe you that the particular person is the Best Guy Evah, it's possible that people 500 or 1000 years from that think it's just another Hero Myth.
6. History matters far more then how you make it sound. Knowing the past will allow us to learn from our mistakes, and help us preditic the future. If we threw away history like it was nothing, then we would have people making the same mistakes again and again, and maybe even throw another Hitler our way.
I was expecting that, but I don't believe that it's that simple. There are still plenty of unique ways of causing pain and harm. Furthermore, if we consider the possibility that history has been manipulated, it must've been manipulated by some fairly altruist entity to contain a specifically nasty set of warnings in form of events: Racial pogroms, depressions, wars, concentration camps, abusive treaties and civil wars. Either that or then there used to be something REALLY horrible in there that makes a few crusades seem rather cuddly.
TL;DR - I don't believe large-scale manipulation of world history is feasible. I also find applying Occam's Razor handy here - naturally accumulating historic heritage without centuries of fabrication is, by that principle, much more likely than the history being a carefully fabricated lie. Now, can we please carry on the discussion about
the game?
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Topic: Assassin's Creed 2 (Read 7351 times)