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Weaponising history
There comes a point when you listen to podcasts where you either accept the creator’s positionality and politics or you shut it off and never listen again. This has increasingly become my approach to dealing with people whose political opinions involve them promoting distortions and lies to further their own agendas. As I get older I have less time for those who distort, those who lie, and those who seek to spread misinformation because that is all they have. Spreading misinformation is a key part of gaining political power, especially when that power is rooted in convincing enough people to vote for you in a democracy. There is no pure history precisely because history as a narrative form always needs a myth maker to tell it. Those who get to interpret history and present their version of history to their audience wields the power of those narratives.
History, at least the myth making and dissemination part of history, has always interested me because how we shape and frame historical events have invariably come down to what political perspectives a person has. I grew up in Medway, a place steeped in history stretching back to the neolithic period. Everywhere you look there is history, a story waiting to be told if you knew the right sources to read or interpret. I can tell you my version of this place, show you through my words a version of the truth, yet it is all my understanding of this place and time.
