Manifesto on the Telling of History

This post is by Drona! Stop asking for James!

History can be inconvenient...

...or useful.

1) History should be told for two reasons: to instill pride in the masses, or to instill revolutionary anger among prospective members of Party. Any approach to history other than these two is suspect.

2) When telling history to the masses, the focus should be on a single, easily comprehensible arc. This arc can be either inspiring or boring. If it is inspiring, the masses will feel safe in the trajectory of history and become helpfully complacent. If it is boring, the masses will lose interest in history, spend their time looking for pornography instead, and become both complacent and impotent to effect any real and harmful change. Either will do.

3) When telling history to prospective members of the Party, the focus should be on indignation. Anger fuels the Revolution. Anger justifies necessary excess. If history is disgusting, reprehensible, then rhetorical or physical violence in the name of cleansing history will become more appealing. To fuel the Revolution, history must be told as a power source from which to generate resentment and hate.

4) The purpose of telling history is to separate the listener from history. It is only by severing the people from the past that the future can be born. For the masses, this means encouraging amnesia: it is best if history is something they forget, and not something that informs the way they see the world and live in it. For prospective party members, this means disassociation: they should feel so compelled to condemn history that they have to step outside of it, disavowing national, ethnic, religous, and family ties that bind them to a compromised collective past. Revolutionaries must leave the collective of mankind and become independent individuals before they will be able to turn and subdue the human collective in the name of the Future.

5) The telling of history must change constantly, must remain always new. In one century, the white destruction of Native peoples may be a comforting arc (Manifest Destiny) for the masses; in the next century, this same arc becomes alarming and must be hidden from the masses and used to promote indignation in the Party instead.

6) When using history, don't rely excessively on outright lies and fabricated events--even though such fabrications may seem far more useful than objective realities. People, unfortunately, tend to see through such things in the current era. This is a great disadvantage of our digital age, and an inevitable consequence of too much public access to information.
It is generally equally effective, however, to selectively emphasize real events rather than to narrate false events. For the creative editor, this can be even better than simple fabrication. One of the advantages of this digital age with its overwhelming quantities of information is that everyone relies on editors and summarizers. The glass is, so to speak, half full!