History Is Written by Historians, Not Victors

Why pesky little things like the truth can't be controlled indefinitely

Statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. The monument was removed in 2021 after standing nearly a century. Photo by Dean Hinnant on Unsplash

This post is by Contributor Johan Pregmo.

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There’s a famous line of unknown origin sometimes misattributed to Winston Churchill: “History is written by the victors.” It’s been repeated so many times over the years that many of us just accept it as a truism. Certainly it has a plausible sounding logic to it. The powers that be are self-serving and prone to propaganda. Every leading player in large, history-defining events like wars and revolutions has their own spin on what really happened. Governments will naturally downplay their own losses and blunders, play up their victories, and justify or cover up their sins. When the dust settles, the winners simply tell their one-sided version of the truth — and their vanquished foes aren’t around to contradict them. Given this, it is argued, our perception of history is warped and wrong. We should all therefore take history with a grain of salt because it’s shaped not by hard facts, but by agenda-driven, whitewashed propaganda that has calcified into established mythology. In all of this, the real truth is left by the wayside.

The problem with this conception of history is that it’s simply incorrect. Not only is it contradicted at nearly every turn, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of history and historiography — the study and evolution of history as a discipline. “History is written by the victors” might seem like an insightful remark to make at a dinner party to fill the space where an original thought should go, but upon scrutiny, it falls apart.

It’s easy to see why people might hold this view. Had the Axis Powers won World War II, then, as the saying goes, “we’d all be speaking German.” We might have vastly different politics, moral standards, and views of history, beyond the alternate events of this counterfactual. Tumultuous historical turning points have serious real-life consequences, not just materially, but ideologically and morally. We rightly view Hitler as the pinnacle of evil — but how would we view him in an alternate Philip K. Dick timeline where Hitler won? It sounds momentarily persuasive, but when we return to reality, it just doesn’t hold up.

History is full not only of deeply unflattering truths to the powers that be, but also instances of the losers writing the dominant historical narratives. Clear, decisive winners are also not as common as we might think. Oftentimes momentous struggles happen between two major powers, both of whom have a story to tell and an audience to tell it to. History, it turns out, can’t really be controlled. Not forever. The truth has a way of getting out there. Unless you annihilate your enemy completely — a rare event among competing powers, historically — the other side will still be around to tell their version. The idea of a frighteningly competent government, able to dictate narratives at will to an eager horde of mindless drones is as convenient as it is false.

Consider the American Civil War. Today, the historical consensus is quite clear — the war was fought over slavery, and every other major cause traces back to slavery and white supremacy. Economic differences? The South was reliant on slavery while the North was industrializing and pulling ahead. Cultural divides? Sure, everyone was racist by present standards in those days, but white supremacy was a cornerstone of Southern culture in a way it simply wasn’t in the North. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens said in his “Cornerstone Speech”, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Several slave states also explicitly spelled out in their documents of secession that they were leaving over slavery.

Yet for a hundred years, starting almost immediately after the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” mythology dominated historical narratives, pivoting from defenses of slavery to a framing that suggested the war was simply the resistance to an oppressive federal government. In this view, slavery was incidental; it was really about state’s rights — and in fact, slavery would have gone away on its own if not for those meddling, big government yankees. The Lost Cause romanticized Confederate General Robert E. Lee as an exemplar of the Southern gentleman, a Napoleon from Dixie. Conversely, Union General Ulysses S. Grant was portrayed as a drunk who relied on human wave tactics, sending sheer numbers to charge enemy lines head-on and overwhelm the Southerners at the cost of massive and unnecessary casualties among his own troops. Likewise, President Lincoln was cast as a tyrant, and General Sherman a war criminal for his destruction of Southern infrastructure. None of these charges are true. If history is written by the victors, how could this happen? How could a pro-Confederate telling of the US Civil War persist for generations if the North was so clearly victorious?

Following the war, Lincoln magnanimously pursued a policy of leniency toward the South. In the wake of his death, in a spirit of reconciliation, the South was allowed to set the narrative. School textbooks across the South pushed the Lost Cause narrative, and some of it is still in place today. The Confederacy lost — morally, politically, and militarily. They were defeated. Yet despite this, they shaped the way the war was viewed for a century. The losers wrote history, not the other way around — an occurrence far more common than many realize.

During Napoleon Bonaparte’s 15-year reign, he was the terrifying bogeyman of Europe, implacably steamrolling neighboring empires while spreading liberal values with a big shovel. Only his disastrous invasion of Russia stopped him in his tracks. But despite Napoleon’s ultimate defeat and his revolutionary liberalism being so antithetical to everything the absolute monarchies stood for, his reforms were too effective not to mimic. He lost; he was at the mercy of his enemies — not just his geopolitical rivals, but his ideological opposition. Yet he was still able to write his own memoirs while in exile on the isle of St. Helena, putting his own spin on events and influencing how we view them today. In spite of every incentive for the “victors” to erase Napoleon Bonaparte from history, he was allowed to give his side of the story. Victory, apparently, was enough of a prize on its own.

Even where the victors write some of the history, they themselves rarely come out smelling like daisies. Ancient Rome was among the greatest victors in human history. They were also all sorts of brutal; theirs was a slave society, an empire built on ruthless colonization. Far from trying to hide such blemishes, they were proud of them. As the Romans would have seen it, everyone with the means to do so held slaves and conquered new lands; they were just better at it.

But we also know plenty of things Rome did that they would not have been proud of. The Romans revered victory, honor, and battlefield glory more than anything. Yet they took the time to record numerous debacles. At the Battle of Teutoburg, an ally led three entire Roman legions into an ambush where they were butchered over the course of four days. It was an unprecedented failure, and a devastating blow to Augustus, the first emperor. Imagine having established a new state off the back of several civil wars, in a martial culture, only to lose 15–20,000 troops. It was as black a mark on his legacy as could be imagined.

The Romans also documented three catastrophic attempts at invading Persia, both during the Parthian dynasty and the Sasanian dynasty. Licinius Crassus — one of the original triumvirs who controlled the late Roman Republic along with Caesar and Pompey — desperate for military glory, cost Rome its greatest defeat since Hannibal. Marc Antony likewise attempted an equally disastrous expedition in the Middle East, and Emperor Julian invaded Sasanian Persia without a plan and got killed for it. All three were disasters that led to great victories for a rival empire and were stains on Rome’s honor, and still Roman historians — who were unquestionably biased and had every reason to glorify Rome — scrupulously wrote them down. What does it tell us when the greatest superpower of the time would not omit their past shames? Certainly Rome put a favorable spin on everything they wrote, but it’s clear, even obvious, that some truths cannot be suppressed. 

Looking further back in antiquity, the Greco-Persian Wars were precipitated by Greek settlements that challenged Persian rule and led to a series of full-blown invasions and wars that the Greeks ultimately won. Or did they? 

Here we see multiple examples disconfirming the notion of victors writing history. The Battle of Thermopylae is widely remembered as one of the most glorious last stands in history, despite being a strategic disaster. The “300” — actually over a thousand — were a rearguard covering for a retreating army. In reality, the Persians were held up for a few days before sweeping aside this minor Greek detachment and proceeding with the invasion as planned. Although Persia was defeated at Platea and Salamis and forced to retreat, this is not quite the victory the contemporary narratives present it as. From the Greek perspective, it’s a heroic tale of resisting foreign invasion — never mind that their own colonization efforts triggered the whole affair — and retaining their independence. From the Persian perspective, it looks quite different. The Persian ruler Xerxes comes into Greece, makes war, cows several city-states and forces tribute, then returns home. Spin, perhaps, but given what happened immediately after, it’s not so far-fetched.

Greece returned to its old rivalries and Persia happily funded their infighting. Sparta, so famous for its stand against Persia, became its ally, and their support allowed the Persians to win the Peloponnesian War. Until the time of Alexander, Greece remained a disunited, disparate set of polities, dwarfed by Persia and kept in check by their judicious use of soft power. Then, from the Roman takeover in 146 to the 1821 War of Independence — a span of nearly 1,700 years — the Greeks spent their time being ruled over first by the Romans, then the Byzantines, then the Ottoman empire. Their contributions to culture and thought in antiquity are unquestioned, but Greece has not been relevant for the better part of two millennia. These are not great winners of history — yet still they are remembered as such. Their version of history predominates over those of larger and more powerful empires that outlasted them.

The Phantom Horseman (1870-93) by Sir John Gilbert. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Consider also the British Empire. Few nations have been more victorious than Great Britain. They went into the 1600s as an emerging colonial power and with the establishment of the British East India Company became a growing economic titan and went from success to success. They won the Seven Years War against France and came out the undisputed masters of colonial rule, despite one small setback on the other side of the Atlantic. They were on the winning side of the Napoleonic war, and came into the 1800s as the world’s most dominant superpower, controlling the largest land empire in human history comprising nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land mass.

But the cost of empire is often paid in human misery. A British-caused Indian famine killed 100 million. Their own fellow whites were treated little better; the Irish lost a million in the potato famine, in no small part due to English neglect and bigotry. During the Boer war of 1899–1902, over 100,000 people died after being put into British concentration camps. When Indians peacefully protested British rule in 1919, up to a thousand of them were slaughtered by British-controlled Gurkha troops. We’re only scratching the surface here.

Britain was an imperialist powerhouse, with all the baggage that entails. Perhaps the only reason they aren’t remembered as villains is because most of their crimes happened to people distant from the West, and because they were on the right side of World War II. For all their misdeeds, the Brits look like boy scouts next to Nazi Germany. This shows that the outcomes of major conflicts can influence the way we view history — and yet all these British atrocities are still known. They were still written down and put to record. Britain — as big a winner as history has ever seen — was not exempt from criticism and scrutiny after its empire collapsed. On the contrary, their actions are widely regarded as contemptible.

But that was a different time, one might argue. They didn’t have the same mass media, the same capacity to spread propaganda, nor the same PR savvy that modern nations do. Maybe today is different? Well, today’s predominant superpower is the United States of America, which is — although we don’t often think about it in such terms — the most powerful and influential empire in all of human history. Not a single historical polity has matched its level of cultural influence, economic power, or military might. So given its enormous reach and all the benefits of modern media, if it were true that victors write history, surely we would expect to see America’s worst failures quietly tucked away and memory-holed, right?

Of course, anyone even remotely familiar with the US knows this is not the case. Its legacy of slavery is agonized over to this day. Its genocide of native peoples is known across the world. America’s history of overthrowing foreign governments is so well-documented that the CIA even admits to its role in them. The George W. Bush administration’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq is the disgrace of a generation, and worsened the US’s reputation internationally. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) could not provide more than an overview of America’s misdeeds in its more than 700 pages. The point is that the whole world knows about the mistakes of the US. Many Americans post-Iraq are so soured on foreign intervention that merely providing money and equipment to Ukraine is seen as controversial, and there’s no shortage of foreign criticism for US actions either, both from rivals and allies alike. Why then, if the victors write history, are the sins of the geopolitical apex predator so universally known and criticized? 

When we take a closer look at history, the picture that emerges is not one where dominant power players alter our perception of the truth at will. Rather, we see the opposite — a world where the truth is impossible to contain, not just because of how complex and difficult it is to do so, but because the people in charge often do not want to. The US intelligence community was unable to stop a mid-level contractor like Edward Snowden from revealing major secrets. President Bill Clinton was unable to silence a 22-year-old White House intern or stop her semen-stained dress from becoming front-page news. The idea that the Powers That Be can simply dictate truth and narrative overlooks the simple fact that governments simply aren’t all that competent. They’re a tangled mess held together by glue, shoestrings, belief, and infamously fallible people. As tempting as it is to think that there is some shadowy cabal who runs everything, the reality is that the way we see the world is more influenced by organic, bottom-up dynamics than top-down actions by the state.

We are easily misled by the shiny gadgets of modernity and the gripping plots of thrillers into imagining that controlling the narrative is easier today than it was in the past, when the precise opposite is true. The vast majority of people used to be illiterate peasants who believed more or less everything their kings and lords told them not only because they had no access to alternative information, but because they believed their leaders represented the will of God. The modern age of information has empowered the individual as never before and weakened — not strengthened — the ability of authority figures to dictate narratives.

The idea that the victors write history is reflective of a broader, more troubling mindset. It is the cynical knee-jerk response of the person who says “all politicians are corrupt” or “both sides are the same” when talking about politics. It’s the safest, laziest possible way of taking a stand and being critical of the status quo. Few explicitly follow this thinking to its logical conclusion, but it traces to an underlying nihilistic worldview where nothing is real and everything is rigged — which therefore absolves citizens of any duty to do anything.

In reality, there is good reason to be optimistic. Our view of history is continually evolving and being re-examined, not just from unearthing new findings but from learning to consider new angles. It is unclear whether Lincoln actually said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”, but the statement itself is true. Even the most totalitarian regimes in history can only lie to its people for so long before reality catches up.

Ultimately, the truth gets out. We might not always accept it, or get it right at first, but looking at human history we see clear trends: we value what’s true, pursue it for its own sake, and amend our way of looking at things in due time. That, in the end, is why historians write history, not victors.

See also: “Everything You Know About History Is Wrong: Part I”

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