All history books are biased?
This sounds a very sweeping statement. Nevertheless, there is much truth in it. The bias is not always deliberate. Every writer owes much to his or her background and to the national climate of opinion.
The important thing about the writing of history is that it should not only be factual but that it should include all the facts. For example, it would be wrong to write about the French Revolution without dealing with what led up to it, the glaring differences in living standards between aristocrat and peasant, the inequity of the law, the callousness of the rich and the rational philosophy of human equality and human rights spelled out by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Otherwise the account would read simply as a record of brutal and indiscriminate violence on the part of the Paris mob.
The best of historical writing therefore includes all the facts, objectively presented, leaving the reader to draw personal conclusions. The problem of this kind of writing is dullness, where personal opinion or interpretation is rigorously excluded.
Nobody, either writer or reader, is totally without a political stance. One writer dealing with a popular revolution will castigate a mob for violence, greed and looting, condemning the murders which lead to the overthrow of a stable government. Another, dealing with the same revolution, will put all the blame on the government for its autocratic and heartless attitude to the people, and argue that the ugly features of revolution are necessary if full democratic control of government is to pass into the hands of the people.
If some historians tend to write, however objectively, from the national point of view, others tend to adopt the one-world stance, which is basically left-wing. This stance favors aggression by the oppressed and is invariably censorious about colonialism. It is also pacifist insofar as the established powers are concerned, although vague about the consequences of total non-aggression in all circumstances. The one-world view also tends to be selective in the presentation of facts, eliminating those which conflict with it’s overall moral outlook. For example there is no mention of social and material progress or of the Pax Britannica in certain modern accounts of British colonialism.
Much the same applies to domestic history. While it is true that the old-fashioned historian concentrated on power bases, monarchs and political leaders, perhaps excessively, some modern historians see history simply in terms of the upward struggle of the poor, writing only about violence against the class struggle and against the trades union movement.
More recently, the writing of history in some countries has been debased out of all recognition. This happens when an oppressive government decides to brainwash its people into continued subservience. The technique is to suppress all the truth of the past and rewrite only the material which fits in with government policy. Such travesties are forcibly imposed on schools, while objectively-written history books are withdrawn from schools and libraries.
