HIS STORY - PUTIN CREATES & DESTROYS THE PAST

The New York Times: November 27, 2008

Nationalism of Putin's Era Veils Sins of Stalin's

That's the headline of the story about how "history" is created. Vladimir Putin, the Dictator of Russia, theoretically the leader of a democracy, is intent on creating the events of the past, today. This former KGB agent, (the Russian secret service under the Stalin dictatorship,) is intent on rewriting the history of Soviet Russia to conform to his idea of what the Russian people and the world SHOULD know about that era. Records of events of that past horror show are locked up now, and will in all likelihood be destroyed so that the new Putin version of what took place will not be subject to verification.

Skeptics of the notion that history is created by power elites, the winners of wars and controllers of information and education, may wish to evaluate the impact of Putin's acts on the truth, the realities, the facts, of what took place in that prior time. They may wish to examine how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their minions in the United States have so tightened their control of the evidence of their actions as those actions affected the course of events while they were in power, that Putin and the American power structure of the past eight years may be partners in historic revisions that overlap in time.

Historians, at least those who believe they write history, are forced to create structures from the scraps of evidence they find, much as anthropologists create whole skeletons from single bones.

The sad truth is that children learn about the past what kings and queens want them to learn.