Postcard from Bishkek

There’s a website that I look at from time to time which is well worth visit: www.cracked.com.

It bills itself as “America’s Only Humor Site Since 1958″ but although some of the articles are clearly meant to be humourous, others are more serious.  This last week, I saw a link to one particular page, for example, which grabbed my attention: “5 Embarrassing Failures History Class Turned Into Victories“.

It opened with the statement, “Sometimes history is written by wishful thinking. When the real event isn’t quite inspirational or romantic enough, we just make up a prettier version and call it history,” and then went on to describe five such cases: Live Aid; The battle of Thermopylae; The Tet offensive;  The Miracle at Dunkirk and Captain Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole.

It got me thinking and reminded me about how there is no such thing as “objective history”.  Our knowledge of historical events is incomplete and our understanding of them coloured by historians and others, who portray them as as they see it … sometimes seeing them through “rose coloured spectacles”.

In fact, there’s a saying the “to the victor goes the spoils”.  I always thought that came from the Romans, but apparently it was coined by an American Senator as recently as 1832.  One of the spoils is, of course, as another old saying goes: History is written by the victors.”  I always thought that this was said by Winston Churchill but I can’t find a reliable source to verify this.  In fact, the closest I can get is a reference to Goering who apparently said something very similar: “The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused”.

Take another example.  Josef Stalin is supposed to have said “One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic.”   Who would have thought that a man that is often described as a “dictator” and on whom so many deaths and so much misery have been blamed, could have expressed such humanity when describing the death of a single man … but, then again, I suppose that it could simply be his supposed cynicism and pragmatism coming to the fore.  In fact, he probably didn’t say this at all – it is probably a mis-attribution of something said by by the German writer and pacifist Erich Maria Remarque who is best known for his novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”.

I have recently finished reading a book about the Gunpowder Plot, when a group of disgruntled Catholics are supposed to have plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, when King James I was giving a speech during the opening of the next session.  I have known since my schooldays that it was, in fact, all a put up job.  It was only from reading the book which was filled with quotations from primary sources that I saw the detail of the conspiracy on the government side.  It was enough to make me question my natural instinct to distrust conspiracy theories.

Well, today marks the a number of anniversaries associated with exploration, some of which are also capable of reinterpretation.  Columbus, for example set sail from the Canaries on his momentous voyage in 1492 to “discover” the Americas.  The fact that there were already people there and he was by no means the first European to cross the Atlantic to the “New World”; that he didn’t actually land on the main continental landmass until a later voyage and that his arrival presaged as much, if not more, death and misery as Stalin was responsible for, doesn’t detract from the importance of his voyage … but it does place it in a different light.

Incidentally, Columbus may have been sailing under a Spanish flag, but he was actually an Italian – from Genoa.  He also never admitted that he had found a “new” continent; he thought he was in Asia, hence he named the local inhabitants Indians.

It’s also the anniversary of the return to Spain in 1522 of the Victoria, the sole surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, and the first ship to circumnavigate the world.  Only 18 sailors out of the original 237 that set out with Magellan in 1519 were aboard, and Fedinand wasn’t actually one of them – he had died on the journey the year before.  That doesn’t stop schoolchildren from being taught that he was the first person to circumnavigate the globe.

Then, on this day in 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for the New World from Plymouth aboard the Mayflower.  (They actually thought it was September 16th – but that’s because England was still on the Julian Calendar … the equivalent date according to the Gregorian Calendar would have September 6th).   In fact, the “dissenters” comprised only half of the 102 passengers on that 66-day voyage.

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Last year there was a scandal here when some people found mistakes and definite “opinionated” comment in some recently published history school textbooks, especially when it came to the period of Russian “colonization” of Central Asia.   One local politician has recently stated that he considers the Russians need to pay something like a hundred billion dollars in reparation for the “genocide” practised against the ethnic Kyrgyz during the events of 1916.  (For the record, at least according to some of the accounts I have seen, the rebels also showed a certain amount of ferocity in their treatment of the settlers).

It used to be the commonly held theory that the Kyrgyz in fact hailed from the Enesei region of Siberia.  Nowadays, I see that several textbooks, whilst they admit there was a Kyrgyz community in Enesei which migrated to the land now known as Kyrgyzstan, that claim that the Kyrgyz comprised some forty tribes and only some of them were these migrants … other, it is claimed were already resident in what was to be become their historical homeland.

As in the case with the Gunpowder Plot, some of this re-writing of what we took to be history is supported by evidence, but in some cases there remains a lingering doubt that someone has donned their “coloured spectacles”, (rose coloured or otherwise), and exercised a certain amount of wishful thinking.

So, I ask myself, what will history make of the first twenty years of the Kyrgyz Republic following the demise of the former Soviet Union, and what in particular will it make of the leading players such as Askar Akaey, Kurmanbek Bakiev and Rosa Otunbaeva?  What interpretation will be placed on the events that lead up to the two revolutions in 2005 and 2010?, and the events that followed such as the riots in the south of the country in June last year?

Will the current view prevail or will history be rewritten? – and if so, how?

I suppose that it will all depend on who is writing the account … on what sources they use … and their own particular viewpoint.

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Tags: Expat, History