Don't use smart mottos - you'll end up looking stupid. And don't use ONE in particular.
Nearly every cynical motto in history is largely or wholly wrong, but there is none more wrong and more downright mendacious than the celebrated piece of flummery about history being written by the winners. Almost from the beginning, the losers did more to write and preserve history than the winners. We don't know how the Persians reacted to the Greek-Persian wars that were the subject of Herodotus - the first historian; not because his work silenced theirs, but because, much later, Persian civilization was destroyed and replaced by Islam, and no Persian annal or memory has survived. We do, on the other hand, know that the Athenians certainly did not win the Peloponnesian wars - the subject of Herodotus' successor, and Greece's greatest historian, Thucydides. According to where you place their endings, they either lost completely or managed to recover some autonomy, but they lost, and lost big. And yet, because all the writers from that period - including even the pro-Spartans! - are either Athenian or from the cultural area of Athens, everything we have of this great event is seen through Athenian eyes.
That is a phenomenon we find again and again. In an area I researched in depth, Dark Age Britain, nearly every useable source and fragment comes from the defeated British side, including the only three named and outstanding authors - the preacher Gildas and the bards Taliesin and Aneirin. The English were too busy settling and organizing their conquests to bother to write records, even when they learned Latin; it took a century and a half before a historian arose - Bede - and although he was in fact one of the greatest who ever lived, he knew so little of events in the original period that his account is virtually worthless.
That is the case, again and again. The Roman conquest of Greece is described - brilliantly - by the Greek, Polybius, one of the political leaders who found themselves one way or another in Rome's way. The history of the Roman Republic is written down for all time by the passionate republican Livy - at the court of conquering Augustus. The fall of the Roman Empire is chronicled almost entirely by Romans - it will be centuries before the Germanic and Arabic conquerors have historians of their own. The Longobard Paul the Deacon writes the history of the Longobard people after the Franks Pepin and Charlemagne have conquered them. The greatest historian of the Muslim Middle Eastern golden age is the Christian, Jacob Bar-Hebraeus. Caesar Baronius takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Catholic Church, halved in size by the fury of the early Reformation, and incidentally codifies the discipline of modern history. Inca princes with Spanish names write histories of the fallen Inca empire. The Four Masters and Geoffrey Keating collect the history of Ireland as Ireland is being ground down by the loving attentions of Cromwell and his successors. These are the men who, as a rule, write the best history; and their motivation is all too clear. "Let our children know what manner of men their fathers were; and that if we were defeated at last, it was not without honour." A victor has other things to think about.
In the twentieth century, indeed, we have had a rather more extraordinary phenomenon: history being rewritten by the defeated in the very lap, almost inside the head, of the winners, by means of a partially deliberate political manipulation. The popular image of the First World War is almost entirely the result of manipulation by a more or less overt alliance of Communist and German writers, united by the common need to make the Allies look uniformly bad and immoral, who have managed to impose what I would call the Black Legend of World War One. To make a couple of instances, popular texts of this type never mention German war crimes, and only ever speak of "brave little Belgium" with an implied sneer, while giving a great deal of space to accounts of allied propaganda, with the implication that allied propaganda was responsible for these things. The opposite was true, of course. Large areas of literature, including masterpieces, have been consigned to the memory hole in order to convince educated persons that the only significant literature that came from the war was the rhetoric of anger of Owen and Sassoon. History is written by the winners? Get real. In our time, and under our eyes, the winners have allowed the losers to rewrite their own history under their very eyes.
So avoid the crap about history being written by the winners, please. It's crap.
That is a phenomenon we find again and again. In an area I researched in depth, Dark Age Britain, nearly every useable source and fragment comes from the defeated British side, including the only three named and outstanding authors - the preacher Gildas and the bards Taliesin and Aneirin. The English were too busy settling and organizing their conquests to bother to write records, even when they learned Latin; it took a century and a half before a historian arose - Bede - and although he was in fact one of the greatest who ever lived, he knew so little of events in the original period that his account is virtually worthless.
That is the case, again and again. The Roman conquest of Greece is described - brilliantly - by the Greek, Polybius, one of the political leaders who found themselves one way or another in Rome's way. The history of the Roman Republic is written down for all time by the passionate republican Livy - at the court of conquering Augustus. The fall of the Roman Empire is chronicled almost entirely by Romans - it will be centuries before the Germanic and Arabic conquerors have historians of their own. The Longobard Paul the Deacon writes the history of the Longobard people after the Franks Pepin and Charlemagne have conquered them. The greatest historian of the Muslim Middle Eastern golden age is the Christian, Jacob Bar-Hebraeus. Caesar Baronius takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Catholic Church, halved in size by the fury of the early Reformation, and incidentally codifies the discipline of modern history. Inca princes with Spanish names write histories of the fallen Inca empire. The Four Masters and Geoffrey Keating collect the history of Ireland as Ireland is being ground down by the loving attentions of Cromwell and his successors. These are the men who, as a rule, write the best history; and their motivation is all too clear. "Let our children know what manner of men their fathers were; and that if we were defeated at last, it was not without honour." A victor has other things to think about.
In the twentieth century, indeed, we have had a rather more extraordinary phenomenon: history being rewritten by the defeated in the very lap, almost inside the head, of the winners, by means of a partially deliberate political manipulation. The popular image of the First World War is almost entirely the result of manipulation by a more or less overt alliance of Communist and German writers, united by the common need to make the Allies look uniformly bad and immoral, who have managed to impose what I would call the Black Legend of World War One. To make a couple of instances, popular texts of this type never mention German war crimes, and only ever speak of "brave little Belgium" with an implied sneer, while giving a great deal of space to accounts of allied propaganda, with the implication that allied propaganda was responsible for these things. The opposite was true, of course. Large areas of literature, including masterpieces, have been consigned to the memory hole in order to convince educated persons that the only significant literature that came from the war was the rhetoric of anger of Owen and Sassoon. History is written by the winners? Get real. In our time, and under our eyes, the winners have allowed the losers to rewrite their own history under their very eyes.
So avoid the crap about history being written by the winners, please. It's crap.