History is Negotiable

Part of my interest in the new world has to do with how the pandemic will be treated by history.  

Just because we are living this historic event ourselves - watching, listening, reading, writing things down, paying attention - does not mean that history will record it accurately.  And what does "accurately" mean, anyway, after the facts and figures are taken care of?  Slavery happened, and Americans lived through it; the same with the Civil War, and Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.  People alive at the time saw, heard, read, wrote, paid attention - lived it - and yet throughout the country, each of these is taught and written about and talked about differently, and each version has its adherents, who insist that theirs is the true story.

Today I came upon a New Yorker article which described the way the story of the massacre of 8,000 Muslim citizens of Srebrenica, by Bosnian Serbs in 1995, in the final days of the war in Bosnia, is being retold.  Those of us who value facts and evidence know that the bodies - thrown into mass graves - were all found, and most of them have been identified, as a result of the largest DNA-identification project in the world.  The perpetrators of the massacre have been convicted of war crimes by a UN war crimes tribunal, after an agonizingly long and detailed trial which is not for the faint-hearted.

And yet:

"Serb nationalists have increasingly denied what occurred... they flatly dismissed the findings of the... DNA identification project... The Bosnian Muslims listed as dead in the town's graveyard, where the remains of six thousand people are buried, were really still alive and living in Germany, a woman told me.  Muslims had stolen the bodies of Serbs and falsely declared the massacre victims, a man said.  Others called the reports of eight thousand dead a "farce," a "circus," and "make believe."

Sound familiar?  If you lived in Kenya, it would:

Despite global scientific data showing that Covid-19 is a deadly new strain of coronavirus, which has killed almost 600,000 people, if you publicly declare in Kenya that you have the virus then you are in danger of being castigated as a liar desperate for attention or a government stooge...  Today, despite more than 11,000 cases of Covid-19 and 200 deaths in Kenya, there are those who still say that the virus does not exist - from the gentleman who cleaned my vehicle last week insisting that it is the biggest lie of our time to fellow journalists saying that it is nothing more than a prolonged flu.

So when and if we get to the new world, we might not have a clear view of what we just went through.  I had a sudden image of the third mate on the Pinta telling his friend the bos'n, "The Atlantic Ocean?  Just a myth.  I can't believe you've been duped by those elitist cartographers.  Spain is actually just over the horizon."