The Phantoms Haunting History

> While in the past their views may have been countered by equally imaginative narratives from the left — like the liberatory progressivism of Whig historians and Marxist theorists — today it feels as though that ground is too often ceded in favor of “trusting the science.”

The first part describing the webs and flows of objectivity in history, with interesting examples was well written, But the conclusion is a bit odd. The author thinks, if you follow one the links they provide, that the far right individuals like Tolkien's works, and then also invent crockpot alternate histories, and suggests that the left should come up with something similar.

> American narrative in decades, was the work not of historians, but journalists. When the profession has ceded its domination over the public narrative of history, amateurs will take over. [...] Maybe that amateurism is not such a bad thing.

If historians won't do it, the journalists should. I can see interpreting it, yes, but pretending to write whole fictionalized narratives masking as history is a bit extreme. That's exactly what journalists in totalitarian regimes do: in Russia they say that Ukraine is a fictional country, it's just Russians corrupted by the "Satanic West", in North Korea I am sure they tell similar elaborate stories and so on.

> Many scholars have found themselves ‘baffled and confused by the enormous proportion of forged, remade, confected, and otherwise mutilated documents’ that form the premodern historical record.

I'm sure they do. Nonetheless, they make the best of it. This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

Similar to intelligent designers saying, "hey, if you throw a bunch of car parts on the floor, they'll never assemble themselves into a car! So it had to be a Designer."

Or homeopaths saying, "There's so much conventional medicine cannot explain. So my herbal cure and natural diet is as good as their chemotherapy!"

Judaism is the evolution of a Sun/Ra worshipping cult, its early followers killed Moses and only perpetuated the religion out of guilt, most historical evidence before the 14th century was faked by monks, and the Carolingian dynasty was invented to pad the current date by over 300 phantom years (the current year is actually 1722, not 2024).

That’s officially in my headcanon now.

> University departments tried to ban his books and boycott his publisher, but Velikovsky still found himself the subject of documentaries and the star of speaking tours until his death in 1979.

When has censorship ever accomplished anything except to turn a crank into a martyr?

Totally unrelated to the content of the article, but I absolutely hate the font on those blockquotes!

The evolution of history into a narrative that politicizes the present is a double-edged sword.

> Inspired by archaeological discoveries in Amarna in Egypt, Freud posited that the monotheism of Moses was, in fact, of Egyptian origin: an evolution of the worship of the sun god, Aten. Even more scandalously, he asserted that ancient Jews had murdered Moses and perpetuated this monotheistic faith not from religious devotion, but from an unconscious sense of unresolved spiritual guilt.

I wonder how much of that had to do with the Nazi demonization and dehumanization of Jewish people. Monotheism is one of the big contributions to culture by Judaism. The other 2 major modern monotheistic religions- Christianity and Islam are explicitly based on Jewish monotheism.

Framing this as them stealing it from the Egyptians and killing Moses (similar to Jesus) seems very inline with what the Nazis would want to portray.

What an awful article. Leaving aside the later half, which is just a vague denouncement of various right wing stances on history, the former part concerns itself with revisionist history, which seeks to rearrange ancient or medieval history.

History will always be plagued by the various issues the article point out, most narrators are totally unreliable, most documents which have existed are lost and might have been intentionally destroyed, physical evidence is selected by the surrounding environment, measurement techniques are imprecise and the amount of things that happened is incredibly vast. This state of affairs means that we should expect that there are strong arguments for multiple contradicting theories and that there is a great variety of theories which are supported by much of the evidence. Essentially revisionism should be the default state of history, but of course it isn't.

In physics we have learned in the last hundred years that roughly everything we had previously known was false and that most of the assumptions made were in fact wrong.

He meditated. He prayed. He fasted. He ate mushrooms. He dwelt in the wilderness. And by doing so he saw something more. Something realer than what is popularly called reality.

But I won't do any of that. What I will do is read stories about the people who did all that and interpret them with a conventional eye.

Funny.

> "The longer we treat our field as sterilized objective truth, we lose more students to the alt-right"

Shockingly bad article. Objectivity is an ideal. It's impossible to reach, but the point is to try. As soon as historians give up trying to be objective, they start producing garbage.