About History: Who Create/Write the Stories of War?
As we learned from school, both elementary or high level, or even in college, almost every discussion or matter that your teacher gave or your friend that opened the talks, always related to the history things. As for fresh graduates from the Geological Engineering Department, when I studied there, sometimes discussing the history of the Earth. Like how the Earth was made or created, the process related to the Earth system, and many other things. But for now, let me threw away for some minutes to tell one or two words about history, in this case, the history of humans. On this occasion, let us talk about how far do you understanding the historical aspect of humans, in this time, about war. Why? Because for some reason, I become interested in this matter in the last 6 months back then.
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As I said in my previous post, I just said that nowadays, fewer people that took care of war. Both in action like joined a military exercise or even studied about the history of the war from their country. But, let us change the focus to another person who might take interest in war stories that probably read my post. I started with a simple but meaningful question: who create the stories of war? For some reason, people will say that, the one who granted a victory or win condition that writes the story. Well, in that case, I agree in many circumstances. In my country (Indonesia), most of the historical records about war always underlining the winner, especially in the War of Independence from the colonialism of other countries (Netherland and Japanese). But, not all stories were created by the victor, some story also being created by the one who granted a losing moment. For example, in the Vietnamese War, when the United States of America took a devastating blow from their opposition in war and forced to withdraw. The story for that war did not come from locals, but from the Americans, like how they managed to fight the Vietcong, even the reason for their failure and defeat.
For this reason, both sides, the winner and the loser, have the same chance to create the stories of war. Even if people sometimes say,” History was created/written by the victors.”, I prefer to say that “History was created/written by the victims.” The reason why I said like that because you will always hear the historical record for war from people that interacting or participating in that occasion. You will not hear the plot of the Vietnam War from South African people or the American Civil War from Japanese people. For me, the people who tell or create the story, at least the one who witnessed in the field.
