Historical revisionism

In historiography, historical revisionism is the process of revisiting, reexamining, and attempting to revise the established, commonly-held view of an historical event. This can be a good thing when the conclusions reached are supported by the evidence and lead to a more accurate understanding of the past; or bad when it paints in inaccurate picture of the past and relies on incorrect, selective, or manipulated data.

When used in Marxist contexts it can mean the telling of historical events in a pseudohistorical or ahistorical way. A relative of political revisionism, which implies a betrayal of the scientific political view, historical revisionism refers to a betrayal of history or historical accuracy. History is a cornerstone of dialectical materialist theory. Cultural revisionism is a related term that implies a historical revision of culture, one that is always necessarily false. In other words, historical revisionism is a falsification of history, whether intentional or unintentional. Historical materialism ensures an accurate and scientific retelling of history, one which is told by the masses rather than by the bourgeoisie. To betray a materialist conception of history in practice, whether by error or by intention is to engage in historical revisionism because it is a regression into idealism and idealist errors.

It could be argued that all bourgeois historians engage in some level of historical revisionism at least when it comes to certain topics, because their telling of history is biased towards the bourgeois class and loyalty to this class, rather than truth or the masses, is the measure of 'accuracy'. As is the case for bourgeois science in general.

One modern example of historical revisionism is the way the history and status of Tibet is misrepresented by bourgeois ideologues and Tibetan nationalists. Tibet has been part of China for over a thousand years since the Tang dynasty, and no country has ever recognised Tibet as a sovereign nation, yet many bourgeois ideologues (particularly in the West) as well as Tibetan separatists argue that Tibet is an independent country that was only forced to join China in 1950 after a supposed "invasion". They also often glorify the feudal era of Tibetan history when over 90% of the population were either slaves or serfs and living conditions were deplorable for most people. This gross mischaracterisation of Tibet's history is made by bourgeois propagandists in an attempt to lend legitimacy to separatist movements in China, as China represents a threat to the liberal international order, and the Capitalist Bloc consequently seeks the balkanisation of the modern Chinese nation-state.

Examples

• Anti-Katyn
• Armenian genocide denial
• Australian indigenous genocide denial
• Canadian indigenous genocide denial
• Clean Wehrmacht myth
  • Rommel myth
• Gay Nazis myth
• Holocaust denial
• Holodomor
• Irish slaves myth
• Jewish war declarations
• Lost Cause myth
• Nakba denial
• Native American genocide denial
• Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory
• Preventive War Myth
• Revisionist school of Soviet history
• Stab-in-the-back myth
• Tibetan sovereignty debate