“I want to be remembered” he said.
“By who?” she asked.
“It is by whom” he corrected.
“Yeah, you’ll be remembered” she said.
George Orwell once warned that the past is never quite as house-trained as it pretends. In Homage to Catalonia, he described the peculiar sensation of watching newspapers describe battles that never occurred, while omitting the rather inconvenient ones in which he’d recently been shot at. Years later, in 1984, he exaggerated this observation into the Ministry of Truth.
But once you notice it, you see the cracks in every fresco, and it isn’t new. Take Richard III, for instance – his PR crisis didn’t truly take hold until the Tudors needed a pantomime villain to justify their throne-nabbing escapades. He became a kind of medieval Bond villain, all twisted limbs and twisted morals, though possibly neither were true. Go further back, and the Celts are painted with the same brush dipped in Roman superiority – a bit wild, a bit stabby, and just uncivilised enough to make their conquest look like a TED Talk on imperial enlightenment. Then there’s the Vikings, who history remembers less as traders and lawmakers and more as ‘that noise you make when you stub your toe on a church’. Which is handy, considering most of their history was written by the monks they’d just deconstructed.
But the twist in the quill is this: whenever history starts sounding too neat – too full of villains with curled moustaches and heroes who smile in slow motion – it’s likely been edited by someone with something to sell. History isn’t a lie, not exactly, it’s just the sort of truth you’d find on a dating profile, – cropped, embellished, and filtered through a lens of desperate self-justification.
Misinformation isn’t new, it’s just had a software update. Back then, it took generations to reshape a narrative. Now, it takes a tweet, a typo, or a particularly ambitious AI. We like to imagine “the record” as some immutable stone tablet of facts, but really it’s a soggy napkin that someone’s written on with a pencil.
And that’s the unsettling truth to what we call “history” – it is often just a version of events that got better PR. The past isn’t a painting, it’s a collage, its glue still wet, made from scraps selected by the loudest, or the last, or the least scrutinised. And if there’s one defence against that – one shield against the slow-motion gaslighting of time – it’s not blind faith in what’s written, but the insolence to ask, who was holding the pen? – because any story that paints one side favourably to the other, will only ever be half the story.
And once you realise that the villains of history were often just the losers with poor publicists, an uncomfortable thought follows, – the heroes might not be heroes either.
We inherit a cast list of good and evil as if it were fact, sometimes because it is easier to digest, but history doesn’t divide neatly into saints and monsters. It divides into people – complicated, compromised, and convinced they were right.
The only thing that separates a tyrant from a liberator, centuries later, is who ended up holding the pen. And if you’re not the one holding the pen, then I’m sorry, but you’re the baddie.
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