Revisionismo histórico

‘Good’ War, ‘Bad’ War

By John Pilger

Fifty years ago, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class rescued the study of history from the powerful. Kings and queens, landowners, industrialists, politicians and imperialists had owned much of the public memory. In 1980, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States also demonstrated that the freedoms and rights we enjoy precariously – free expression, free association, the jury system, the rights of minorities – were the achievements of ordinary people, not the gift of elites.

Historians, like journalists, play their most honorable role when they myth-bust. Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America (1971) achieved this for the people of a continent whose historical memory was colonized and mutated by the dominance of the United States.
The “good” world war of 1939-45 provides a bottomless ethical bath in which the West’s “peacetime” conquests are cleansed. Demystifying historical investigation stands in the way. Richard Overy’s 1939: the countdown to war (2009) is a devastating explanation of why that cataclysm was not inevitable.
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