“History Is Written by the Winners”

I was thinking about that old aphorism the other day, “History is written by the winners.” It is one of those self-evident truisms taught in high school history classes. But I think it’s misdirection. How can that be? 

The reason it’s misdirection is because of the way it’s used. We usually use it to refer to a situation where there is a clear conflict or war and one side wins. They get to write the history books, to define which side in the conflict was justified, who attacked who, why, and otherwise re-interpret or invent the historical facts to make themselves look good.

I poked around a bit trying to find out who said it ‘originally,’ and it seems to have been attributed to Churchill, Hitler, Napoleon, Machiavelli, and Orwell. But they all used it in the same way. Orwell is a good example. Here in this 1944 entry in a column he wrote for The Tribune, he writes:

Out of the millions of instances which must be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable.  During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audiences with stories of devastating air raids on London.  Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen.  But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain?  For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn’t they?  The answer is:  If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn’t happen.  So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years.  Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document?  Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis?  How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain?  Does Europe welcome the New Order?  In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle.  History is written by the winners.

Note his emphasis on ‘physical struggle.’ He then goes on to use this comparison to sell a big lie about the honesty of the press in a ‘free’ country:

In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer lies about it than our adversaries.  The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.

So by contrasting Britain to the totalitarian German regime, he is selling the public on the notion that their government, their rulers, care more for the truth — to an extent. Basically the same misdirection he was selling with 1984. He concludes:

I still don’t envy the future historian’s job.  Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war cannot be estimated within several millions?

Few of us would find it strange, but it is certainly revealing. Yet even as he admits to the mundane wartime propaganda of exaggerating casualty counts, he drills in the biggest lie: that England and Germany were really mortal enemies–one a free democracy, the other a totalitarian dictatorship–and fighting a war for their very existence. When in reality both countries were being controlled by the same masters who were orchestrating the war behind the scenes. (See for example Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.)

But let’s cut to the chase, shall we? We are taught to think of the phrase “history is written by the winners” as referring to a situation of open war or conflict, where one side is a clear winner. As when Orwell referred to ‘physical struggle.’ In that case, the loser will retain some collective memory that there was a war–a memory that cannot be easily erased but can be shaped to suit the narrative of the winner. But, what happens when the conflict is not fought out in the open–if we didn’t know we were at war? If it the struggle is not physical but takes place behind the scenes over the course of centuries. How would we know that we lost? If history is really written by the winners, then why would they even let us know we had been conquered? Wouldn’t it be better to erase any trace of it? Or, wouldn’t they want us to think, in fact, that we had triumphed?

16 thoughts on ““History Is Written by the Winners””

  3. Yep. It would make more sense to say…”history is written by the controllers.” Or, “history is written by your slave masters.”

    In spite of Orwell’s misdirection and blaming those bad totalitarians, he did reveal some of the techniques used by the controllers. It was clear that the war with East Asia or Oceania didn’t matter and may or may not have even been real. What mattered was the domestic control, the ability of the controllers to generate hate against the external enemy.

    Just like America freaking out about Putin, who poses them no physical threat whatsoever but who suddenly generates 2-minute hate again even though the Cold War ended 25 years ago. It shows the incredible power of the controllers–to be able to shape opinion at will and whip up a frenzy out of nowhere. No-one questions their tax burden or their debt burden. In fact, they’d gladly pay more if they could just be protected from….Islamic terrori…..wait, that’s so last year….I mean, Putin!

    (It almost (but not quite) gives me some sympathy for what the controllers do. The people aren’t just willing to be duped, they are DESPERATE to be duped.)

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    1. Welcome back Gull/Aurora/Emma! Didn’t take you long. Can you please ask for a re-assignment? They really need to bring in some new blood. Or, you know, just leave us alone.

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  5. Good question. The chosen people think it’s the year 5776, so they are probably doing a slightly better job keeping track of history than Christians who think we’re only 2000 years past year zero or Cambodian communists who think we’re only 40 years past year zero.

    But I do think that even the controllers often buy-in to their own B.S. Certainly many people that I consider very elite….extremely rich and connected….the Davos set, likely top Masons, the banking elite…do things that reveal that they aren’t in on ALL the rackets….like binge watch TV shows full of damaging propaganda or put their kids on Ritalin or fall deeply in love with Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton or believe passionately in faked historical episodes.

    What does this tell us? Options include:

    1) A lot of what we see is not a conspiracy, but rather chaos and historical forces. No-one is really in charge
    2) The uber-controllers and hoaxers are a VERY small group
    3) There is a big group involved, but there is so much compartmentalization and “need-to-know” that the perpetrators of one hoax may be the victims of another. People involved in drills in Sandy Hook and Boston may be giving their kids flouride pills to “save their teeth,” for example. Junior intelligence officers really may earnestly dedicate themselves to fighting “Islamic terror” and “Putin.” Some Harvard-educated third-world government leaders really MAY be passionate adherents of Marxism, even if it IS a project.
    4) The people in the know deliberately don’t track history because to do so would be to compile evidence of their crimes. This protects them somewhat, although it means that the REAL history is ALREADY GONE.

    We really need to figure out WHO is behind this all and WHO knows WHAT and how they divide up the work and the who gets to know what. “Intelligence” is a cop-out. Mathis says that there may be millions of people paid by Intelligence. They can’t ALL be masterminding everything. In spite of our claims that “our leaders” are puppets, it would actually make MORE sense to me if Obama and Trump were higher up the food chain than most of “Intelligence.” Hierarchies tend to the pyramid structure, and we’ve seen that our “occult” leaders are obsessed with pyramids, from dollar bills to Masonic degrees to to Egyptian and Babylonian structurers.

    So the question is….who is at the top of the pyramid. And by definition, the answer can’t be “Intelligence.” There are too many of them. If the U.S. President is taking orders from people, it’s not every Tom Dick and Harry at the CIA. Is the head of the CIA actually the President’s secret boss? Maybe. But who is his boss? Anyone? Or does the buck stop there? It’s possible that the head of the CIA is the head of everything, at least operationally, with the media in effect reporting to him. But then we still have to ask what’s the relationship between CIA and Mossad and MI6. And even if that hierarchy becomes clear we have to ask what’s THEIR relationship with, say, the Bank of International Settlements or the Grand Pooh Bah of all Masons or the richest families on the globe.

    The truth seeker Web is full of researchers ignoring this question. But it is THE question. As discussed in these threads a few weeks ago, many people don’t want to address this issue because they fear it will lead in anti-semitic directions. Others fear it will lead in truly occult directions…to real Satan worshippers. Others fear it will lead to the truly powerful, who don’t mind us sniffing around the edges but might react violently to being actually and credibly outed.

    Is it literally the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds? Is it literally the Trilateral Commission? Is it elite Jews? 33rd degree Masons? The Black Pope? The Royal Family? The top British and American spies?

    A good way to get at this is to always ask Cui Bono? Who benefits? This blog and a few others (Mathis) do a great job at least partially addressing this. For example, the piece about the fake bank robberies points in a direction–the federal government was eroding state power, the overall government was making the people fearful and more prone to want protection from a dangerous world, and maybe some domestic or global bankers thought that more government centralization would also enable more banking centralization. Here we do get a complicating factor, where, instead of a single rigid hierarchy, we can imagine multiple pyramids cooperating. The bankers, the governments, Intelligence, etc. would ALL benefit from increasing centralization. So there is some possibility of loose cooperation. Just like after 9/11, people NOT in on it but who nevertheless stood to gain from increasing spending on national security, Intelligence, war, etc. immediately got behind the official story as a way of promoting their own interests.

    Anyway, it’s all pretty tricky to unravel. Do any of you have any ideas for HOW to explore this subject? I’m increasingly seeing the fakery and some of the reasons for it (they want people scared, they want money, they want power, etc.). But I can’t decipher who is behind it all and how they interact with each other.

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  6. Daddieuhoh, I myself had a couple of a-ha moments while reading your piece. As with many things lately, this game of words is opening so many topics worth debating. Orwell is enough to inspire many of us enter into one, I’d say, but there is so much more than one or two spooks pre-programming our consciousness for what is/as to come as imposed reality.

    But still, history is actually written by the winners,if we think about it literally. The losers, in this duality of meaning as opposed to the word and meaning of winners, are supposedly unable to write it (as they are removed from any position to write anything, i.e. lost their lives fighting, imprisoned by the winners, silenced in this or that way, etc). With that assumption, the only one who can re-tell what happened to those not involved and yet unborn are the winners. Last men standing, in other words. But as nothing is simple to grasp, we might have possibly all-time winners (almost divine-like features?) who coincidentally or not own the major media outlets.

    On the other hand, they can dupe us into believing that we are the winners, not even realizing we were actual losers of the game. As major example I’d suggest WWII, where we are all taught to believe the fight was against one man, the devil himself, who managed to pull the entire German nation and world into a mad and condemning war. So we get a perfect Hegelian discourse, where evil is presented in the form of Nazis and dangerous nationalism where we defeat the evil ultimately, not even realizing that the true evil orchestrated, financed, logistically supported and executed the whole thing. While we remain traumatized and in shock, those surviving it and those impacted by the history written by the winners, will be further programmed into believing that the truth prevailed and evil was defeated. How sad to realize the actual scale of such game played with our minds. So here we are, duped many times over into believing that we are the good ones, while the truth is just the opposite.

    You are completely right, how to even know when we lost or won? It’s so complicated sometimes to decrypt it all in order to realize what actually happened. How to track the history un-biased anyway? Can anyone except some sort of super-trooper machine do it so it corresponds to what actually happened? Anyway, this is just the philosophical debate about it, when it comes to what we are taught and programmed to perceive, such derailed and edited history on majority of topics only shows that the pattern exists. A pattern worth exploring and defining, in order to be able to recognize it without any delay possible or with other words, in order to be able to prevent it in the real time as we debate. Individually, we can’t even hope to grasp it all, there’s just to much of distortion about the truth to almost every significant event of the past. And there is the constant divide imposed constantly, that it is really just a hope that we could be united for once against those imposters. Whoever they are, can we get some Piece of Mind, finally ?

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  7. excellent comment! I find it very sobering to understand that the world wars, along with Vietnam…etc, most likely did not happen as we have been taught and that it isn’t even because “history is written by the winner”, but because wars were planned by the “psychopaths in charge” and the outcome is most likely a “foregone conclusion”. Anything to ensure the establishment of their NWO.

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  8. With all due respect… Whoever wrote this must have never been to a war, to a physical struggle. Just another armchair quarterback so to speak. So this is how it works nowadays… Somebody naive enough to consider himself none the wiser and think that with just a computer, an Internet connection and Wikipedia you can be called a researcher and that one can unravel the mysteries and enigmas of this and centuries past? Why am I even wasting my time writing this? Fool me once…

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  9. Well, here we are, end of 2022.
    Now, do you still “believe” that Orwell was misdirecting ??
    Or, maybe, just maybe, your interpretation was a little bit narrow?

    “History is written by the victors” may be applied to ANY 2 parties opposition, conflict.
    Cheers.

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