76560 - Podcast #44: The fake history

N. Lygeros

Let’s talk about that right now, in this podcast.
The Soviet Union wanted to play a game without history. It was nonsense and with time it became a strategic error. At the beginning the system thought that it could destroy history or even kill it. But history was unbreakable. For that reason, it started to write its own history, a fake one of course. The birth of fake history was in the Ante Cold War period and not after as many people think. Now everybody knows the sense of fake news but it’s hard to imagine the existence of a fake history. It looks incredible but it was the point of the Soviet Union. When you can’t reach the level of History, you construct a parallel one and the simplest one is the fake. The fake history is the job of the propaganda. The efficiency of the propaganda is impressive even for that time. Because the whole Union trusted this Pravda without any contestation. In fact this is not precisely the truth because some persons of interest tried to resist to this fake history but their lives were destroyed. A famous example is Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
The fake history is just tactics. It doesn’t have a very high level, you don’t need that. The impressive fact is that the propaganda can use it at the whole framework to change the mind of every brain. The idea when you write the scenario is to think that it has to be consistent. You don’t care about that in fake history. So you have only orders, facts which are not related. There is not only one logic, the idea is only how to protect the system. So you can only use fake news, lies and of course fake history, first to accept that you are not able to kill history but at the second level if the real history is accessible only to a few persons and the fake one is accessible to everybody, you don’t care about the real one, you need only the fake one because of the manipulation of the mass. So even if history exists as a reality which is of course inaccessible because they can’t find facts, it’s fine for you. So you have only a fake history as a framework for your mind, for the mind of the people, for the mind of the innocents. So if you change only this you don’t need to change everything. To be more precise, if you change the history only in the jail and the innocent is only in the jail, in fact you changed the whole world of the innocent. So you don’t care to change anything else outside. You are in the system and you say this is history. It’s simple, it’s accessible to everybody, there is no contestation, there is only one fake history which is written in the journal Pravda, which means, in Russian, Truth. It’s a joke. If we say that we forget human beings who resist to that barbarity. So when you think about Boris and of course I mean Pasternak, it’s impressive because you know he was living in a world of oblivion. He was living in a world of propaganda. But he wrote a book of truth in lies. He wrote a book of memory in oblivion. He wrote the real facts in a fake history and he did it. So of course his life was destroyed but his work is still here with us and we know that it was correct. So this resistance, this resilience is an important fact to imagine that, don’t say all the time that would you have propaganda nothing else is possible. It’s possible but with sacrifices. So for us the example of Boris and at the end of the Cold War of course his recognition, even by the Russian system, officially I mean, after of course Gorbachev, is a proof that we can do what we have to do  even in that context. So we have to remember him and the others. He have to keep in mind the works and say that it’s always possible to resist to barbarity you need willingness, you need faith. But if you have willingness and faith it’s possible and you create the future of history.