by Juan Leer

Created on: January 29, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

As George Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

It is in this way that history can never be truly objective. Those who are in control in the present will try to "spin" the past to make them look better. That's just how things work.

Put it this way... would the United States have the same attitude over what happened in World War II as the Germans? Are all history books the same?

Of course not. But if history were truly objective, then the answer to those questions would be yes. But history can never be objective for a couple of reasons:

1) People perceive the same thing different ways. If this weren't the case, there would be no arguments or disagreements.

2) People have bad memories. How often have you heard someone tell a story over and over, but everytime it's told it changes just a little? That always happens... people have bad memories.

3) People don't always have all of the information. Are we ever going to 100% know everything about what happened during the Roman Empire? No. We can't, it's impossible. So while we do our best to objectively tell what happened, it's still a subjective account of it.

So for all of these reasons and more, history can never be truly objective.

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