Many people are ignorant on earlier conditions.  Then people tend to take it for granted it was like when they grew up.  This includes both standard of living and how people treated each other.  Both have changed much over generations and centuries.  Far too many people today are unaware of this.  Add a tendency to wishful thinking.  Then we get people denying it ever was as bad as it is documented to have been.  A variant is denying it was like that particularly there.  Then it is also a matter of misdirected love for the place.  Or to an entire country if the person claims that.

What I call history denial is on a different level.  People deny the existence of events, developments, cultures and state societies.  The individuals as such deny an event has taken place or a society was.  In addition there is denial of all or parts of prehistory.  I mean things which happened before written history.  Some deny all written history before a certain point.  All those have no idea of what the state of evidence looks like.  They don’t know the evidence that something was exist.  So they take it for granted it don’t.

In reality there is something called the scientific community.  There is never one or a small number claiming something was.  Instead it is tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.  Each has seen a small part of the data demonstrating something existed.  Anyway, there is no possibility for one person to examine everything.  The total amount of data is by far too much for that.

At worst even the Moon is believed to be man-made.  Many today are unaware of the real movements of the heavenly bodies.  In addition there is ignorance about own ignorance.  Things like the movements of the Moon can be hard to get.  Add a habitual suspiciousness.  Then someone may believe the Moon would be a modern hoax.  I can’t help wondering what would be the point with that.  As if such a hoax would even be humanly possible.  The Moon has been mentioned in writing as long as writing has been used to describe heavenly bodies.  I think it has been depicted in art even longer than that.  To the natural science it is obvious the Moon has existed in geological time.  This is about the effects the Moon’s gravity has on the Earth.  Effects such individuals likely don’t know about.

What use to be called natural disasters some deny to be natural.  To me they seem to believe something literarily did not exist before they themselves knew about it.  Then it becomes easy to imagine something to be a modern thing.  Trouble is natural disasters are documented not to be this.  Cold snaps, heat waves and hurricanes have been mentioned for centuries.  People have written down the effects they have seen themselves.  Other types of disasters have left geological evidence too.  These are things like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, landslides, floods and droughts.  All these are outside human control.  We can’t concentrate the energies needed for that.

Precisely the existence of geological time there are people denying.  They start from an oversimplified image of how rock layers are expected to look.  When something does not match the oversimplification the problem is supposed to be unsolvable.  This type of problems was solved already in the 19th century.  No-one of them is any surprise to present-day geologists.  Such cases are well-known to them.  Geological evidence has been collected for more than 200 years now.  Why would they not make attempts to explain their data?  If one scientist gives up another scientist will sooner or later continue.

As a science archaeology has developed over generations.  Archaeologists have identified dozens if not hundreds of cultures.  Each can be recognised from the style of the objects the culture has made.  Cultures during the past couple of millennia have left a clear cultural heritage too.  To me as a European it is as such obvious the Roman Empire existed.  I think it is the same for East Asians about Han China.  People in other parts of the world instead have other cultural heritages.  Or it is so indirect its origin becomes fussy.

State societies oftentimes have a writing system.  People may write on ceramics or makes carvings in rock.  If something lies in oxygen-poor water, organic materials can be preserved.  These include texts written on plant material or leather.  (The latter includes parchment too.)  Such materials have also been preserved under sheltered conditions in deserts.  Together all found texts show that written history stretches more than 5,000 years back.  This is very much longer than manuscripts in libraries.  The latter can usually be dated to a period of a few decades.

The closer in time one gets the more documentation there is.  For relatively modern times there are for example vital statistics.  This makes it impossible to hid or fake millions of dead.  After World War II 10 – 12 million people were missing from the previously German occupied Central Europe.  Did the Soviet Union get an addition of equal size?  To the opposite, up to 5 million more are missing than is explained by direct acts of war.  No other countries got any additions of combined comparable size.  Where did all these humans go?  The simple explanation is that the Nazis killed them.

If nothing else disastrous decisions became revealed afterwards.  I think the Great Chinese Famine caused the death of 29 million humans.  This at least seems most likely.  The causes were forced collectivisation, confiscation of economic resources, deliberate extermination of species and drought on top of that.  China was then so isolated this was first revealed later.  Say that India had tried something comparable 15 years later.  Then it would have been already revealed while it was happening.  Not only because the country’s border districts are more densely populated than China’s.  But because cruelties become easier to reveal over time too.  This is not considered by individuals accusing their government for things which would not work.

Finally, I have read about people denying their own country’s setbacks.  Trouble is the setbacks’ consequences are to be seen anywhere just by locking for them.  One example is Americans claiming to have won the Vietnam War.  They have no idea Vietnam has since then been ruled by Communists.  This is not something American mass media has made up.  This is something a 100 million people are still living under!  Denying that the US lost the war is denying their everyday experience.  However, American ignorance of geography is a standing joke.  At least in Sweden, Norway as well as Canada.

 

Uploaded on the 8th of November 2024.