I wasn't necessarily meaning that the winner of a war got to write the history. I'm sure the history of the Vietnam War written by the North Vietnamese is quite a bit different than our account(s). By victor, in this country, I mean the political point of view that was prevalent at the time dictates the point of view of some particular act/war, gets to write our history of it. The prevalent view of Nam was different than what actually happened; the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not as officially reported--it was an excuse to go to war. It did have precedent in our country--The Spanish American war and the War with Mexico also were started by false reports.
The history of this country is written by those who are in control of the educational/corporate sections of this country. Howard Zinn does provide some reality to this countries history.
True. Ironically the history of the Vietnam war wrote itself ... the Pentagon Papers ;-(
ALL wars are started by false reports (we are talking about politicians here). FDR arranged for Japan to attack the US, by cutting off their oil and scrap steel, but the US didn't think Hawaii was in danger. Where did Japan also attack on Dec 7th? The Philippines. That is where FDR expected them to attack. So he was right. Gen Billy Mitchell predicted Hawaii would be attacked, just the way it actually was, but he had been court-martialed years earlier. Double Agent Dushko told J Edgar that the Japanese had an unusual interest in Hawaii, wanted him (on a trip to the US paid by the Germans) to check out Hawaii for them. J Edgar hated spies and thru him out of his office. Supposedly the Portuguese Embassy in Tokyo, warned the US a few days before, that the Japanese were going to attack. And of course we were already reading "Purple", we knew everything the Japanese Embassy in the US was hearing from there.
There are a band of brave truth tellers, the SJW Brigade. Hooray! Kind of like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting fascism in Spain (but for the Communist Party). History rhymes, often in Cyrillic.