Rekishi [歴史]
The characters/ideograms mean, "history." The fist character means, "curriculum; continuation; passage of time," the second character means, "history; crhonicle."
History: The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. A past characterized by a particular thing. A "continuous, typically chronological, record" of important or public events or of a particular trend or institution. A chronicle, archive, record, diary, report, narrative, account, study, tale, story, saga; more ....
Fact: A thing that is indisputably the case. A fact is often used in discussing the significance of something that is the case. It is a piece of information used as evidence or as part of a report or news article. A detail, element, point, factor, feature, characteristic, ingredient, circumstance, aspect, facet, and more ....
A fact is the "truth about events' as opposed to interpretation. This is where history becomes muddy and hard to perceive. When one talks of facts you have a considerable amount of leeway as to perceptions, context, beliefs, cultural influences and a host of other human driven individual perceptions governed by who they are, how they grew up, where they grew up and influences from cultural sources, society of that culture, the culture and belief of their immediate surroundings as that changes or remains fluid through out their lives, etc.
Facts are subjective to all this and the "fact" that they are not supported by truth about events but rather the interpretation of events also subject to individual or grouped individual influences. Reality is the actual occurrence of an event but the history and facts often degrade as each individual comes in contact with said events "facts." As long as any supposed fact is disputed regardless of the information provided even historically significant documents it comes down to who wrote the history and facts and what influenced them, etc. It can be said that history is written most often by the victors who are biased and will skew history accordingly. This is a fact!
As long as the originator of the event failed to document it properly there will always be discord with context and interpretations as each of us "humans" comes in contact with said events facts and it will always remain in a discussion format about the significance of that persons facts of the event. It is a muddy thing much like the muddy and convoluted context and application of true real life self-defense.
Without the facts from the person who directly caused the event to occur, not someone as a by-standing participant but the person who caused the creation of the event it is all subjective to interpretations as to individual perceptions, etc.
Then there is the second and third hand rendition of the historical events. If it was not written down by the actual person experiencing the event, also still subject to memory, perceptions, interpretations and their own life events, etc. then it is subjected to degradation. Human memory is a very funny thing because it changes constantly, even memories of past events, due to current events, experiences and perceptions. They all change constantly and will remain fluid because we are humans.
To accept such history, facts and perceptions without question dooms a person to fail in keeping the history alive for future studies. Even scientific studies are subject to such things and why they are scrutinized and questioned continuously until the end of time. We tend to revisit bad history because we fail to study all history and facts with an open and questionable oriented mind. Stubbornness is a human fault and frailty.
Some of history even with witnesses, documentation of witnesses, paintings painted by humans, and historical documentation in word or as today in pictures and video's are subject to fault of the person who took it down due to the same human frailties. To believe is to question and when questions become outlawed because of the belief of one thing, event or even a person then all suffer.
One other point of the many that could be made on this subject. Often in some cultures when confronted by a question that the person asked has no answer of their memory does not fully and completely provide the answer along with the human conditions that often cause a memory to be faulty they will concede to the questioner simply to keep the social interactions in a harmonious state. Some cultures place no importance on the documentation of historical events but place a huge amount of importance of social harmony and will out right provide false responses to maintain the social harmony. When relying on personal memory driven facts many are merely perceptions of the moment. They may seem factual and righteous to that person but when questioned can be found lacking.
Here is the real rub here, this same second and third hand factual historical view can often be accurate and true as well. Or at least parts of it will be true, relevant and pretty much a solid fact over perception but the skill comes from "data-mining" that wheat from the chaff in those cases.
Personally, much of the historical information I have an interest in tends mostly to be true - for the moment. I still accept many facts as truth but remain open minded to additional research and speculations when validated to a certain degree because things are not written in stone and if they were it is still questionable.
Anyway, history is fluid according to circumstance and human conditions so remain open minded and be willing to change when change is necessary to history so we can learn all we can.
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