Hoho the thing about history is funny. I'm actually studying history in uni right now and I want to work in the field sooo I think I may have some insight about history, and that saying. Keep in mind though I am just started on this path so my take could be contradicted by someone with more experience in the field.
"History is written by the winners" is a complex topic in my opinion because it all stands on a simple fact: did both sides of a conflict write about their sides? Did third parties observe the conflict and write?
On the SMP, as irl, we have two big categories of historical sources, written and not written (that is how they are categorised in my country at least).
Written sources are the ones that give the most information, but they can also be biased because of the author. If you have a primary source of a conflict from one side, to make sure you don't have a biased take, you should go look for accounts from the opposing side (ex: in my country a huge battle happened in 1475, and you can check both our sources, the opponent's sources AND third party sources from other nations to craft a bigger picture and see what happened).
Why am I saying this? I saw people say Ghostbur is naive and that he learned history and how events happened just through reading about it, how he had a warped view of what happened... It seems people forgot that he had access to documents like the Declaration of Independance, the Decree, and so on. Those are primary sources on the history of L'Manberg, the very legal backbone of the country. He had access to other books, you could guess. And funnily, he read the history books, that supposedly said Alivebur was evil...
What did he do? He read the opposite side. He read the primary sources written by Alivebur himself. As far as I am concerned, Ghostbur tackled this to make sure he gets both sides, and draws his own conclusions.
Say what you want about Ghostbur reading the books. He was the single person on that server who cared about the written history, about what stays behind and is set in stone, and read it. And now, the server will suffer in the future because, as far as I am concerned, the answers were there. In the books.
But no one but the "naive" ghost cared about the books. About the tools that gives full context to stuff like Eret's museum. As far as I am concerned Ghostbur saw the bigger picture because he went and read and cared to learn. No one is born knowing. Ghostbur did what future generations would have done. Read the primary sources, and make sense of them, try to see both sides.
Sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to this ask, Redemption Anon!!!
But this is really interesting! It’s nice to get an idea of that quote from a history student!!!
But you are so right, it really shows how Ghostbur went in search of all the information not only to learn, but to know what happened from Alivebur’s perspective too. Which was why he was reading history in the first place, because Alivebur was important in it:
“I’ve been reading a lot of history books recently, Philza. Lot of the L’Manberg history books, right? Because I know that Alivebur was really important in it, right?” - (Philza’s Just a regular day: 1:08:08, 16th Dec)
So this, along with his quote about history being written by the winners, along with the fact he’s read Alivebur’s memoirs to the point where it changed his opinion, really shows how he went in search of all the info!
Yeah, I think you make a real good point about the books, because we know the future is affected by the lack of these books, which shows how the answers were in the books all along.
Yes!!! A fantastic point to end off on, Ghostbur has seen the bigger picture and went in search of all the history. He’s not naïve, he’s the one who knows the most about what happened.
