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You make a very interesting point that never occur to me. How many of the stories of great men are just that? Makes me look to "history" in a different way.

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History is written by the victors - there for those Brits who took up arms and went to fight in Spain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War ) are remembered as freedom fighters, fighting the good fight, but those today that want to go to Syria or other modern battlegrounds are (currently) viewed as terrorists. Only the future will know how we will refer to them in 50 or 100 years time...

And here I thought that Franco won the Spanish Civil War.

And yet the regimes that opposed Franco's outlasted Franco's. Who the "victors" are depends on the geographical context of the analysis and the time window.

I really liked a quote from Julian Barnes' The Sense Of An Ending. One of the characters answers the teacher's question "what is history?" with "History is the lies of the victors,” to which the history teacher responds, “Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.”

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