History Is Written by the Losers (2016)

I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one. The robotics tie in isn't far off though, as some of the earliest autonomous mobile robots spawned from cybernetics research.

> I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one.

Just to clarify, do you mean that the Soviet context is the same as the modern context or that the modern context misuses the term in some way (or something else that I missed)?

The assessment of Indian history is quite accurate, though it is important to note the distinction between the Greek/Chinese written history and the Indian tradition of oral history. Foundational works like the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita were transmitted orally, from teacher to student, over the course of many centuries. Various memorization techniques (e.g. the eleven pathas of Vedic chanting [1]) were employed to promote perfect transmission of information.

This presumably means that during the many centuries of internal strife in the Indian subcontinent, warfare and disease could erase the history of the vanquished by simply eliminating the learned few who had memorized it.

It's also worth pointing out that contemporary Indian history is extremely biased. In the museum adjoining the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the historical account of the 1984 Sikh separatist movement universally refer to the event that led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi as the "Blue Star massacre". The Partition Museum, located less than a mile away, uses the generally-accepted name of "Operation Blue Star", but is riddled with factual inaccuracies and anti-colonial editorialization in many of its displays. The underlying motives of many Indian historians is to rewrite it to suit their present purposes, which is why P. N. Oak [2] has such a huge following in the highest levels of Indian government.

My nieces and nephews in India are taught "Indian exceptionalism" in school. Many Indians will erroneously claim that Western ideas like germ theory are either appropriated from, or inferior to, the ancient practice of Ayurveda. And even when it comes to what little historical information one might find in the Mahabharata, the words are treated as mystical sounds rather than something to be analyzed and understood.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._N._Oak

The author doesn't consider, or comment on, or maybe doesn't know about, Voeglin's thesis that the Hebrews exemplify a bringing-about of order out of disorder with a reflective understanding about the importance for the future of mankind, and making a record in that regard, i.e., History

Machiavelli and Dante are other examples of losers effectively writing (thinly veiled, and very subjective) history. Both were political losers, exiled from their lands in their latter years, grinding their axes by wielding their pens.