History is written not by the victors but by the surviving archives

You have surely heard that “history is written by the victors.” That is only partly true. Far more often, history is written by chance: what reaches us is not the most important but the most durable.

The survivors’ bias

We know antiquity from a few percent of texts that happened to survive fires, wars, and mold. Brilliant books burned, while mediocre ones survived because there were many copies. A historian looks not at the past but at its fragments — and easily mistakes “what survived” for “what mattered.” This is survivorship bias: we look at the planes that returned and draw conclusions, forgetting those that did not.

Why this matters today

The same effect works on the present. We remember the loud and the documented, while the quiet and the unrecorded vanish as if they never were. A people that does not keep its own testimony — in its own language, through its own eyes — risks being “rewritten” by others’ archives. Not out of malice, but simply because someone else’s record survived.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana

My opinion: history is not what happened, but what we managed to preserve and read honestly. That is why an archive, a museum, and a record in the mother tongue are not dust but a form of self-defense. To keep your own testimony is to keep others from telling your story for you.