“He who controls the past controls the future.”
Aldous Huxley
The idea is not to change history, but to control its narrative.
Obviously it works.
A glaring example: the stab in the back theory in 1918.
The high staff of the German army, anxious to absolve itself of its responsibility in the defeat, recounted, with no complicity, that Germany had not lost the war, but that it had been betrayed by civilians, communists, socialists and Jews.
[ Stab-in-the-back myth - Wikipedia]
And it worked, we know the rest.
Another example: the lost cause theory
The “Lost Cause” (Lost Cause of the Confederacy) is an American theory based on a denialist ideology through a pseudo-historical approach seeking to present the traditional white society of the South of the United States as chivalrous and driven by its sense of honor (in), obscuring the importance that slavery had there. Among the ways of remembering the Civil War, the Lost Cause constitutes a minority but important point of view. It attempts to minimize or even deny the central role of slavery in the outbreak and outcome of the Civil War.
Finally, the ongoing efforts to rewrite the history of the Second World War and the occupation.
Firstly, we are presented with a resistant France as a whole.
Then in the 70s, a France largely collaborating with a minority of resistance fighters.
Today, the picture is more nuanced. In summary, a France which is not collaborationist but which has confidence in Vichy while largely disapproving the persecution of the Jews.
Then a minority of collaborators, and a minority of resisters, with public opinion increasingly supporting the latter. And Vichy which submits more and more to the Germans.
And, today, a rise in a discourse which aims, on the one hand, to deny the genocide of the Jews and, on the other hand, to deny the responsibility of Vichy in the deportations, to rehabilitate Pétain.
The challenge is to rehabilitate its ideology which meets the major concerns of the current far right, racist, anti-feminist, homophobic, and advocating the defense of so-called traditional and mythologized values.