Illusion of Victory
History is a battlefield itself where the victors trip each other up in the record in order to reshape the entire terrain. The winners write their victory, crafting a story that obscures the chaos of the struggles, minimises the losses, and magnifies their own roles variously as saviours or agents of fate. Historical reconstruction can be innocent, but mostly it is the opposite of incidental or kindhearted, operating in identical principles that govern human ambition toward war, though most often with a more cynical method. Control through the erosion of truth. To understand why this happens, we must peer into the mechanisms by which power sustains itself through narrative.
Victors reframe the terms behind the engagements and conflict through narratives. The point is a story which is ostensibly logical, undeniably inevitable, and solvent, that cleans up all the blood and absolves mass murder. Cynical and alienated moral ambiguity painting all rivals as flawed, desperate, or misguided. In short, they invite extremes, and this has consequences up the chain of reality.
Consider the rise of empires: the Roman conquest of Carthage is often told as a tale of divine destiny, with Rome’s gods favouring their cause and Carthage’s hubris sealing its fate. Beneath this myth is the frame of a brutal reality, Carthage was not defeated by gods but by a combination of military strategy, economic dominance, cultural static, and political cunning. The victors rewrote history to ensure that their triumphs are seen as good, rather than the evil result of coercion and all out war. This is how power becomes eternal: by convincing others that it was always meant to be so, not founded upon disgusting and filthy lies.
In this domain, the mass murderer’s lie for glory can never be about the act of victory itself, because it is indefensible on its own. By controlling the narrative, they dictate what counts as “legitimate” success, wherein losses may count as victories and actual victories become inexcusable failures. This manipulation of rules ensures that future generations will not question the victor’s authority, they will assume it was always just, confirmed by reports of the enemy as opposite of the thus legitimised spectrum of potential views. With narratives, they can cut off options entirely, and of course they will try to cut off the truth first.
The Balance
The victor must balance perceptions of outcome by adapting the understanding of the methods and acceptable opinions, most especially through buy-in and sunk-costs. A conqueror will attempt to argue that the means were justified by the ends. This is where they make the most materialistic arguments for warfare.
Take the case of colonial powers like Britain or France: their empire-building were often romanticised as a “civilising mission,” with missionaries and administrators portrayed as benevolent saviours. Yet the reality was darker and much more involved. Measures of success correlated with willingness to be that invader. Exploitation and even genocide occurred, with forced compliance rather than the assimilation of the people and their culture to Truth in Christ.
By redefining the process as one of progress, exaggerating the uncivilised nature of the people, and relying upon the excuse of an unfulfilled Christian mission, the victors justified themselves. They also often erased the violence of their actions from memory and presented themselves as guardians of order, tagging themselves on as riders of the coattails of those who actually were guardians, or attempted to be.
This balance is fragile, especially amidst power struggles and expressions of varied evil in the world. Thus, the winner who wishes to hold on to war trophies or glory is basically forced to lie to protect the evil, in constant reinforcement of the narrative that their methods were not only justified but somehow historically and deterministically inevitable or unstoppable.
Myth of Shared Victory
Power is not maintained through force alone, it is sustained by relationships, both within and beyond the winning group. The victor must cultivate loyalty, either by offering shared rewards or by framing their success as a collective achievement. This is where the lie becomes most dangerous. Its maintenance is no longer just about personal gain but about community, and can then even become about avoiding genocide by those continuing to tow the line, in the most impressive demonstrations of sunk cost arguments, all the while inviting even more war down the line. The same ones involved in genocide can also pay for the politicians railing against it.
The Roman emperor Augustus, for example, positioned himself not as a dictator but as a restorer of peace and tradition. By rebuilding wooden Rome into marble Rome and presenting the expansion of his rule over other lands as a return to Rome’s “golden age,” he turned the act of conquests into communal celebrations. Rome’s subjects were told that they, too, had benefited from the inevitable rise of Roman power, even as the “tolerant” power slowly expanded over every part of their lives.
This illusion of shared victory ensured that dissent was framed as ignorance, disloyalty, or even rebellion. By embedding themselves in the narrative of collective progress, they ensure that those who might challenge them are seen not as rivals but as obstacles to unity. This is how power becomes a shared burden rather than an individual triumph, a way to make dissent feel like betrayal rather than necessary correction.
Leaders often act in the name of stability or national survival thus receiving less resistance, whether true or false, using logic and data, often skewed enough, to justify their actions. They force the hand of their enemy and their own allies, creating compliance and obligations. The truth, that their victories were achieved through coercion, corruption, fear, and manipulations, gets buried beneath layers of carefully constructed narratives that prematurely tie off any loose ends. This is the final act of deception: making the lie so necessary that it becomes truth in the minds of those who are forced to accept it for survival.
Deception for Survival
The most sophisticated form of historical manipulation occurs in rhetoric. This is where liars corrupt the very backboards of discourse. The victor redefines reality itself by manipulating meaning. Religious corruptions are primary in this activity. By generating lies that frame their victory as moral imperative, they dismiss all alternatives as irrational in the minds of people. The narrated deceptions are not only accepted as true but pushed desperately, as agreement creates a sense of certainty. Interpolating prophets comes in handy for this kind of work. We can see this most at work wherever people are made to feel like victims.
History is written by those who controlled the story narration, ensuring that the how mirrors the causative whys, at least in appearance, creating a self-reinforcing legitimacy for open avarice. Empires manipulate beliefs to sell people and their opponents down differing lines of compliance. The important thing is that both sides accept the overarching narrative; the backboard. The victor’s lasting power lies in the ability to steer the discourse afterwards, or else even complete domination can be made to look like disastrous failure. Establishing their version of events as dominant in public debate, eliminates wider dissent. This is how history becomes a tool of domination: through violence yes, but primarily through the quiet erasure following it.
Weight of Truth
The pattern is clear: winners do not simply win; they write their victory into existence. By controlling the acceptance and rejection of narratives, logically balancing the methods with outcomes, cultivating forced loyalties, and disrupting reason with lies, they ensure that their story becomes indistinguishable from reality itself. Yet the lies cannot last forever. The seeds of truth are always present, waiting for the moment the cycle break of its own turning, imbalanced and unwieldy as it is. The victor’s narrative may endure for generations, but it is ultimately as fragile as the uncontrollable enemies made. It relies on the complicity of both those who accept or reject the terms to agree what they are to begin with as a form of popular moderation, altered by manipulating extremes.