http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/mansonparole.asp

The digital age has provided a fertile soil for the growth of rumor, anomalism and conspiracy theory; be it Obama's birth, Hillary's brain damage, Dubya masterminding 9/11 or "the moon landing was faked".

Although the internet provides plentiful resources to check and verify, the propagandist can count on these tools not being used, and the original lie being propagated. After a while, the record is so muddied with claims and counter claims that the difference between truth and lies becomes harder to discern. Its not just the internet's fault, the JFK assassination conspiracy theories and the holocaust deniers have proven that. History can be manufactured, as George Orwell reminded us. But today, it can be manufactured much faster.

One of the advantages of getting older is the ability to remember events and to compare those memories with the accepted truth of them today. I love watching and reading stories about the Vietnam era, the 60s, hippies, and other memories of my youth and contemplating how a commonly accepted historical picture of those times is emerging which appears quite absurd to those who were actually there.

It is true, "being there", close to the action, imposes its own limitations, the inability to see things in historical context, the limited horizon of the direct participant embedded in the times, the lack of perspective. It is always the question of who has the best concept of a battle, the soldier who saw it all from his foxhole, or the general at headquarters poring over his maps and dispatches. If they both have a valid point of view, which is most valid? Is it some combination of the two, and how does the historian make that combination? What is truth, anyway?

No, NO, NO. I am not saying there isn't any absolute truth, that we get to manufacture it all in our heads and that there is no external reality. What I'm saying is that there IS an absolute truth but that we can never be sure what it is because we can only perceive it second hand, through the senses of others and through their interpretations. And if we can't be sure because the tools of science (experimental verification, etc) do not apply, then our knowledge of the past will always remain suspect and unreliable.

We have religious dogma today based on the writings of witnesses who did not participate in the events they describe, and which were edited and selected by individuals who lived centuries later. We also have political and economic dogma based on on historical evidence that is just as flawed. Archaeology cannot help. It can only tell us what happened, not everything that happened, or what didn't happen at all.

In the end, the only universe we can really count on is the one we experience directly, not because it is necessarily more real, or because we know how real it is, but because we have direct experience of just how unrealistic it might be.