Who Killed the Iceman?
July 26, 2001
by Joe Sobran
So the Iceman was killed.
Ten years ago the well-preserved frozen body of a
man, estimated at 5,300 years old, was found in the
Italian Alps. Now it appears that the Iceman, as he has
been nicknamed, died violently: an arrowhead has been
found lodged under his left shoulder.
By now the trail is cold. The identity of the
culprit may never be known. Authorities insist, however,
that Congressman Gary Condit is not a suspect.
Reconstructing the past is a fascinating and endless
enterprise. We never have as many facts as we would like;
what we know is always a tiny fraction of what remains
unknown; and we never know how small even that fraction
really is.
Whole biographies of William Shakespeare, up to 600
pages or so, are written from a handful of documents
totaling maybe 30 pages. The rest is surmise. And there
is plenty of reason to doubt whether he even wrote the
works ascribed to him.
The hunger for data about Shakespeare has led to a
long series of forgeries and blunders. The latest
excitement concerns a supposed portrait of Shakespeare,
which is certainly bogus.
It's a portrait of a young man, date and identity
unknown, bearing this inscription: "Shakspere Born April
23 -- 1563 Died April 23 -- 1616 Aged 52 This Likeness
taken 1603 Age at that time 39 yrs."
One thing is certain: portraits in those days didn't
carry that sort of detailed information. The huge 1623
Folio of Shakespeare's plays didn't even mention the
years of his birth and death, let alone calendar dates.
His exact birthday (in 1564, by the way) is still
unknown, after centuries of research.
So the information on the portrait must have been
added long after the painting was made, in an attempt to
pass it off as an authentic likeness of Shakespeare.
Whoever committed it was too naive to realize that his
"facts" themselves would expose the fakery by being too
precise to be true.
False history can have disastrous consequences. Our
own Civil War was the needless result of some bad history
on the part of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln denied the right of the Southern states to
secede from the Union. He based this assertion in
history: the states, he said, had never existed
independently of the Union, so they couldn't reclaim
their independence in 1861.
But what about the Declaration of Independence,
which said they were "free and independent states"?
Lincoln answered with a sophistry: that the states were
merely claiming independence of Great Britain, not of
each other.
He went on to say that the Union had been further
"matured" in the Articles of Confederation. Apparently he
never read those Articles, because they say at the outset
that "each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and
independence." How could a state "retain" what it had
never had in the first place? Obviously the states
already recognized their own independence by emphatically
reaffirming it.
So the Articles of Confederation, far from making an
unbreakable Union, was actually a second Declaration of
Independence! Lincoln was also unaware that in the age of
the Founding Fathers, a "state" was still, by definition,
free, sovereign, and independent, whereas a
"confederation" was -- also by definition -- a voluntary
association of sovereign states, any of which might
withdraw at will. Until Lincoln's time, the Union was
often called a "confederation"; Lincoln himself sometimes
referred to it as "this confederacy."
Nevertheless, 620,000 young men paid with their
lives for Lincoln's willful falsification of history.
Beyond that, the Civil War wrecked the original federal
system and paved the way for monolithic centralized
government.
It's sometimes said that history is written by the
victors; but such "victors' history" is really official
propaganda rather than a serious and conscientious
attempt to reconstruct the past.
Fortunately, the records of American history are
ample enough to allow us to correct Lincoln's version of
it; but the fact remains that Lincoln's version is the
one taught in the government-run schools, so it will take
a long time for the general public to realize the truth
-- if indeed that is even possible at this point.
Maybe history is its own reward. Those who cherish
and study the past for its own sake will find it full of
surprises -- some of them heartbreaking.
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