Mythologization of history

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Mythologization of history is an effort to attribute to a current nation or state the attributes of some more glorious time, particularly when stronger leaders than the supposedly weak ones of the present held dominion over a greater expanse of territory or possessed more independence than the weak ones of the time. At worst such an attempts includes racist doctrines, including those that underpinned the expansionist efforts of nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militarist Japan that culminated in World War II.

Some reconstitutions of independent states which had been under foreign domination have a rational basis. Countries as Greece, Poland, Ireland, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Czech Republic have a continuous heritage of culture through some often-bleak era of nearly-colonial rule by foreign powers. No myth is necessary for the reconstitution of such a state. Where a myth appears is when someone seeks to restore some empire irrespective of the national or religious realities that make such a restoration implausible. The empire of Alexander the Great, Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Caliphate, and the European colonial empires of most of the rest of the world are gone forever because no demands for their re-establishment now exist. In the case of the Soviet Union, the picture is less clear. Under Vladimir Putin, although Russian Ministry of Defense archives are partially being declassified and historians are being given the mandate to revisit World War II ( The Great Patriotic War ), it appears that "canonized" aspects of the Soviet-era ideologized treatment are being strengthened instead of being reviewed in a dispassionate academic sense. Putin has refused to apologize to the Baltic States, which Moscow annexed in 1940 in contravention of local laws and international law. The secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Nazi-Soviet division of Europe between themselves at the outset of WW II in Europe are not compatible with the heroic slant contemporary Russia continues to put on the driving out of German troops from Central And Eastern Europe by Soviet troops in 1944 and 1945. Official Russia remains in denial of the fact that after the suffering caused by the Nazi regime, the Soviet system visited new traumas on the peoples of CEE.