“History is a set of agreed-upon lies. » – Napoleon BonaparteSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay In this quote, Napoleon Bonaparte projects his belief that history is just a few lies that people have relied on agreement, implying that most current historical knowledge today is a product of fiction that individuals in the past agreed to write down as factual knowledge. The motivations behind fabricating historical knowledge can range from personal gain to covering up a country's embarrassing past. However, this raises an interesting question: why does this event lead historical figures to document false information? It is possible that these figures simply chose to falsify all bad and significant events. However, through the shared knowledge of history and the existence of evidence of several events such as massacres, wars, battles, etc., it is evident that the nature of the event itself is not sufficient to falsify information about him. The emotions of authorities can play a considerable role in this, because after all, they are the ones who qualify their thoughts as historical knowledge. Therefore, this begs the question: How does emotion affect a person's willingness to document knowledge of history, whether truthfully or falsely? To study the role that emotion plays in this process, it is most prudent to do so using an event that affected a large group of people. individuals emotionally. For the purposes of this essay, the Nanking incident serves as an example. To quickly summarize, the Nanking Incident was an act of massacre and rape committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing, China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It has different names. For example, it is called "The Rape of Nanking" in China, and simply "The Nanking Incident" in Japanese textbooks. The diction of the titles themselves gives a different nuance to their respective readers. A Chinese reading this event would be more strongly affected than a Japanese, because "rape" seems much more serious and specific than the word "incident." The Japanese refuse to acknowledge the misdeeds of their soldiers during this period, they refuse even to fully explain them in school textbooks. It is often reduced to a simple paragraph on the "Nanking incident", whereas in China the same event is taken very seriously, which is not irrational given that the Chinese people have undoubtedly been very deeply affected by such a horrible event. Therefore, the variations in how Japan chooses to represent this event could be seen as a falsification of historical knowledge, because by changing the wording of the title they were able to reduce its significance as a historical event. The Japanese may have done this to protect their image in the nation, or even because they are too embarrassed to admit that their soldiers went and did these terrible things. This proves that if an event has emotional impact or high significance, it is more likely to be modified when it is documented as historical knowledge, with the nature of the modification depending on the context of the environment in which it is discussed. Although reducing the importance of events such as the aforementioned Nanking Incident is an example of a country changing a historical event because of its high emotional value, there are several other cases where the, 10(3), 335-356.