When the war ends, the editing begins. Borders move, papers get signed, and the winner starts turning what happened into what will be remembered.

People quote “the victor writes history” like it’s a bitter joke. It isn’t a joke. It’s the final brutality. The winner keeps the land and then keeps the words. He decides what can be said, what must be softened, what must vanish. Massacre becomes “incident.” Torture becomes “interrogation.” Colonization becomes “civilizing mission.” Language scrubs the blood.

The real prize is impunity. Win, and the method stops mattering. The outcome becomes proof that you were right. If the record threatens that proof, you don’t answer it. You manage it. You lock files, rewrite curricula, erect monuments that teach children a clean story, and treat anyone who dares to remember aloud as an enemy.

This is how war survives among those who never fought it. One side grows up inside innocence. The other grows up with an unnamed wound. These two educations meet and do not reconcile. They grind. The past returns as bitterness, denial, and politics pretending to be new.

We already accept that some things are not a state’s property to destroy. Ruins, temples, the visible record. We call it a crime when a country smashes the past in stone. But a state can smash the past in paper and call it sovereignty. The evidence gets buried: testimony, documents, orders, lists of names, forensic traces. Not myth. Not pride. The material that makes denial difficult.

The goal is not to trade one narrative for another. It is to break the monopoly. Keep the victor’s version visible, then put beside it what it tried to bury. Teach the contradictions and the missing pages. Let accounts coexist until denial costs more than admission.

For as long as one side controls the archives, the war continues. Quieter. Longer.