Everything we think we know about history is partly false, if only because lacking certain relevant contexts and associated facts. In just the way the present moment is ‘full’, saturated of its own content and reality, so too is every moment of the past– however when it comes to the past we can no longer access that fullness directly, and the further back we stretch our minds to attempt to observe events from the past the more of the fullness of it slips away.
Why is this important to understand? Because without it we can feel like we fully understand something about the past. Take WW2 as an example. The history of WW2 is often hotly debated and it seems like most people feel strongly that they understand pretty much what happened. What led up to the war, what happened in the war, who won and who lost, good guys vs bad guys, etc. People may argue about details or even about the fundamentals of WW2 but they still think their own position is full, saturated for the most part. In their own mind there are not critical and huge chunks of missing information, because if there were then they would not be able to cling to the idea that they understand what really happened.
Yet in reality, for whatever side or perspective you happen to be on when it comes to historical events, WW2 or otherwise, your idea does indeed contain huge gaps of missing information. You do not REALLY know what happened back then unless you were there, and even if you were there and can trace a particular route through the saturated reality of the then-present moment which you personally did experience, that perspective you have is still limited via your own subjectivity and lack of access to tangent events and facts, especially when it comes to facts that were already deliberately hidden or covered over in some way (which many facts always are in the saturated present moment).
Yet no one seems to approach history with a sense of humility and questioning. Why is that, I wonder. Too much indoctrination via ‘education’ as we are told how certain historical events happened? I think it has to do with false pedagogy. I remember learning about history throughout school and there was never, as far as I can remember, any emphasis on things being unknown, murky, debatable or up to interpretation. There was no humility about how what we were being taught might be wrong or only partly correct. There was no room baked in for the unknown or the mistaken (or, much less, for the deliberately obscured or distorted). Not only was there no room for these but we were never even taught that such things existed in the first place.
So it became inevitable that people who grew up under such a system would view history through the tyrannical lens of a false clarity lacking humility, i.e. as a kind of ideology. No understanding of how history was its own present moment just like this moment right now, and no imagination to wonder at the vastness of the unknowns we never have access to. Let alone that the retelling of history can also be used as a weapon. No, all of this is deliberately glossed over or missing entirely from modern education, at least as far as I have seen.
What is the effect of this?
People have lost a serious connection to their own past. They become radically of the present moment in so far as even their recollections of the past are mentally constituted under the form of their present moment experiences. They assume access mentally to historical knowledge is more or less the same as their access to the present world around them, and mentally there is no proper distinction between these two wildly different kinds of information-access, no room for the gaps or errors, so that a questioning or wondering humility never appears and no (or very little) space is made for the possibility of deliberate subversions and lies. In this way history vanishes from existence: in trying to bring it fully into the present moment it is left fully outside that which is present as its own and much different character is mistaken and its content bastardized all with a near-ubiquitous ruthlessness and arrogance rarely seen elsewhere.
By violating our relationship with the past we distort and falsify our present as well. This inevitably seeps into philosophy via the many routs of content and form pervading our mentality. The entire mind becomes clouded in strange and unseen ways. It is therefore no wonder that people are unable to walk clearly through the fog of their own thinking. I would wager that one of the best ways to address this deep problem philosophy has with properly thinking in the present is, as ironic as it may seem, to work on correcting our relationship with the past. Then we might be capable of uniting our minds more effectively across time which should expand the window in which effectively-foundational thinking builds from its own ground of requirements. History SHOULD be viewed as an aspect of the present, but only when we become capable of properly enacting this in and as the accurate reality of our own present moment of consciousness it truly is.