The popular narrative of the Crusades as an unprovoked colonial venture is a "fake history." Historical sources indicate the First Crusade was a belated rebuttal to 400 years of Islamic aggression and escalating atrocities against Christians and pilgrims.

The widely held view of Spanish colonial brutality wasn't just Protestant propaganda. It originated from firsthand accounts by Spanish conquistadors and priests like Bartolomé de las Casas. This internal criticism and moral debate over the treatment of indigenous peoples was present from the conquest's very beginning.

While "fake news" is ephemeral, "fake history" creates enduring, distorted paradigms—like the belief that only white people enslaved others—which fundamentally poisons how people interpret present-day reality and social issues.

The Spanish conquest was characterized by the systematic destruction of Inca art. Rather than preserving priceless golden artifacts like llamas and flowers, they melted them into standardized bars for easy shipment and accounting. This reflects a colonial mindset that prioritizes raw monetary value over cultural and artistic significance.

During British rule in Rhodesia, white employers often found indigenous Shona names too complex to pronounce. They would unilaterally assign simple English names to their African workers, demonstrating how administrative convenience under colonialism actively eroded cultural identity.

In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire adopted European scripts, dress, and customs not due to force, but because they saw the confident, technologically superior West as a model for success and power, abandoning their own traditions in the process.

Despite building a massive, highly organized empire, the Incas had no written language. This means nearly everything known about their history and culture was recorded by the Spanish after the conquest. Their entire legacy is therefore filtered through the lens of their destroyers, creating a fundamentally biased historical record.

The idea that growing wealth and education automatically lead to more compassionate values is historically false. Wealthy societies, from the Roman Empire to 18th-century Europe and Belle Époque France, have often been the most deeply committed to slavery and colonialism, using their resources to create more efficient systems of oppression.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, racism was not just socially acceptable but academically esteemed. Fields like phrenology and eugenics were considered legitimate sciences pursued by the era's leading intellectuals. This presents a stark inversion of modern values, where intellectualism is aligned with anti-racism.