fallacious objectivity

in "as i please 10" ( 4 february 1944 orwell laments the lack of objectivity in contemporary history. he maintains that in the past objective, factual history was possible but with the advent of the mass of wartime propaganda, presaged by fascist and soviet distortions of events during the spanish civil war, any history of the world war or following events could not possibly be objective: "in no one case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true. in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. history is written by the winners."...well...all history has an agenda...it's true that in any struggle the winners get to write the first history...but the losers never disappear ( have a look at wolfgang shivelbush's "the culture of defeat" )...was there ever a bourbon history of the french revolution? or a bonapartist view of the battle of waterloo? would one view that victory by wellington as the result of superior generalship of a better army or as a loss to treachery and overwhelming numbers? the south in the u s civil war had the "lost cause" and post world war I germany had the "stab in the back" to assuage the loss...those myths did great disservice to many but were part and parcel of an alternative view of the winner's history...w g sebald's "on the natural history of destruction" is one of the first attempts to recount the deaths of german civilians at the hands of allied bomber command as the were pursuing "military targets"...civilians are always "military targets", professionalism non-withstanding...and surely japanese accounts of hiroshima and nagaski run counter to the consensus view of the "greatest generation", not to mention gar alperowitz "the decision to use the atomic bomb" which puts the lie to that consensus...history is never objective...even thucydides had an axe to grind...he just said he didn't...honest historian admit their biases...dishonest ones distort fact to fit theory...either way objectivity is elusive at best.