Reforming the Past

The Hybrid Warfare targets preferentially the cultural element. The Denial of the Past might be apperceived as a kind of anti-access operation striving to dislodge a group from the collective memory and historic past, in order to degrade the feeling of identity and the group connection it affords. Applying inherently restrictive, although state-of the-art biomedical technology for analyzing human remains is bound to become mainstream: allegedly to promote archaeological and historical research, it may actually convincingly twist evidence and promote a refurbished past reality to serve an agenda. An example of how this could be engineered may be drawn by recent research where the combination of Isotopic analysis and Paleogenomics was used over-ambitiously but insufficiently (in terms of sample size) to suggest, in two successive and intertwined publications, a revision of the military history of the early fifth century Ancient Greece. It is maintained that foreign mercenaries have played a most important role in the whole ancient Greek world in the Mediterranean and beyond; outsmarting thus the Ancient sources and besmirching them. The discrepancy of this theory with its own findings, research practices and historical facts, especially as pertaining the recorded aspects of military realities, conduct of operations, religious and ideological constants is evident with little effort, but no such contradiction may find its way to mainstream prestigious scientific journals. Consequently, although the attempted revision is ill-warranted, it gains traction and the approach in general may develop to malevolent, targeted similar endeavors in other cases.