@kennethamy,
Why not just admit that you can know it, but not KNOW it. If you are standing on a broad plane, and under your feet grass is growing, and there are trees nearby, and more grass, and further off there are more trees, and more grass, and at the limits of your sight there are barely descernable, grass and trees. What if beyond your exact perception is more green and grays breaking the even rim of the sky? Are you to assume they are not trees and grass because you do not know that they are? It is not like there is no evidence, but the distance of time is like the distance measure, as the distance grows, so grows uncertainty.
What is hanging on it, first of all. Are we drivng our lives by the rear view mirror? Is not the recent past more essential to know than the distant past? Certainly, recent history is more clouded by the machinations of the powerful, and the hand of the propagandists; but they leave their mark. If the past is unknowable, then the near past inscrutable. Nothing makes sense today, and nothing will make sense that happens today, tomorrow, without some grasp of the past. Does it have to be perfect?
I think all one has to do, is know enough of the history of failed states to recognize which way our house of cards is tumbling. Then, what does it matter if people are revisiting history while it happens, and writing it like Caesar, or Napoleon to fit themselves? So long as people know the history of states, and nothing more, they can guess the truth. We are controled because so long as we do not feel we know the truth we do not feel justified to act out of frustration and anger. For that reason, intelligence, as the day to day knowledge of our affairs is called, is kept strictly under government control. That the governemnt feels the need to keep secrets, and not few, but many, does not ever mean we do not know the facts.
What does the fact of government secrets tell us about us? That we are feared? That ignorence for us is victory for them? The fact is, we have more trouble knowing what is going on today than in guessing what happened in the past. It is because we cannot grasp the present that the past seems so out of focus. Our president is wrong to believe history happens after we die. We are living history, and if we are struggling we cannot expect the next person is better off. It does not matter what the government says, but what it does. It matters what your neighbor says, because your neighbor never lies. Ask him how he is doing, really? It is a dangerous question. Listen to the answer.