Abandoning history would leave falsification uncontested while real processes continue

Evidence

But it isn’t the real choice, for two reasons. In the first place, it would mean leaving history to the falsifiers, unchallenged and unchecked, because they will not desist even if we do. And in the second place, more serious, we cannot abandon history, because whatever we may say about it, the historical process continues—not just versions or narratives or what­ ever may be the fashionable term, but historical processes which continue to shape the present and affect the future. We stand a better chance of being able to understand what is happening now and influence what will happen next if we have some knowledge of what happened in the past. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1853

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the reader’s core concern: real historical processes keep operating beneath contested representations — key to qualifying purely constructivist Orientalism critiques.