When one gets deep into a study of some place and time in history, it becomes clear we know really very little of what actually happened and even less of the reasons why.  That is no reason, however, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with fantasies and guesses and fictions.  When we die what we know dies with us, so the vast majority of human memory is lost forever, and we only have the little that gets written down, and it is filled with biases and omissions and exaggerations and so on.

People of the future will have a slightly, but only slightly, better time of it studying us than we have studying what went on in, say, ancient Rome.  We do have a somewhat more objective discipline of reporting history, but there is still plenty written that is untrue or misleading, and of course we will leave film and so on, but selection effects here too will prevent anything like a completely accurate record.

Thinking about it, it is amazing we know as much as we know and can see an overall picture regardless.  I would only say a great deal of care and humility is called for if we are to draw lessons from this history.