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trukterious | 7 years ago

Absolutely. The greater the man, the greater the flaws. Yet we still need heroes from history to look up to, and we can't judge solely by modern standards.

By analogy consider the contemporaneous movie The Wizard of Oz (1939). It's enjoyable and arguably morally-improving to watch. We are the better for it. Yet a great deal of immorality existed behind the scenes:

https://www.ranker.com/list/wizard-of-oz-behind-the-scenes-s...

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watwut|7 years ago

Sometimes "great heroes" do bad things even by their time standards. It makes no one service to pretend it is not so and automatically assume everything bad was normal at the time. It was not and their bad decisions had opposition.

We dont need lies about history, even when that lie is by omitting ugly stuff about people we want to see as heroes. Such framing leads to dangerous worldview and dangerous implications about current times too. It makes us less capable to deal with actual real world complexity. Even heroes should be questioned and mythical heroes are exactly that - myths.

We need truth about historical personalities, not hero worship.