When I was a child, the bad guy was easy to recognize: you would just wait for sinister music to play on a Disney screen. And after an hour and a half, you would cheer at his demise.
As you grow into adulthood, you witness upstanding citizens imprisoned for heinous crimes no one expected. You see examples of kindness, gentleness, and remorse from convicted felons. It’s then that you realize a purely evil villain is almost entirely fiction: any human is capable of both darkness and light, sometimes in the same lifetime.
Except in truly wicked circumstances, most would agree a person can be forgiven for their crimes. Their childhood, upbringing, genetics, and hardships in life are considered from all angles. Many are restored to society, and—especially in the case of celebrities—their indiscretions only add to their popularity.
Historical figures, however, are not often given this measure of mercy.
Like fictional bad guys, people of the past are cast as perpetual villains rather than complex individuals who are—like all of us—products of their time and environment. Their redeemable qualities are dwarfed by their audacity to behave in a way contrary to our modern values and moral standards. In some cases, these judgements are fair. In others, a historical figure is ripped out of their chronology and context to be posthumously flogged and convicted, almost always for political, social, or religious reasons. In some cases, they are lifted out and ceremoniously exonerated, their sins erased and forgotten completely.
Both are deeply wrong.
The most disappointing thing about fictionalization of historical figures is that the historians who are meant to actually understand them have, in recent decades, merged indistinguishably with social or political activism—-all while claiming neutrality. Both sides have claimed certain figures as their personal mascots to further a particular agenda, doing a great disservice to (and even making a mockery of) the discipline of history.
Bottom line: if you look for darkness in a person, you won’t need to look long to find it. Whether the person in question is currently alive, long dead, or yet to be born, proper historical analysis MUST BE FAIR or it falls into the realm of propaganda. When propaganda masquerades as objectivity, it produces myth rather than historical truth.
Once established, myths are difficult to refute.
We need to be a thinking, rational, fair community of people who question not only the assessment of a historical figure, but also the motives of those assessing them. We need to learn to decipher biases, look at a person in historical context (their societal values, beliefs, and expectations), and consider their actions from the place they came from rather than from the future looking backwards.
And leave the sinister music to Disney.
The Homeschool Historian 