Was listening to Razorfist's arcade stream from last Friday - https://youtu.be/TmTY2d7nwAs
In it he talks a little bit about General Patton and how he was possibly assassinated due to his anti-Communist views.
Found that interesting and went to wikipedia where it doesn't talk about that - but has a whole section about "views on Race" where the writer declares him a racist. https://archive.ph/aww7m
Individually they were good soldiers, but I expressed my belief at the time, and have never found the necessity of changing it, that a colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor.
And then the writer goes on with THIS nugget
He also stated that performance was more important than race or religious affiliation:
I don't give a damn who the man is. He can be a Nigger or a Jew, but if he has the stuff and does his duty, he can have anything I've got. By God! I love him.
Which sounds completely anti-racist to me and, gasp, someone who believes in the merit of a person!
The section goes on to say he's also an anti-Semite and anti-Russian
The obvious question is WTF does this have to do with an objective AND NEUTRAL historical scholarly article - answer is NOTHING. But this garbage is appearing on more and more figures pages to retcon history.
That led me to the next check - a copy of wikipedia was made about 6 years ago, Infogalactic.com precisely because of this revisionist history even then.
Here's the infogalactic page as it was originally pulled from wikipedia in 2016 (with a few minor edits earlier this year) https://archive.ph/wip/ZHdWA
Note there's no race section.
Note also the section about the assassination controversy for his anti-communist viewpoints that is now omitted from the wiki page.
Well you have two types of assassination, the first is the obvious, you won't shut up with all the talk of "truth" so we got to make sure you can't talk even if it was to save your own skin (cough Epstein)
The second is the more insidious one, historical assassination. You silently and slowly erase their legacy, making them first appear to have blemishes on what was an impeccable record. Bring up views and statements they made once even if they never affected their actions in power. Then you make them bigger, grow them like a tumour until you reach the point that you can publicly decry them (the founding fathers were all slave owners, they don't deserve any statues). If you can remove the historical examples of who you should strive to be, it's easier to leave them directionless, easy to manipulate.
And we know now, thought much too late, the proper response is "so what?"
Unfortunately the common response of "yes, but...." acknowledged those wanting character assassination and caused where we are now
A lot of people don't seem to realise that - until a bunch of zealous CofE types got involved - I'm not even christian, but that was such a fundamental part of their thinking that it's not fair to omit it - slavery was a global constant. Prior to that little bit of enlightenment, it would have been weird for somebody in power to not have slaves.
Except in the UK, where, even before we gained the power to impose our sensibilities upon the world, we held the practise to be distasteful within our own borders. Amusingly, our centuries-long crusade against slavery may all have started as a post-Conquest cash grab by William I. The thought of some Royal slush fund turning into a global crusade does still amuse me...
Yes, so it was called "indentured servitude" instead. But the real problem with that was with the debt-holders not being honest with how much work they wanted from the debtors straight-up, and stringing them along forever. Or worse, pulling the company store trick of "deductions" for every fucking little bullshit thing.