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Comment by knuthsat | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s the way history works. Napoleon was pretty horrible, yet even the enslaved Dalmatians forgot what he did and praise him for building roads.

I’m pretty sure Hitler will have a similar public image to Napoleon in a few hundred years. We do similar things with Roman emperors and praise their accomplishments forgetting the massive amounts of suffering they caused.

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By the way, this is quite interesting! Most events of 20th century were related to ideology. But before that, in old times maybe only religious wars were close to this. Other wars and conflicts were good old attempts to conquer someone and/or to gain resources and power. But was there as much hatred as produced by ideology? E.g. during the napoleonic wars many people died but does someone hate France because of Napoleon? I guess not. Or take WW1, it was only 107 years ago. Surely a lot of people died. Does someone remember it with hatred? Only as a great tragedy I think.

I'm pretty sure that you needed ideology to convince people to go to these incredibly long wars. It just gets washed away by other explanations given by the historians.

I mean, does Russia have memorials of their leaders? Germany also has a bunch of memorials even going back to Prussian days. Yet many of these individuals caused massive suffering.

Aside from the similarly fated Russian invasions, they are completely different. Napoleon was not genocidal and contrary to his popular reputation was not a warmonger. England & the coalition was generally the aggressor because they wanted to restore the Monarchy (The Bourbons) to France & weren't happy about the Rights of Man and Liberalism that the Grande Army was spreading.

Was Napoleon the aggressor in his invasion of Russia?

Yes. The backstory... England was very hostile to France, especially because of Pitt, and France lost its navy at Traflager so Napoleon's only option was to get all of Europe to Embargo England [1]. Russia eventually decided to trade with England anyway which is what triggered the French invasion to enforce the embargo. The other factor is that after Napoleon divorced Josephine, he had the option of marrying the daughter of the Emperor of Austria or Russia, he choose Austria which cooled relations with Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_System

Napolean and the Roman emporers of which you speak had some actual military victories to counterbalance their other atrocities. Hitler brought nothing but ruin and dishonor to his beloved German people, and lost the war to boot. No. History will remember Hitler forever as a blustering fool who invented industrial scale genocide. He'll be sitting alongside Nero and Caligula in the collective memory, not Napolean and Julius Caesar.

This is the current sentiment yes, but time will shed a bunch of facts.

I personally find Napoleon and Julius Caesar as completely uninspiring figures. Their accomplishments are worthless but for some reason praised from the perspective of history.

A big reason for this is that history finds explanations after things happened. They attribute to these "leaders" way too much.

> This is the current sentiment yes, but time will shed a bunch of facts.

Reveal these hidden facts! To which facts do you refer, exactly?

Facts related to the atrocities committed during his rule. The current sentiment does not really tell how the future will look at the events.

Russians have monuments that praise the rulers that were ruthless and brutally destructive towards the human spirit and it's been less than 100 years ago since these events happened.

Just because current rule in Europe/Germany finds him horrible it does not mean that in 200 years these events will be looked at with the same eyes.

> Facts related to the atrocities committed during his rule.

If I had asked "The facts to which you refer are related to what?" then that would be an excellent answer to the question!

I asked "To which facts do you refer?": What are these facts?

That strikes me as unlikely.

Attila the Hun is to this day considered a ruthless barbarian and killer. Practically no one could tell you who he was or what he did, but everyone knows he was a bad dude.

Hitler will be remembered for the ovens, long after everyone has forgotten Archbishop Ferdinand.

Apparently there are enough Hungarians around to punish me for this one!

Apologies to my Magyar friends! But what I said is certainly true in the English-speaking world.

We can only hope that Hitler doesn't become a culture hero on the same fashion.

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