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Comment by pseudostem | Hacker News Reader

I am a history enthusiast. I have a reason to believe this belief by populations in untruths is short term (I'd define it as <50 years, YMMV).

Long term chronicling goes beyond short term propoganda. Society eventually (IMO) accepts the truth. And the highly trained, poorly dressed, unsung heroes are to be credited for it. Unfortunately, society at large pays importance to the short term "stuff". Regardless, I feel these guys stand for correctness and should be recognised (preferably much before they die).

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Are we past World War II propaganda yet?

I have a feeling that most of us still believe a pretty twisted narrative where things are just black and white, which frankly, can absolutely never be the case. Humans are never completely evil or completely good, but that's the narrative I hear most of the time, not just with current events but with a lot of wars more recent than I would say 200 years... for example, today, Napoleon is not considered to have been the devil himself, though for at least 100 years after his defeat, I believe the countries he briefly overpowered thought of him as such. What do you think about that?

I got the impression that the UK WWII vets had come around on the issue already, as they faded to oblivion. "Was that other guy going to put mosques everywhere? Was he going to operate a vast white slave trade? Was he going to destroy us eternally, like this?"

We are very much past most WWII propaganda. It’s not just that words like Nip have lost their negative connotations in most peoples minds, people don’t even know what they were referring to.

Some propaganda that was around in WWII continued to be pushed, but it’s not WWII specific.

This may come as a surprise, but most professional historians don't accept the idea of there being a singular "truth" to be known. I'll link some different perspectives discussing this ([0], [1], [2]), but suffice to say that most historical work becomes dramatically less useful to society if the primary purposes of history are to satisfy our idle curiosity about the past and figure out some objective temporal ordering of events. Those fuzzy questions of narrative and "propaganda" are a huge part of why we do history, even if they cause all sorts of issues.

[0] https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.h...

[1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...

[2] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...

We still have people believing WW1 and WW2 propaganda, or have a very cliché view of the middle ages for example. With tons of fact that have been debunked over and over again being spread.

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