So is it your opinion, when discussing history, we are to skip the "unpleasant" parts for fear our words may be somehow taken as an "aspersion" for some living person?
Or is it that we should not look to the total of past lives taking the "good and the bad" into account in our estimations of the men being studied?
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Please explain.
Certainly not. What you need to skip is the half-baked, unfounded, hubristic moral judgments as to the character of the players. One of the principal differences between a true historian and a propagandist, is that the true historian spares the reader the moral judgments. Sanctimony is better left to demagogues and quacks. Those who truly seek the "Light," are quite content to leave "Judgment" to the Lord.
It diminishes the character of George Washington, not in the slightest, that he had slaves. On the other hand, we all owe him our gratitude, for furnishing his own domestic staff from Mount Vernon, and not sticking the public with the bill, when he became President.
It diminishes the character of Robert E. Lee not in the slightest, that even though he personally declined to own slaves, he led the troops that arrested the sociopathic abolitionist, John Brown, who was tried and hung; or that when Virginia was threatened, he resigned his position in the United States Army, to defend his homeland.
William Flax