It’s tempting to give in to the Whig Theory of History and concede that the “good guys” always win eventually, because this does seem (at least superficially) to be the case; the Nazis and Soviets both lost out, slavery got abolished, feminism and the civil rights movement happened. The question is, though, did the good guys win out because they were “good”, or are they seen as good because they won?
It’s not quite that simple. The descendants of the victors generally see the victors as good, but that doesn’t mean the descendants of the vanquished see the defeated as evil. Nazism seems to be a case where the defeated society really has strongly repudiated its past, but there is plenty of Soviet nostalgia in Russia and Confederate nostalgia in Dixie.
It’s tempting to give in to the Whig Theory of History and concede that the “good guys” always win eventually, because this does seem (at least superficially) to be the case; the Nazis and Soviets both lost out, slavery got abolished, feminism and the civil rights movement happened. The question is, though, did the good guys win out because they were “good”, or are they seen as good because they won?
It’s not quite that simple. The descendants of the victors generally see the victors as good, but that doesn’t mean the descendants of the vanquished see the defeated as evil. Nazism seems to be a case where the defeated society really has strongly repudiated its past, but there is plenty of Soviet nostalgia in Russia and Confederate nostalgia in Dixie.