I think they have a hard time with nuance. They don't get that we can appreciate some things about a person and not others, or that we can be glad for something that exists even if the way it started wasn't so great, or that a person could make mistakes and still be good.
So they have to either ignore the mistakes, or downplay them, or they have to utterly reject everything connected to that person. If George Washington did bad things, then he was a Bad Person. If he was a Bad Person, then everything he did is tainted. They could never be proud again.
It's a weird artifact of authoritarianism and they don't even see how weird it is.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2017-12-12 01:31 am (UTC)So they have to either ignore the mistakes, or downplay them, or they have to utterly reject everything connected to that person. If George Washington did bad things, then he was a Bad Person. If he was a Bad Person, then everything he did is tainted. They could never be proud again.
It's a weird artifact of authoritarianism and they don't even see how weird it is.