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  "description": "The Baddies in fake news, propaganda, and why history’s villains always lose",
  "path": "/blog/the-baddies/",
  "publishedAt": "2025-08-01T21:53:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:tyqadi4nl52kqm7wykhmysl5/site.standard.publication/3mmyiavqtgmpx",
  "tags": [
    "AMERICA",
    "CULTURE",
    "PHILOSOPHY",
    "POLITICS",
    "PERSPECTIVE"
  ],
  "textContent": "“I want to be remembered,” he said.“By who?” she asked.“It is by whom,” he corrected.“Yeah, you’ll be remembered.” she said. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell described the peculiar sensation of watching the present tense being retroactively murdered, as newspapers describe battles that never occurred, while omitting the rather inconvenient ones in which he’d recently been shot at. Years later, in Nineteen Eighty-four, he fictionalised this observation into the Ministry of Truth. – later adopted by the Haynes Manual for American Politics. But the Ministry of Truth is older than Orwell, older than the printing press, even older than my Kellogg’s bicycle spoke reflectors. Take Richard III, for instance – his PR crisis didn’t truly take hold until the Tudors needed a pantomime villain to justify their throne-nabbing escapades. He became a kind of medieval Bond villain, all twisted limbs and twisted morals, though possibly neither were true. Go further back, and the Celts are painted with the same brush dipped in Roman superiority – a bit wild, a bit stabby, and just uncivilised enough to make their conquest look like a TED Talk on imperial enlightenment. Then there’s the Vikings, who history remembers less as traders and lawmakers and more as the noise you make when you stub your toe on a church. Which is handy, considering most of their history was written by the monks they’d just deconstructed. The pattern isn’t subtle, once you notice the villains with curled moustaches and heroes who smile in slow motion, someone is writing the history, and it ain’t the dead guy. But it’s not that history is a lie, not exactly, it’s just the sort of truth you’d find on a dating profile, – cropped, embellished, and filtered through a lens of a desperate hard sell. The problem is that we like to imagine the record as some immutable stone tablet of facts, but in reality, it’s a napkin someone wrote on with a pencil, left in the pocket of a coat that’s been through the wash several times, found years later and we called it history. The past isn’t a painting, it’s a collage, its glue still wet, made from scraps selected by the loudest, or the last, man standing. And if there’s one defence against that – one shield against the slow-motion gaslighting of time – it’s not blind faith in what’s written, but to question, who was holding the pen? Because any story that paints one side favourably to the other, will only ever be half the story. Because it’s not just that the villains of history were often just the losers with poor publicists, for if that’s true – and it is – then the heroes might not be heroes either. We inherit a cast list of saints and monsters as though it were settled fact, because a cast list is easier to hold than the alternative, which is the truth that history divides not into good and evil, but into people, who were either absolutely convinced they were right, or they wanted to be. So when we look back and wonder how people could have been so certain, so divided, so completely convinced they were right, it’s worth remembering they probably wondered the same thing about the people they disagreed with. It’s also worth remembering that history is just the present without the hindsight to pick a side. Because we don’t think we’re in history, we think we’re in the bit before it, which is usually where the editing happens. But if every story with a good guy and a bad guy is only half the story, then the only honest position left is somewhere in the middle, asking questions no one particularly likes. Not to pick a side, but to just understand why there are sides at all. And if that’s a harder story to sell, then it’s probably closer to the truth.",
  "title": "THE BADDIES",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-17T08:22:11.000Z"
}