It wasn't Trotsky, it was Yezhov, the man in charge of NKVD during the worst of the purge. Fun fact: of all occupations/organizations NKVD officers were at the highest risk of a speedy trial and execution.
I think there have been several people who have been erased from photos. I recall one photo that had been updated several times to remove more and more people until only 2 were left.
That's another example, but not the one I was thinking of. I clearly remember the photo, and yet it seems impossible to find on the internet. Closest thing I could find is this one, but it's Mao instead of Stalin: https://11points.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/maofuneral.j...
Comparing every single thing to the evils of nazism and communism is a bit too trite. I know that most people default to last century's events because they are the only ones fresh enough to have a grasp on, but deleting people from inscriptions, annals, murals, paintings, coins, etc. has been a common practice throughout history.
Saying "this is just like what emperor Flavius did!" causes a lot less outrage than saying "this is just like what Stalin did!", even though they are both true. This is why, unless a phenomenon was exclusive to a certain ideology, I feel like constantly mentioning nazis and commies is just a rethorical tool
Statues and names of military bases for example, celebrate people. As far as I am aware history is mostly doing just fine in history books and places like Wikipedia. No need to conflate these things, is there?
How do you know it has taken off? When a new roman emperor took place he mobilized an incredible amount of people to replace as much stuff as possible from the previous ruler at a scale hardly comparable to what's happening today
Do you have specific examples you're thinking of, specifically regarding "purging history"? My university degree is in history and I have never used statutes or building names to study, but it's hard to have a discussion when the meat of the argument is only obliquely hinted at.
It's not like someone is building a highway and I'm saying "just like Hitler!". This is erasing recently disgraced people from photos in order to misrepresent facts.
Although I suppose we could also say "just like Vogue!" (or whichever fashion magazine is most guilty of photoshopping people).
>This is erasing recently disgraced people from photos in order to misrepresent facts.
Which has been done since forever. People in the past didn't erase others only after they were long gone. Someone could quickly fall out of favor and have many of his depiction and documents already altered in a single year.
I don't think it's something that has always been universally common. Erasing people like that is something that mostly the Soviet Union was known for. And possibly China or other dictatorships, but it's something you mostly see in propaganda from dictatorships. It's quite unusual to see it from the UK.
My problem is with people using nazis and communists for cheap rethoric effect towards people who don't know history and eat it all up. If you knew that people have been erased since the time of the babylonians you wouldn't immediately compared what's happened to nazi Germany.
It's bad that he got deleted from the photo, but that's not indicative of any particular 20th century dictatorship
Are you telling me you did not immediately think of how people kept disappearing from Soviet photos? I think that's easily the most well-known modern example of this. It's blatantly similar.
And if your argument that dictatorships outside the 20th century did it too, that still doesn't mean it's not something associated primarily with dictatorships. Can you name a modern democracy where people were erased like that?
Still, the majority of examples, and the most famous ones, are Stalin, followed by various other dictatorships. But this example is apparently not a first for the UK.
True, but on the other hand, the people that did it are well aware of that, too. And they still do it. Although this is not Stalin's playbook, of course. Just a minor part of it.
