Does a false legend have value, is there a time when the truth comes at too high

Question:

Does a false legend have value, is there a time when the truth comes at too high a price?

Does a legend have as much value as the truth? Imagine for a moment if you will??

The Nazis won the second world war, with the surrender of the Allies. Hitler is shown as the brave hero who overcame the evil empires of the Americans and British and many people look to him as a true leader. Shortly after Adolf Hitler??s death the Nazi Party fell into disarray and vanished from the face of the earth. Hitler is shown by popular history as the brave hero who overcame the evil empires of the Americans and British. Slowly the crimes of the Nazi Party are forgotten, replaced by propaganda and lies.

After the fall of the Nazi party comes the Reformationist Party who??s leader is inspired by the teachings of the greatest minds in history. This leads to an era of utopian type peace as the territory covered by the old Nazi Party covers most of the globe.

The year is 2345, you are assigned as a project to construct for a documentary a history of the beginnings of the Nazi and Reformationist Parties. During your research you uncover the buried documents and history of the second world war, the death camps and brutality of the time. Given that the world??s current peace is built upon a foundation of lies you would feel compelled to reveal the truth. However the legend of Hitler as the great hero standing against the evil empires combined with the thoughts of the greatest minds in history has lead most people to try to improve and better themselves, revealing the truth could cause civil war, deaths of millions and an end to the peace that has lasted almost 250 years.

Given what is at stake, would you reveal the truth?

Does not the legend, if not the man, have value?

And what if you found that a person who is regarded as a hero today, someone who inspires people to better themselves, was nothing more than a thug and crook? Would you expose the truth?

Is there a time when the truth comes at too high a price?

Serious answers only please.

Thanks.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: If I were a historian, I would probably be very concerned with accuracy of information, and publish my findings. However, I'm not a historian.

Personally, I believe that most people would ignore it anyway. Every year you hear anew that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and this horrific discovery gets more and more documented. But the general populous is usually either too dumb or too smart to let things like that affect them.

For instance, the dumb people wouldn't even know or understand the ramifications of the fact that TJ owned slaves.

The smart people would realize that despite his personal life, he still had an important message, and truth spoken out of corruption is truth all the same.

So in the end, I'd probably end up publishing it, in the hopes that my analysis of the general population was correct.