Some things I need to get off my chest, based on reading about and discussing history on various online forums and Facebook groups, and certain articles and books.1) You shall remember that people who lived hundreds of years ago were complex human beings every bit as complex and human as we are, who had families, and feelings, and human dignity, and that therefore you should write about them with respect, in the same way that you would wish writers to treat the memory of you and your loved ones with respect decades or centuries hence. You will not laugh or sneer or gloat at their painful deaths and suffering, or claim that they deserved everything they got, or express a wish that they’d suffered even more, or call them vile names. If you wouldn’t want someone in the future to make light of tragic events which have befallen you and your loved ones, or to depict your beloved father as a callously neglectful parent or not in fact your biological father thanks to your mother’s cheating on him, or your kind and wonderful husband as a spineless snivelling coward who frequently beat you up and forced himself on you, or your daughter as a cold-blooded child killer – and if it would make you angry and upset if anyone wrote things like this about your favourite historical person – then you should think twice about inventing such calumnies about other people merely because you don’t like them or because they were an enemy of your favourite historical person.
