Blue Orange
Gone to Texas
If that's your takeaway, then I would say that you have badly missed the point.
It's absolutely astonishing to me that people, still now, insist on so badly missing the point.
Or, put it another way, why is knowing the truth, as in the complete truth and not just the comfortable, selected truths, seen as a bad thing? Why is it when we learn about how this formerly lauded individual (regardless of who it is) actually was a real human being with flaws and views, it's suddenly a bad thing?
Look, it's pretty simple. If you don't want history to remember you as a dick, don't be a dick. We live in this vast sea of information now. Which means that all that stuff that was "conveniently forgotten" like, say, being a slave trader (as an example) is now readily available. And yes, new information results in people changing their views on the past. And it should. We should never look back on the history of someone or something, interpret it one way, and then, regardless of any new information that is later learned, insist that that single interpretation must be the only one we ever use for all time.
I know it's a big shift for a lot of people to learn that the "facts" they grew up with are no longer the only facts. It's hard to learn that people we thought of as heroes were in fact, really not. Good grief, I'm old enough to remember when Columbus was a hero. Now, we realize that he was much more of a murderous bastard who spend a significant time in Spanish prison for being TOO violent to the natives. How bad do you have to be for the 15th century Spanish to chuck you in jail for what are essentially human rights violations?
It is NEVER about "fiction can never be controversial".
The rules for 'don't be a dick' change considerably over time. People used to be burned at the stake for being gay; now it's increasingly no big deal. Andrew Jackson was considered a great president for all the land he got his supporters; now we hate him for getting it by driving off the Native Americans. It works the other way--Grant's reputation has improved as his drunkenness gets forgotten (and the Lost Cause and Dunning School historians lose influence) and his attempts to push Reconstruction are appreciated. I'm sure the Brits here have their own examples.
Do the right thing because it's the right thing, but don't think you can predict the sweep of history. Future generations may decide they hate you for driving a car and eating meat and flooding them with global warming. Or you may be persecuted for your social justice activism by the Carlson, DeSantis, or Shapiro administrations.
There was actually a whole push-and-pull between the Crown and the conquistadors over how much to exploit the natives, ironically enough. They didn't have modern conceptions of human rights, but once you were baptized you weren't supposed to mistreat Christians... but of course the conquistadors wanted their gold, and the Crown was far away. Bartolome de las Casas embarrassed them into making rules, but they weren't enforced very well.
Being a Nazi was considered bad in 1991, but it's not quite so open-and-shut in most other cases.
