Heroes=propaganda
By redacting all the details that make a man human you can turn him into a hero. You simply make the conscious decision to forget all the bad, messy things about him, erase them from history, and highlight only the things that you want remembered. Sentiment and the desire to have a hero will take you the rest of the way. People want heroes. They want to believe anything that makes them feel good about themselves, including being of the same race or nationality as a superman, a great and ambitious leader who fought for his people, a visionary. If they owned slaves or molested their daughters or drank their own urine then those things might divert from the heroism, from the feel-good propaganda, so no, those don’t get passed on to the public pool of knowledge. Heroes have to be good guys or they do not join us together in worship, they do not arouse nationalistic fervor.
When people push the idea of patriotism, love of country, what they really mean is love of government. Fire-men and soldiers and police officers they represent the protective arm of government, the part that is there to make you feel safe, not because they do anything much to protect you, but because you think they can. These “heroes” are there to tell you to respect and love authority because authority loves you like a mother loves her little children. You are to love the uniform and to support it uncritically. You are supposed to forget the fact that these people are human and therefore inclined to be crooked, sloppy, lazy, selfish, stupid, and hypocritical.
