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issue36"The greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them,  
not by their contemporaries."


How can we decide the greatness of an individual? Tow factors are most important in the process  
of evaluation, one is the standard of the evaluation, another relates to the information of the  
individual provided to the evaluator.  People have always been discussing who is a hero and who  
else is an devil. This is also an evaluating process. However, interesting phenomenon, engaged  
in great complexity come to our mind as we trace back the history of human society. Even so, the fundamental factors in any evaluating never changed, which will be fully dicussed below.

First, let us have a quick look at the standards of greatness. The inermost of human hardly ever changed in the past thousands of years, we give honor to those who contribute mostly to the wellbeing and progress of human society, no matter the change of other conditions. In this sense, an ancient hero who killed an elephant to secure and feed his tribe wouldent be defined as an evil hunter who vialated protection laws and caused the extinction of that special elephant. And this is the case. However, the customs of human societies do have changed in the days behind, and will still be changing in the days before. For example, a man who killed another man and made the victim's wife his own would be considered a great and respected man in Chenghis Kehan's time, and he was such an "hero". But one  thousand years later, we considered him a criminal in the sense of law and human rights. The two example shows that the standards of greatness may or may not change as time passes by. If it does not change, the greatness of an individal can be decided by his contemporaries too.

However, sometimes the greatness of an individual can only be decided by his those who live after  
him, simply because in his time the truth-or even secrets are hiden due to various reasons from  
personal privacy to national security. Such hiding may be necessary and legal sometime. In these  
cases, the judement of one individual's contmepararies is built upon fake information, thus such  
judements can not last long. As soon as the truth is revealed, people will give a new judement to  
update the former one. Such cases can mostly be found in the political field, especilly in those  
countries where democracy is not ensured, where the political situation always fluctuates. Maybe  
this is why Nixon erased the tape which recorded information about the Watergate scandal. More  
examples happens here-China, where politician were used to ups and downs, take Deng xiaopin for  
example, he experieced 3 ups and three downs in his political life. His greatness-defined by the  
people, surely have changed many times, as people here are easily influenced by the media  
controled by the Party. And such changes is still possible in the future, because some of his  
"secrets" in 1989 are still unrevealed.

In sum, whether the greatness of indiciduals can only be decided by those who live after him must  be discussed case-by-case. Any single conclusion of all the conditions would be inappropriate, and will meet exceptions inevitably.