Protecting the past  There is a simple case of natural justice in protecting the decisions and reputations of those who have served the state and can no longer speak for themselves [i] . The same applies to events, for better or worse political or military disputes that were settled fifty or a hundred years ago are best left like that, settled.  All nations have moments in their histories that are unlikely to reflect that country at its best but we judge our own nations and others on a balance of the broad sweep of history rather than the grubby minutiae of particular events.  By its nature the historical record will always be incomplete – silent on motivations of those involved or the particularities of individual decisions as we can never know everything and not all decision making processes are recorded. We already know the overall outcomes of, for example, wars or elections. It would be impossible to change those results by discovering that they were not handled as one might have wished. Neither is their much to be gained in despoiling the characters of those involved – national psyches need their heroes and villains, making either of them more human in both senses of the phrase adds little and could distract much. For example do we really need to know that Churchill opposed the Nuremburg trials instead favouring execution without trial for senior Nazi leaders? Does it diminish Churchill’s greatness or undermine the results of the Nuremburg trials? No. [ii]  [i] BBC News Website. Secret papers face faster release. 29 January 2009.  [ii] Cobain, Ian, ‘Britain favoured execution over Nuremberg trials for Nazi leaders’, The Guardian, 26 October 2012