Yup, designs - a good analogy.
I was thinking of Constantine (the first 'Christian' emperor). Around 326, he had his eldest son Crispus poisoned, and a little later his wife Fausta boiled to death in her bath. He then started to delete references to both of them (as Kim Jong-un has started to do with his uncle).
The Christian historian Eusebius, who used to lick Constantine's A*se, obediently deleted references in at last some of his works
