Nonsense, I look on Ozymandias, king of kings' works daily and despair!

It's true. I wonder how many ancient Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians, Romans thought:

"Surely, this empire will last forever! Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair!" (EDIT: LOL It appears we're all of one mind remembering this poem. We must be doing something right. XD)

Especially in modern times it's insanely difficult to imagine the geopolitics shifting drastically, but it's happened before, it's happening now. The difference being that the rest of the globe is now much more invested in your shenanigans with your neighbors, but it's still happening.

What does one do amidst a regime change?

I'm glad I've never had to seriously consider it until now. ...but it unnerves me that I probably need to start.

how does one consume ancient history? do you eat the source documents?

My history teacher said that the greatest curse you can give someone is telling them "May you live in interesting times" and boy do I feel that now.

Bold of you to presume that people will be allowed to read about these times, in the future:-).

May you live in interesting times...

Edit: Ah, was done below, great minds...

The language certain politicians are using is plucked directly from the mouths of Goebbels’ and Himmler’s rotting corpses. How can they not see what lies ahead if they continue with this shit?

What's even more infuriating is that when you try to point this out to others, they act like you're insane/exaggerating.

But it's not literally the Holocaust again, so it's fine /s

I'm trans, god help me...

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to look on helplessly as everybody else repeats it.

That only really works in a benevolent dictatorship. In a democracy, the masses can vote for reality-rejection candidates.

It's a pity democracy seems to be better than all the alternatives in practice, cause in principle there should be ways to improve things more. Inevitably though all other forms turn into draconian crap. Well, democracy does sometimes too, but less often.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian

Systematic historical thought emerged in ancient Greece, a development that became an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around the Mediterranean region. The earliest known critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 – c. 425 BCE) who later became known as the "father of history" (Cicero).

Now how many people had access to this knowledge is another matter, but studying history and learning from it was an important aspect in the education and training of leaders to be since more than a thousand years at the very least.

If we look at Moses and the Pharaoh as well as ancient Greek democracies, we can conclude that the principles of politics have not changed all that much in the past 3000-4000 years of human history. The knowledge was always there and the same mistakes are always repeated, with some very incremental progresses and regressions in between.

They so often did though, how many massive fires broke out in London before the great fire finally convinced them to stop building overlapping thatched rooves.

Even during The Plague of Justinian scholars wrote about what was essentially ancient social distancing practices, 2000 years ago later we still can't do it properly.

How many times did they have to put up with rat plagues and stinking open cess pits, followed by a big town clean up, and then nothing change in infrastructure or waste management practices, only to do the whole clean up again ....until the Great Stink got to close enough to the windows of parliament that those in power decided maybe they should address the root problem instead of applying bandaids every few years.

(I don't have a history degree so I'm pulling these details out of the memory depths of my dusty documentary viewings, and I'm probably wrong.)

This fantastic opening quote must have also been Marx's weirdest flex.

Something something heglian dialectics, something something new vegas, something something "Fuck caesar,blow his ass away, and Legate Lanius too"