Americans like to think they are exceptional. Yet most couldn’t tell you the first thing about how governments, like clockwork, repeat the same bloody cycles of tyranny and collapse. Everyone assumes the Nazis hold the crown for worst government in history. Sure, Hitler’s crew were sadistic thugs who industrialized murder. But “the worst”? Not even close. They just happened to do their killing during a time when cameras, film, and bureaucratic obsession with record-keeping made their atrocities impossible to hide. If Goebbels had been working with the technology of Genghis Khan, you’d barely have a postcard left to prove it. History is littered with tyrants who weren’t so kind as to leave photo albums of their mass murders. The Turks tried to erase the Armenians. Stalin starved Ukraine into submission during the Holodomor, then doubled down by purging his own people until the bodies stacked higher than Lenin’s promises. Mao made Stalin look like an amateur, turning his “Great Leap F...