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 Forward” into the greatest famine in recorded history. Pol Pot, with a population of only eight million, still managed to kill a quarter of his own countrymen in Cambodia’s killing fields. Not bad for a backwater dictator without a proper industrial base.
Let’s not forget some of the “forgotten” massacres: the Rwandan genocide, carried out with machetes while the so-called civilized world sat on its hands. The Cultural Revolution, where Chinese students gleefully beat their teachers to death for “thought crimes.” Or the centuries of Islamic conquest where religious minorities were butchered, enslaved, or simply erased. Every continent has its government-backed horror show, whether it was the slave raids of African kingdoms, the Spanish Inquisition, or the Japanese atrocities across Asia in World War II.
The cycle is always the same. A government forms. It starts off promising peace, order, maybe even liberty. Then slowly but surely, those freedoms get carved away. A little censorship here, a little surveillance there. Before long, you’ve got secret police, gulags, firing squads, and a population too terrified to do anything about it. Eventually it burns itself out in civil war or collapse. Then the whole tragic charade starts again with a new flag and new slogans.
So yes, tyranny isn’t a glitch. It’s the default setting of government. The only question is how long your current batch of “leaders” can keep the smiling mask on before the killing starts.
I will never understand how human beings can be convinced to give up the right to keep and bear arms. I guess they don’t know history and prefer to live in a pretend fantasy world free of cruelty and democide.
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