It’s astounding that with the modern age of near limitless access to free information, most people are seemingly oblivious to any history that not only did not occur in their lifetime, but history that didn’t occur within the last year or so. What further astonishes me is that long studied students of history, supposed “experts in their field” of history professors, seem to miss the fact that whenever a structure of governance gets powerful enough, it will literally genocide a group of people. Not only to this end, but most historians seemingly only rate leaders and politicians based on how well they have grown the central power of the authority, with the more power accrued, the greater the grade that individual receives. Presdent Franklin Roosevelt is universally ranked highly, along with President Lincoln, for growing the size of the American federal government. Leaders such as Catherine the Great of Russia, Otto von Bismarck, are universally considered great because of how dizzyingly they grew the size of their respective governments, and made those governments ever more important in the lives of “their citizens”.
The final macabre fact is that most people, regardless of the layman, or specialists in history, all seem to miss the fact that there has quite literally never been a time in human history, recorded or unrecorded, where some group with unrestricted power over another group did not commit a genoicde against them. When the fact that genocide has occurred is brought into the discussion, it is usually couched in the idea that the individuals in the group were evil, and therefore corrupted the system in order to effectuate their genocide. As always, the most famous genocide of all, the Holocaust perpetuated by the German Nazi party during the 1930’s and 1940’s, is the prime example of this issue.
What is never discussed, however, is whether humans can actually be left alone with the kind of power that governance wields, and whether humans will use that power for good or for ill. The fact that humanity cannot go a single year without some larger group abusing a smaller group, resulting in a genocide, should speak for itself. The problem isn’t the individuals, the problem is that humanity fundementally cannot be trusted with unchecked power over other people, and not be expected to use that unchecked power to abuse or murder groups of people.