Musing on History

I'll get back to the clinical trials thing anon, but I must digress. I'm reading The World: A Family History of Humanity, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I don't necessarily recommend it to the average reader -- it's a doorstop, it wanders about a good bit, and it's hard to follow. But it does add up very compellingly to one powerful overall conclusion.

Most of the people who history remembers, the ones with The Great or similar after their name, or just every run of the mill king or emperor from Britain to India to China and all points in between, was a sadistic psychopath. The near universal rule on assuming a throne was to murder any relatives who might have a chance of replacing you, including your own children as well as nephews and cousins. If Richard III did indeed murder his nephews (a matter in doubt) he was pretty much the norm. They also generally subjected anyone who displeased them to horrific torture before killing them, also tortured people just for fun, were mass rapists, and committed atrocities in warfare as a matter or routine.

Apart from the rape, this is of course a description of Yahweh, but that makes perfect sense. He is modeled on all the monarchs known to the ancient Hebrews. That's how a Lord is supposed to act. Hitler was novel in that he had industrial technology at his disposal, but otherwise there would have been nothing remarkable about him in the 16th Century. Kim Jong Un would also have been perfectly normal, and Vladimir Putin is if anything relatively moderate. So yes, times have changed. Let's not go back, folks.