They were a pretty minor group, but they were real!

Don’t let your dreams be dreams

God, what I would give for late 19th century/early 20th century militant labor movements back

just a few bombs

as a treat

I was going to say “You’ll have to first train the neo-nazis to have a superstitious veneration for coincidence resembling pre-modern societies that don’t understand weather patterns”, but then I remembered they’re neonazis, and that’s probably a checkbox they already have filled.

For all that I will condemn Khrushchev, overwhelmingly my condemnations are for him as a part of the rotten Soviet system as a whole more than him as an individual. It’s sad, because I think Khrushchev was a genuine believer in (admittedly only moderate) reform and a better future. But as Robespierre once said, “To rule innocently is madness.” Anyone who has power over a system is trapped in a no-win scenario - either sacrifice the power you have to influence it, and let other (potentially worse) people take over the reins; or do what you can to perpetuate the system, and all of its horrors, in the hopes that you can steer it to a less-bad outcome.

I honestly think the Soviet Union was one of the worst things to happen to international leftism. Their demand that communist parties in the West follow Moscow’s line discredited what influence they had, and the obsession with crushing non-ML leftists in ongoing revolutions (like the insistence on crushing the Trots and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War before crushing the fascists) ensured that the ML interpretation of socialism sucked up all the oxygen in public discourse for the better part of a century.

The PRC’s horrors, by contrast, have mostly been either domestic or blatant imperialism.

The meme is saying that the actual Illuminati were secular and democratic, but are seen in the modern day as a shadowy, oppressive cabal

The mind makes it real

Explanation: The Romans were very fond of omens, and wise merchants could take advantage of that fact. When the Emperor Augustus returned from one of his harder-fought battles, he was met by a man who had a raven - which immediately greeted Augustus with ‘Hail Caesar, victorious commander!’ Augustus was tickled pink by this, and probably regarded it, as any upstanding Roman would, as a good omen to be greeted by such a trained bird (Romans LOVED taking any odd occurrence as an omen), and paid 5,000 denarii for the bird - the equivalent of over 20 years’ pay for a common soldier! (one might compare it to $400,000 in the modern day)

Obviously this was a VERY CIVILIZED BIRD! AVE CAESAR!

Explanation: The Polish Sejm, in exercising the liberum veto at every opportunity, utterly paralyzed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, leading to its eventual destruction.

In the last ~3 decades of the Commonwealth’s existence, attempts were made to unfuck the system, but by then it was too late.

Mandatory note that Khrushchev was no saint as autocrat either - as the saying goes, the issue is not the monarch, but the monarchy. He did perpetuate the Soviet system as a whole, despite some attempts at reform; and was directly responsible (despite some hesitation) for giving the order to crush Hungary’s socialist revolution.

His interest in farming also ended up damaging the agriculture of the Soviet Union, ironically - upon a friendly visit to the USA, he became enamored with the possibilities of corn (a legitimately very useful and versatile crop), and attempted to establish its cultivation across the Soviet Union. Because he was the most powerful man in the country with no real countervailing institutions of power to defy him, this went through without delay, including in many areas where the climate was simply not suitable for corn.

Explanation: While none of the higher-ups of the Soviet Union were saints, especially during the Stalinist era, Nikita Khrushchev was pretty inoffensive as far as the top brass went - an apparatchik and technocrat with an especial interest in farming. He survived primarily by being the ‘court jester’, accepting being the butt of Stalin’s jokes and degrading himself in exchange for continued survival at the Red Tsar’s Court - considering that the alternative was very often… an assignment with a low survival rate.

Khrushchev would go on, after Stalin’s death, to clinch the effective position of head of the Soviet Union, and embark on a pretty extensive policy of ‘destalinization’, reversing many of Stalin’s worst policies and attempting to build a more ‘rational’ and sustainable Soviet oligarchy.

Be careful who you bully!

Better to be infamous than forgotten!

I would see a pretty definitive fall of the Republic, ironically, in the death of Caesar. Not because Caesar was some hero of democracy, mind you, but because his dictatorship was ultimately still predicated on the continued functioning of the entire Republican process - including the election of many of his enemies to office without interference from him. You can argue, of course, and not without merit, that Caesar felt firmly positioned enough to allow this rather than it being out of any concern for the greater stability of the polity, but the point is that Caesar’s dictatorship, like the strongman regimes of Marius, Sulla, and Pompey before him, still maintained essential Republican structures.

With the Second Triumvirate, much of that was washed away, especially as Augustus accumulated power. If Caesar’s dictatorship was an autocracy that violated the law while preserving the power structures of the Republic, then Augustus’s autocracy violated the power structures of the Republic while preserving the law - and the law means nothing without power structures willing and able to enforce it.

However, Caesar’s own dictatorship and the succeeding Second Triumvirate is, itself, only the culmination of almost a 100 years of political chaos, dating back to the conservative assassinations of the Gracchi. So I would definitely agree that it was a long process rather than any single point.

Precious Uncle Clawdius 😭

I am ignorant of many things 🙏

Rule by arbitrary whim of tyrant vs. rule by arbitrary application of law

A sign of fertility, and thus good luck and good health!

Also funny, and Romans regarded humor as warding off bad luck as well (hence why children were encouraged to make bawdy jokes at weddings - gotta start off the marriage with laughter and good luck!)

Yep! In some armies, they were purely civilian (merchants, priests, prostitutes, etc); in others, they included paramilitaries as well (the equivalent of ‘military contractors’ who know how to fight but aren’t really supposed to end up on the battlefield; armed wagon drivers, artisan/engineering advisors, personal servants of nobility, etc)

That’s actually really interesting, I wasn’t aware of that.

If you’re looking for a single person, I’d point more towards Augustus (or, controversially, Cato)

Caesar pulled a lot of shit, but he was also a fairly cautious political operator by the standards of the Late Republic. The desperation of the conservative faction to prevent lawful reform - especially the intransigent hypocrites led by Cato - started the civil war.