The Twelve Lessons of History
- Never trust anyone who says ‘this is the first time in history…’ There is plenty of room for history to be turned on its head every time someone puts a spade in the ground!
- People have vested interests and will defend their version of the truth against all comers! Even against truth itself!
- Respect for the past comes a very poor second to the opportunity to make money!
- Humanity thrives on catastrophe!
- People who do not live in cities with kings and all the accoutrements of civilisation are not ‘ignorant savages’!
- Humanity will always go to war!
- Religious belief will produce more lunacy and weird historical claims than any other source known on the planet, and people will be deadly serious about their particular claims, so be warned!
- Academics, historians and archaeologists are so bedazzled by victors, they will relegate all vanquished cultures to the wastebin! Impressive civilisations that emerge from the genocide of ‘lesser peoples’ overwhelm them!
- Power elites have always rewritten history to serve their own ends and they have worked industriously for centuries to subsume and eradicate earlier ‘conquered’ peoples and all they stand for!
- Those that come after will learn from the lessons of history and copy them. Success is its own teacher. Power is addictive and fear is the fuel of power.
- Beware of thinking of different cultures as different races! Hippies and Punks are not different races, to use a modern analogy!
- There are many mysteries yet to be explained!