1 October

For thousands of years, Kings dominated human life globally. Only churches provided any sort of counter-weight. For example the 19th century was a century of kings, here’s a cartoon of the world’s top kings in 1815, carving up the spoils after defeating Napoleon. Kings and emperors and pharaohs dominated for thousands of years prior to this too. Then in the 20th century, we claimed we developed an alternative. Democracy. Now ‘the people’ would be sovereign. (Never mind the Greeks invented it thousands of years previously, and it never took off.) We had ‘people’-led revolutions in Russia and China, that then became ‘totalitarian’ regimes. Democracy in the way we think it exists, as the people leading countries, has never existed. It’s always kings, even if we call them by different names. Xi and Putin are kings, Trump too. The hapless pollies who claim to be the champions of the people are trampled in the stampede of the same people to vote for kings, like Trump.