Regents

The Santayana quote is meaningless, and he probably meant it as parody. Modern demons do learn from history, but not the way we naively imagine. They use history to improve the efficiency of their evil deeds. History is quality control, not a horrible example to be avoided at all costs.

Does knowing history make any difference? It does help peasants to realize that our “votes” didn’t influence our current demons, so we shouldn’t let them blame us for “voting” the wrong way. Demons are demons at all times in history. Occasionally a nation or city gets a non-demonic ruler who isn’t immediately removed or killed by rivals. We should treasure such moments.

Modern media wipes out history entirely. Before 1970 ordinary media did a better job of documenting the demons of earlier eras so we could notice analogies and similarities.

The Ripley brief features, written in 1958, often described earlier aristocratic monsters.

One was Countess Bathory of Hungary. From an 1895 magazine:

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According to the legends Countess Elizabeth Bathory was a monster, an infernal creature, the female counterpart of Bluebeard. She did not kill her husbands but she slaughtered her waiting maids, and she did this with such a vim and took so much pains at it that she required only a few years to kill all the young peasant girls of an entire province. From natural cruelty ? Yes, without doubt; but above all through coquetry. One day, having struck a little too roughly a maid who perhaps had not arranged her hair according to the countess’s idea of taste, she observed that the young woman’s blood sprinkled on her hands made them whiter. Ever afterwards she repeated the experiment. She reached the point of taking a bloodbath every day. Trusty agents continually engaged new waiting-maids throughout the country; these she immediately slew on any pretext and acquired a complexion of magnificent whiteness and éclat. Her house in Vienna gave its name to Blood Street (Blutgasse).

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The modern equivalents of the Countess are the insane transhumanist Tech Tyrants who suck blood from children and transfuse it in an effort to live forever. At least they aren’t killing the victims.

Another Ripley story gave the word origin of whipping-boy. Krauts are always ORDNUNG IST ORDNUNG. If the ruler needs to violate a written law, the law must be rewritten to remove the violation. Children must be punished for bad deeds, but aristocrats can’t be punished. Solution: Enslave a boy of the same age to take the punishments so the aristocrat himself can act with impunity.

Proxies were a major part of the ruler’s arsenal in those times. Kings often took power shortly after birth. Regents were the real rulers, but the whims of the infant prince were also important. One Spanish infant prince didn’t like theatrical performances. So the regent closed all theaters for 16 years until the king got older and repealed the ban. If the king didn’t like it, nobody could like it.

We have regents now, but our rulers are in their second infancy instead of their first.